Experiments

Jesuits, early in formation, go on “experiments,” relatively short-term experiences of a specific type of service.  This exposes them to a new world and allows them to explore new gifts. It has a terminal point and so has low stakes if it does not turn out well.

So, that thing that you’ve been putting off… that thing that represents an expression of your generosity… is there a way to turn it into an experiment?  

It just may turn out that someone would delight in the generosity of your attempt.

(PS – Audacious Ignatius was an experiment Katie and I decided to try one day while our kids played trains together.  We give thanks often for giving the project a shot.)

It’s Just Soup

My dad’s dad’s mom used to say this thing when someone was feeling quite wrapped up in the emotional urgency of a difficult situation.  He would remind the person that “you don’t have to drink the soup as hot as it boils.”

For a long time, I took this to mean that I just needed to give a tough situation a few minutes before throwing myself back into the mess, back into the emotional emergency. 

But the other day, my dad reminded me that, often, the situation is not worthy of the emotional emergency I place onto it.  That situation?  Hey, it’s just soup.  

Taken this way, the first seven words of my great-grandmother’s sentence also suffice as quality advice.  You don’t have to drink the soup.

I don’t take this as license to be aloof.  Rather, it is an invitation to hold my inner chatter and my emotional response to a given situation a little less tightly.  And this stance, in reality, frees me to be more thoughtful and generous, rather than obsessed with my own stress response.

So, hey, it is just soup.  And there will be more tomorrow.  

Consume accordingly. 

Your Conflicts

About a year into my time as a lay volunteer in Uganda, I found myself in the middle of a number of conflicts that I had not anticipated.  I was confused and sad, unsure of how to proceed.  

I wrote a rather conflicted email to the director of our program, the remarkable Fr. Tom Smith, CSC, who was then living in the United States.  In retrospect, I was, in that email, trying to evade my responsibility in the situation.  I was trying to hand Tom my problems.  

Fr. Tom, in his characteristically thoughtful wisdom, handed them right back.  (The subject line of his response was aptly named “Your Conflicts.”)  He affirmed the goodness of all involved and helped me see the situation in a fuller context, but let me know that I was now a part of the conflict and it was up to me to act, in love, toward a resolution.  

I have often considered the kind justice of his response.  I was invited to stop the externalization of blame and the evasion of responsibility.  Once I accepted the ground that I was on, I was freed to work generously toward a solution.

Fewer Lines

One morning when I was learning to program, I was given a problem and told to write an algorithm to solve it. I dutifully cobbled together a tangle of code and was approaching a workable solution. 

Then, one of the instructors looked at my monitor, highlighted every line, pressed delete, and walked away.  

At first, I felt panicked.  (That had taken me so long to do!) 

And then, I felt relieved. I was free to consider the problem in a fresh way, and solved it in a few crisp lines.

It is often difficult to embrace an invitation to step back from “the way I (or we) do things.”  But when I do, I am often rewarded with the freedom that comes from simplicity.

The First Cup of Coffee

Ever read anything by Amor Towles?  If you haven’t, and do, expect a treat.  (A Gentleman in Moscow is a brilliant place to start.)

For me, it is like being in the presence of someone who is marvelously attentive, refreshingly insightful, and appreciative of great books.

I read his Rules of Civility about a year ago (so, the beginning of the COVID-times).  I have considered the following bit, from the mouth of the book’s narrator, since.

My father was never much for whining… He certainly didn’t complain about his health as it failed.

But one night near the end, as I was sitting by his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium.  Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.  Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane – the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath – she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.  What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the end of his own course, was that this risk should not be taken lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Order or Control

As much as I think I would like to, I am unable to control all the circumstances of my life.  It is simply not possible.    

Same thing with the mystery of God.  Trying to control the Trinity?  That is a tough road.

But what is possible is order: to orient myself toward the stuff of my life such that I am able to react masterfully, faithfully, with love.  This may likely mean doing less things and/or, on a given day, doing the important things first. 

Close Enough to Love

The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer:  Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.  In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.

Is this not fascinating?  In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.  

Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love.  Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.

I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.  

Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.

We Only Get a Vote When We Show Up

Last year, a friend witnessed the following interaction in a Zoom meeting about how to handle her child’s school year given the reality of COVID-19.

The conversation was heated, quite divided between those who wanted in-person school and those who wanted remote learning.  A decisive policy would come down to a vote.

One parent was so furious that she said destructive things to the group and then signed off abruptly, minutes before the vote.  

The vote was taken and tallied, not in her favor.

She signed in a few minutes after the vote, and asked to be counted.  That was not what the process that group decided on, and so her vote was not registered.  

The world tends toward disorder, so there are everywhere chances to make things better.  We only get a vote about how our shared future unfolds when we show up. And our vote counts exponentially when we show up generously and with grand imagination.

Furious or Curious

The experience of anger can be quite involuntary.  Something happens, trespassing against our expectations of how things should be, leaving us furious.

Okay.  But then what happens.

Anger can quickly turn into self-righteousness, to barricading oneself on the moral high ground.  And anger can take the legs out from under our ability to listen perceptively and to relate imaginatively to people who think differently from us.  And because of this, anger can handicap any attempt to accurately perceive and productively improve the situation that made us angry in the first place.

We do not always have the choice to be furious.  But we can, afterwards and always, choose to be curious.

(Hey!  The above reminds me of the dear Fr. Michael Rossmann, SJ’s recent post on his new Substack blog.  Check it out!)