Re: "Re-"s
It has been two weeks now since I heard The News about my fate. It seems a lot longer than that! And yet, it has been a time in which time itself has gone by differently than when I was working. There has been a different pace, and a different content to each day, different reasons to experience my reliance upon God, and different reasons to be thankful...
In fact, one of my surprises, I suppose you could say, has been that I could be thankful, that I could experience a grateful heart, even in the midst of this sort of enforced transition. I believe that this, too, has been one of God's Gifts in these moments.
What I have been increasingly aware of is how many words that begin with "re-" seem to be cropping up in my speech these days. I want to mention just three of them.
First there is "recover." I feel I am in a period of "recovery," for I have sustained a blow from which I must recover. But maybe it is that I am, like many people, always in a state of recovery-- only now I am more acutely aware of what it is precisely I'm recovering from!
You might know that, along with a professor of social work in Arizona, I am writing a book about how addiction affects grief and what the role of being in recovery from addiction has in mourning. I've learned that mourning is itself a kind of recovery, that it takes the discipline of a program, and that perhaps the spirituality of the 12-Steps is itself a suggestive guideline to the spiritual recovery that can happen within us as we mourn.
Near the beginning of my present mourning, I referred to the Serenity Prayer's first line: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...". And over the last week, I have been praying the second line: "Grant me the courage to change the things I can...". And I can say honestly that the last few days have been a process of discovery: what things, really, can be changed, and what things, not? In that way, I have been completing the prayer: "Grant me the wisdom to know the difference."
Ahhh... this is one learning of this time: wisdom. Recovery means gaining wisdom.
Another "re-" word I have been using frequently has to do with "restoration," or more to the point, "being restored...". Restoration seems to me to be different than recovery. Recovery has to do with healing, but restoration has to do with getting something back.
In my case, what I am praying to be restored is my reputation (another good "re-" word!) and my honor-- my sense of myself as worthy of the dignity that used to be "attributed" to me! (Remember, I talked about this in an earlier blog?) Several times in my life I have been through exercises designed to help us participants discover what it is we most value. We'd be asked to list the "things" we valued most, and most people would respond with a range answers, from "family" or "friends" to their "home" or other things they owned. Then we'd go through a process of eliminating things from our lists until there was only one thing left. What it was would tell us something about ourselves.
Always, at or near the top of my list would be my honor, or my reputation, or my name-- something like that. Well, what has happened to me has struck at or near the top of my value-list! So praying for "restoration" means to me engaging with God in that "getting back" of what has been damaged or lost.
In this context, I have been relying on the line from Psalm 23: "[God] restores my soul." Yes, there is a need now in me for "soul-restoration," for that deep inner replenishment that only the Divine can accomplish.
Which leads to the third "re-" word that has come to my prayer repeatedly recently (see, once I get started on those "re-" words, it is hard to "refrain" from using them!), and that is "resurrection." I have often thought that we Christians do ourselves a disservice when we confine resurrection to something that happened to Jesus only, and long ago at that! In my preaching days I would proclaim that one of the "messages" of Easter is that God made plain God's "resurrecting power," and our human "resurrect-ability!" I meant by this that more than being able to "renew," God had the power to "resurrect" us, to transform us thoroughly, and to bring us through "transitions" wherein we have "died" to what was in order to be "raised" to what is and what is to come.
I experience my present transition, not just as transitory as I spoke about yesterday, but also as transforming. Whatever life I had before, I am now "dead" to, or at least, it is "dead" to me. There is no going back; there is only going forward, into the future that God has for me. As in so many things, this, too, is part of the experience of mourning, namely the limits of recovery and restoration. I can be healed, and recovered. This is at the core of my faith. And I can be restored, deeply, and I place my hope in this. But I pray also to continue to be led, through and out of this "grave" situation (please forgive me my puns!), into a new life, again of God's own choosing, beyond my ability to see at the moment.
I am always interested in how, in the resurrection narratives, Jesus' disciples recognize both that he has changed and that he is somehow the same. Someone said to me the other day, "This is going to age you." You can imagine that I didn't view this at that moment as the most positive of comments! But yes, it is true. This transition will "age" me. But in that way, I would have gotten older anyway! Why not "age," as wine ages, if it is to be "fine?" For me, resurrection is about how God makes us better as we ourselves get older!
