A time to grieve with friends

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who truly cares (and one who can remind us of Who's really in charge)."

-- Henri Nouwen

"Sometimes, with the best of intentions, friends don’t know how to help. They may feel that to bring up the subject of our loss is to risk making us feel worse, so they avoid it (or us) and then talk of other things, all while the presence of the unspoken builds up to an almost intolerable pressure. I need a friend who will be totally in it with me, without an attempt to distract or solve."

-- Martha Whitmore Hickman

"I do not believe that sheer suffering alone teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, connection, and the willingness to remain totally vulnerable in the face of both life and death."

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"People say, 'time heals.' Yet time by itself doesn't heal anything. If a person in grief sits in a corner waiting for time to take care of bitter sorrow, time won't do anything at all. It is what we do with that time that can heal."

-- Reverend Arnoldo Pangrazzi

"When tears come, I breathe deeply and rest. I know I am swimming in a hallowed stream where many have gone before. I am not alone, crazy, or having a nervous breakdown; my heart is at work, my soul awake and alive."

-- Mary Margaret Funk, in Thoughts Matter

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."

-- Romans 12:15 (NIV)

"Where there is deep sorrow there is holy ground."

-- Oscar Wilde

I am going to take the rest of the week off from writing, and then on Friday I will go to Denver and step on holy ground, to be with my friends, Bipin and Shashi, in their deep sorrow and to grieve with them and remember this most amazing young woman (see attached). This week of silence is in honor of Yamini, who I knew very well when she was a little girl, and who touched me deeply with her ebullient spirit. This fragile time reminds me all too well of my time with my sister, Diane, and her family over the loss of their daughter, Michelle, during July, 2008. Two precious lives lost way too young.

I will be back to you in my journaling next Tuesday after I return. Please pray for us this weekend, and love your children.


Yamini.ppt

Beware self-justification through carefully bound analysis

Before you let your emotions erupt into spas...m, let's relax for a minute with a little Szasz...mmm?, and please, no responses if they are sarcas...m, unless in our friendship you wish to create a big chas...m. :-) I just can't help myself.

"The struggle for definition of the problem is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western movie two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for the right words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick? The one who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; the one who defines thus dominates and lives; and the one who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

"Psychoanalysis is an intellectual attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his existing system of self-justification, and it usually includes new, even more sophisticated forms of self-justification."

"Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, in all actuality, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be way better off rocking the boat and trying to shake it loose."

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer a fatal injury to one's ego and self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

"Anxiety is the unwillingness to play, even when you know the odds are for you; courage is the willingness to play, even when you know the odds are against you."

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define reality or be defined by it."

"When a person can no longer laugh at himself, he finds more than enough others to laugh at him."

"Clear thinking, distinguishing, and choosing requires more courage than intelligence."

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but they sure do make a good excuse."

-- Thomas Szasz

We have an interesting way of finding justification for our misery and suffering, of declaring our own rightness in knowing what's wrong, and it usually involves another person, and if that person is a so-called expert, all the better, because we like to have the right, very smart-sounding words behind our justification. But, in the end, no one ever gets away with anything, and we must face ourselves with great courage, and choose. Our ego typically doesn't fare too well in our learning (in fact, we must shed it), while our spirit shines and soars.

Freedom to choose

If by others you're rankled, consider yourself Frankl'd; there's no in-between-ing, when your search is for meaning:


"Love is the only way to grasp another person in the innermost core of his being."

"The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather is detected, discovered, remembered."

"Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."

"Between stimulus and response, there is an empty space. In that blank space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In the clarity of our chosen response lies our growth and our freedom."

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in and response to any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way, regardless of how things seem, look, and feel."

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers - the truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can ever aspire."

"Most men in a concentration camp (this applies uniformly to all of those who suffer from harsh external circumstances) believed that the real opportunities of life had already passed. Yet, in reality, there was a brilliant opportunity, a perfect invitation, and a provocative challenge. One could make a glorious victory out of those very difficult experiences, turning life into a bold inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate and die, as did a majority of the prisoners (this applies to 'prisoners' of any kind)."

"Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, and various mental and emotional stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision - a conscious or unconscious choice - and not the result of camp influences. Fundamentally, therefore, I believe that any man can, even under the harshest of circumstances, literally decide what shall become of him - mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost."

"The way in which a man accepts his outward fate and all the suffering it entails inwardly, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult of circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish, or, in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is 'worthy of his sufferings' or not (a reference to a quote from Dostoevski). And do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate."

-- all of the above from Viktor Frankl, in Man's Search for Meaning


"You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses."

In the "both/and" of this, you get to choose your experience.


P.S. I had a very tight window of opportunity yesterday afternoon to see the movie, "The Road," which I have been looking forward to for a while now, ever since I read the book this summer, and it touched me deeply and moved me to tears, because, like the stories from the concentration camp above - where at least there was hope that liberation was coming from a part of the world that was still alive and sane, but in this story, there was no liberation coming, no hope coming, no sanity anywhere, and no living parts of the world to long for, and still - there was plenty of meaning to be found, even amidst the bleak and lifeless landscape, and with the help of the little boy in the movie, I found it, and amazingly, it was worth it.


"Wrenching, elegiac, but ultimately inspiring, this is a film that knows how to hold onto its own fire. By stripping away everything but the bare essentials, it makes us ask ourselves about the compromises we make every day, and about the consequences of our choices, and the value of the things that we so often think are worth striving for, vs. those that truly are."

-- excerpt from internet review of the movie

Yes, I am willing to "hold the fire" through all of it, until my last breath, and although the denigration, desolation, and devastation of today's world does not look (at least to the physical eyes in our head) quite like the haunting image above, to our hearts' eyes it is even more deadly, empty, f###ed up, hopelessly jacked up, terrifyingly trashed up, etc.. And that's where what God made gets to shine with His light, deep from within. "Elegiac," wow!, what a great word ...