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"Seeking Refuge"
Some years ago when I was a high school teacher, one of my
colleagues had been having a run of tragedy in his life with
bad luck on top of that. In assessing the unfolding of his
life and his hurt, he said to me one day, "I just want to be
absent for a few days." Worried, I asked what he thought
he'd do if he stayed home. He smiled and said, " I want to
be absent from life, not absent from school."
Wouldn't it be nice if we could be absent from life from time to time when we needed to be? Imagine if we could suspend all knowledge, memory and responsibility for just a few days at a time in order to refuel. If I could restructure life itself, I would build in the capacity to be absent from it once in awhile. Because there are times when we have horrible, no good days, and sometimes weeks, or months strain our capacities to the max, and we have to find a way to cope and refuel at the same time. And that isn't easy.
When I was a child, some days I would wake up grouchy and my mother would observe, "I see you got out of bed on the wrong side this morning," with the implication that tomorrow would be better. And usually it was. But I have had, and I'm sure you have had, stretches that amount to much more than that.
There was a time in my adult life when I was deeply sad. I had lost a parent - and there were other important disappointments. And this probably had something to do with my vulnerable state - I was very pregnant. I'd always prided myself that I could be having a very hard time, and no one would know the difference. (Of course, this is not good because hiding ourselves only means we will suffer alone.) But this time my emotional well was so dry that I lacked the energy to engage in ordinary conversation or activity. Larry was his usual wonderful self, but overworked and commuting long hours. I was home but in the last stages of pregnancy, not doing much. The house was a mess. If I could have made an arrangement with God to be absent for a few days, believe me, I would have.
A group of good women friends, aware that I was "down in the dumps" each in their own way tried to get me to talk about it. But as nothing could be fixed or changed - there was no knot to be untied that could relieve the pressure, as I saw it, I honestly believed there was nothing to talk out and saw no point to feeling sorry for myself out loud.
My friend Susan dropped by during this time. A very busy woman, she said she just happened to be out and about. She firmly ushered me outside into the sunshine and we sat together on the front step for awhile. We chatted about the weather, and since that was all I was willing or able to do we lapsed into silence together. Then she noticed my feet were swollen - that's a pregnancy thing - so she prepared a bucket of cool water and insisted that I put my feet in. And that felt good. We sat there for awhile with me very aware that I had nothing to say - I felt that I was failing her. Then Susan walked over and inspected our sit-down lawnmower which was sitting stationary on the deep grass. She said she felt like mowing the front lawn and asked if I minded.
Rachel Naomi Remen says the most important thing we can bring to another person is the silence of being together without demands and with complete acceptance. My friend Susan had every right, I would have thought, to get very angry at me for shutting her out so completely. The scene that day would have been hard to explain to anyone else - me sitting there with my feet in a bucket watching my friend mow my lawn as though she were a hired hand. I bet her own lawn wasn't even mowed. What she was doing, it dawned on me later, was finding a way to be with me that put no pressure on me at all. She on the lawnmower and me safely watching her drive back and forth. She was playing the role of "The Big There-There" in my life, rather creatively, I might add. As strange as it looked, she was providing a place of refuge that proved therapeutic.
I'm not going to tell you that I experienced such a dramatic shift that day that my dark mood was over. But Susan's actions provided something that became one source of my healing. In the face of my sadness, in view of the fact that nothing could be fixed or changed, in spite of my brooding and the fact that I was closing her out, which made me very boring - in the face of all that, she chose to stay. I was very lucky. - She connected me with the "cosmic" lap we heard about in this morning's readings, providing what Remen calls the silence of complete acceptance, refuge and rest - Over time her actions, and thoughtful actions by others, helped to shift my view away from what was wrong with life back to what is right with it.
It is wonderful that we are able to function as a source of refuge and draw strength from one another. When our feet are in the bucket we don't know what will comfort us. As Barbara Rhode said, sometimes we go looking for the "Big There There" and find instead that the excitement of a new idea lifts us from despair. This, I have to admit, is what happened to me over time. Reading provided for me challenging ideas and a certain companionship that I needed to grow and that reawakened my sense of awe and beauty, allowing me to make peace with the world once again.
Ultimately, our true refuge has to be found and developed within.
Remen says that of all the ways people commonly deal with suffering, few are places of refuge. In fact, many will disconnect us from the very life we hope to bless and serve: we deny that we hurt, we jam our schedules and move ever faster so we won't have time to feel, we rationalize our feelings or we place blame or we explain to ourselves in great detail, and over and over, how a situation came to be. These tactics more often than not leave us spinning our wheels emotionally rather than bringing us into a place of healing or strength.
Let me quote Remen:
"In order to live fully, we may need to look deeply and respectfully at our own suffering and at the suffering of others. In the depths of every wound we have survived is the strength we need to live. The wisdom our wounds can offer us is a place of refuge. Finding this is not for the faint of heart. But then, neither is life…"[1]
What does she mean when she says that refuge is found when we look deeply and respectfully at suffering? One thing I know she does not mean is that we should get stuck, or wallow in our troubles. Sometimes we experience a temptation to review our wounds over and over again in our minds in order to justify the terrible state we are in. The result is that we can whip ourselves into an even worse state.
The looking at our suffering that Remen calls us to, I believe, requires living with the hurt and the ambiguity, of our situation. This means not closing down, if possible. We should take care not to close down from or block out pain until we have learned what it has to teach us. If we can resist the temptation to condemn the world or our own lives, if we can trust the process of waiting without answers, if we can do all this and keep some part of our heart open to the world, then, eventually something genuinely new in our understanding can and will emerge - we can and will develop for ourselves a larger perspective in which our most painful experiences can be understood and accepted.
Healing is much faster when we don't close down. The process she refers to requires staying open to your feelings and to the world. When all we are feeling is pain and hurt, nothing is harder. It also requires a commitment to learn, some kind of reflective process. This process has many names, vocabularies and methods. In my life I have always referred to and experienced this process as thinking, albeit a very deep and special kind of thinking. I know that there is a quality of waiting to it, a kind of trust, or at least hope, that something I will grow into an understanding that I need. If I do not leave time for this pondering in my life, especially if the day has been rough, then my spiritual gyroscope begins to wobble. Many religious people experience this process in their prayer life. The Buddhist method is meditation.
I am not saying that thinking, prayer and meditation are exactly the same. But, what I am saying is that each represents an attempt to orient the self in relation to an ideal that is beyond and bigger than any of us - call it Love, God, call it the Ground of Being - Spirit of Life, Higher Power, the Holy, or simply the universe. Each represents the help we need to grow and to wait.
Rachel Naomi Remen says: The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process. First we experience everything. Then, one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it." [2]
The wisdom of which Remen speaks is the final refuge of those who suffer. It is hard-won, but available to all of us as life in all its fullness comes our way. It is a blessing that we have the capacity to grow together, and to be present to each other, companions in the journey, providing each other with the strength to wait and to live one day at a time as we grow. The role of the Big There There is not to be underestimated!
The caring hands and hearts of this church are missionaries in this work of being present where there is hurt, and of caring, without fear or judgment, when someone is suffers. Hopefully, we grow together.