This thought leads to yet another "re-" word: "re-fine!" There is a Praise Song that invokes the Holy Spirit as a "refiner's fire." So be it! "Re-fine" me, Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit!
May you be so blessed as well...
In fact, one of my surprises, I suppose you could say, has been that I could be thankful, that I could experience a grateful heart, even in the midst of this sort of enforced transition. I believe that this, too, has been one of God's Gifts in these moments.
What I have been increasingly aware of is how many words that begin with "re-" seem to be cropping up in my speech these days. I want to mention just three of them.
First there is "recover." I feel I am in a period of "recovery," for I have sustained a blow from which I must recover. But maybe it is that I am, like many people, always in a state of recovery-- only now I am more acutely aware of what it is precisely I'm recovering from!
You might know that, along with a professor of social work in Arizona, I am writing a book about how addiction affects grief and what the role of being in recovery from addiction has in mourning. I've learned that mourning is itself a kind of recovery, that it takes the discipline of a program, and that perhaps the spirituality of the 12-Steps is itself a suggestive guideline to the spiritual recovery that can happen within us as we mourn.
Near the beginning of my present mourning, I referred to the Serenity Prayer's first line: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...". And over the last week, I have been praying the second line: "Grant me the courage to change the things I can...". And I can say honestly that the last few days have been a process of discovery: what things, really, can be changed, and what things, not? In that way, I have been completing the prayer: "Grant me the wisdom to know the difference."
Ahhh... this is one learning of this time: wisdom. Recovery means gaining wisdom.
Another "re-" word I have been using frequently has to do with "restoration," or more to the point, "being restored...". Restoration seems to me to be different than recovery. Recovery has to do with healing, but restoration has to do with getting something back.
In my case, what I am praying to be restored is my reputation (another good "re-" word!) and my honor-- my sense of myself as worthy of the dignity that used to be "attributed" to me! (Remember, I talked about this in an earlier blog?) Several times in my life I have been through exercises designed to help us participants discover what it is we most value. We'd be asked to list the "things" we valued most, and most people would respond with a range answers, from "family" or "friends" to their "home" or other things they owned. Then we'd go through a process of eliminating things from our lists until there was only one thing left. What it was would tell us something about ourselves.
Always, at or near the top of my list would be my honor, or my reputation, or my name-- something like that. Well, what has happened to me has struck at or near the top of my value-list! So praying for "restoration" means to me engaging with God in that "getting back" of what has been damaged or lost.
In this context, I have been relying on the line from Psalm 23: "[God] restores my soul." Yes, there is a need now in me for "soul-restoration," for that deep inner replenishment that only the Divine can accomplish.
Which leads to the third "re-" word that has come to my prayer repeatedly recently (see, once I get started on those "re-" words, it is hard to "refrain" from using them!), and that is "resurrection." I have often thought that we Christians do ourselves a disservice when we confine resurrection to something that happened to Jesus only, and long ago at that! In my preaching days I would proclaim that one of the "messages" of Easter is that God made plain God's "resurrecting power," and our human "resurrect-ability!" I meant by this that more than being able to "renew," God had the power to "resurrect" us, to transform us thoroughly, and to bring us through "transitions" wherein we have "died" to what was in order to be "raised" to what is and what is to come.
I experience my present transition, not just as transitory as I spoke about yesterday, but also as transforming. Whatever life I had before, I am now "dead" to, or at least, it is "dead" to me. There is no going back; there is only going forward, into the future that God has for me. As in so many things, this, too, is part of the experience of mourning, namely the limits of recovery and restoration. I can be healed, and recovered. This is at the core of my faith. And I can be restored, deeply, and I place my hope in this. But I pray also to continue to be led, through and out of this "grave" situation (please forgive me my puns!), into a new life, again of God's own choosing, beyond my ability to see at the moment.
I am always interested in how, in the resurrection narratives, Jesus' disciples recognize both that he has changed and that he is somehow the same. Someone said to me the other day, "This is going to age you." You can imagine that I didn't view this at that moment as the most positive of comments! But yes, it is true. This transition will "age" me. But in that way, I would have gotten older anyway! Why not "age," as wine ages, if it is to be "fine?" For me, resurrection is about how God makes us better as we ourselves get older!
This thought leads to yet another "re-" word: "re-fine!" There is a Praise Song that invokes the Holy Spirit as a "refiner's fire." So be it! "Re-fine" me, Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit!
May you be so blessed as well...
posted by TRXTR | 3:46 PM
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