Tag: faith

Betrayal and Forgiveness

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“True forgiveness is when you can say, ‘Thank you for that experience.‘” – Oprah Winfrey

My daughter’s 7-year-old friend came over the other day with the news that their former au pair had betrayed them (her words). The gist of the story was that au pair had agreed to stay with the kids for a weekend and then backed out. Our young friend said that her parents had found someone else to stay with the kids while they travel leaving only the feeling of betrayal to somehow process.

That word, betrayal, always reminds me of my ex-husband. Because when his friend and my business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities, my husband at the time felt so betrayed because his friend told me. And the more he declaimed it, the more embedded I felt in his betrayal of me and our wedding vows.

In this circular pattern of pain and distrust, there seemed to be no way out. I couldn’t get any resolution of what had happened because every time we touched on it, even in counseling, it just triggered my ex-husband’s feeling of betrayal. He could bring more dramatic outrage to the table so I always ended up bottling it up in a misguided effort to make it stop. When we finally divorced, I was so relieved that cycle was over.

But it left me having to forgive my ex-husband without any satisfying resolution about what had happened. Which was even harder work. Our wisdom traditions talk about the power and necessity of forgiveness. Growing up as a pastor’s kid, it was like the bread and butter of our family. Knowing that and wanting it, I still had to find out my way of actually forgiving. I was like a goat tethered to a stake always covering the same ground until I did.

In the end, I discovered meditation as a way to lean in to the mess of it all and develop a bigger perspective. That is when I finally figured out how to forgive. The pain of betrayal led me to the life of meditation and perspective. Which has then gone on to give so many more gifts of faith, confidence and personal belonging that allowed me to choose to have kids on my own. Looking back, I have never been so glad for the gift of pain leading me to the richness of life.

I know forgiveness is extremely hard to do when we feel like keep the wound open provides evidence that we were the injured party. I recently read a quote by Henri Nouwen, “Your future depends on how you decide to remember your past.” In that passage, he was talking to himself but the Truth of it brought tears to my eyes.

Watching my daughter’s friend as she told me the story, I could see her rewriting her history of the 18 months the au pair lived with and cared for her based on this last interaction. If I could amend Henri Nouwen’s Truth slightly, I’d add that “Your kids future also depends on how you decide to remember your past.”

Praying for Rain

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“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.” – Rabindranath Tagore

My friend, Mindy, told me this story about her son when he was about 6 or 7-years-old. It was the beginning of the school year and her son didn’t want to have to sit next to Henry in school. He came up with the idea to pray about it. The next day after her son came home from school, Mindy asked him whether or not he had to sit next to Henry. He replied, “Of course not, I prayed about it.”

I was reminded of this story the other day when my daughter was looking for her kinetic sand and said she’d prayed to God that she’d find it. I knew I’d thrown the kinetic sand out so no praying would help! I threw it out because I’d been praying not to have that stuff all over the floor and I knew how to make that happen. 😊 But it also made me think about my relationship to prayer.

The longer I live the less I know what to pray for. As our overall human and my individual scientific understanding of our world has grown, I’ve found it precludes praying for anything that I know how it works. And the more that I think I’m in control of my life, the less that I pray for things like money or even happiness.

So as I summon my centeredness and quiet as I meditate, I find myself instead praying more for a feeling and connection to the Divine. Praying for a voice that speaks kindness, a heart that serves from its depth and a mind that is childlike enough to search for mystery. I pray for an acceptance of things how they are and eyes to discovery the delight in it all. I pray for arms that are tender enough to hold everyone that I encounter during the day. I pray for ears that are open to listening and a patience to do it without judgment. I pray for a curious nose that can draw me to the sweet smelling things around me. I pray for a feeling of grace so that I face the day from my depths instead of my human fragility. I pray for feet that will guide me to my individual path that I should be walking and the courage to do it.

This weekend my daughter was praying for rain. I thought that one was likely to pan out given the forecast but it turned out that she was praying for rain right at that instant. So I shook the wet tree branch that she and my son were standing under and we laughed and laughed. Then when it really rained, we ran around, jumped in puddles, held our umbrellas upside down and sang. That turned out to be exactly what we all were praying for.

A Legacy of Love

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“Legacy is planting trees under whose shade you will never sit.” – Richard Leon

I went to a dinner last night to honor a foundation my dad started 25 years ago. The foundation takes any money bequeathed in wills to the church he was pastor of and gives out grants to deserving organizations. The one they featured last night was a non-profit that helps with refugee settlement and combats the trafficking of children.

Sitting there listening to the work of my dad’s legacy, I pondered what the echo of our lives is when we die. Certainly the love and memories we have made lingered in the hearts and minds of the people we love but beyond that, is there anything else? I’ve helped build a few Habitat for Humanity homes – does that make any difference? What about words? Books? Blog posts?

Thinking about my dad’s quote above, we can plant trees under whose shade we will never sit. Presumably that means that there will be more oxygen to breathe, comfort on the hot days, possibly even food to eat for the people we leave behind and for our communities. We can plant and contribute to organizations and ideas that help ameliorate the pain in the world. And my dad did. But where does that mean my work as his daughter begins?

Someone in the room last night asked for a member of our family to speak. As the youngest child, I assumed it would be my brother or my mom since they’ve always done the talking but it turned out they nominated me. Without any preparation of what to say, I started with the depth, faith and the love that my dad started in me and how that fire still burns. In fact, it feels as if I have come to embody my dad even more in his absence than I ever did when he was alive, in search of God, kindness and love. We do pass a torch to the next generation and I think it’s in the form of the fires we light within other people. It’s not as quantifiable as money left to a foundation but it’s just as powerful.

Ride the Wave

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“You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

I started meditating this morning and instead of bringing me peace, more and more fears popped up. Fear of my son’s transition to a new classroom and teachers at school. Fear for how the mornings and evenings would go for me as I try to support him through it and get him to eat, sleep and change diapers. Fear of whether his little friend at school was still enrolled. Fear about whether my fellow carpoolers would remember that it was early release for our daughters at school today and pick them up on time.

Sometimes meditation uncovers crap that I’d prefer to leave boxed up.

I sat on my meditation cushion just trying to observe the fears as they popped up. Soon I was just pouring with sweat and sitting in an uncomfortable heap. But after a few minutes, maybe five or maybe ten, I ran out of worries. All of a sudden I realized I could hear my neighbor’s fountain in their back yard and then I opened my eyes and the sun was coming up. Everything, including me, felt sunnier.

Life keeps teaching me not to interrupt the natural cycles. By letting my worries and fears pop themselves up and wear themselves out til I was empty, I naturally filled back up with faith. Leaning into the process and sweating it out, I am learning to ride the wave instead of fighting the current. My younger self fought the current the whole way insisting on keeping the worries on the inside, the sunniness on the outside and being enervated by the battle the whole day long. But I’ve found when I ride the wave, sooner or later, I am delivered back to solid ground where I continue on with the day, surprisingly refreshed.

Theology

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“A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.” – unknown

We were driving in the car the other day and my six-year-old daughter asked, “Did God make the word orthodontist?” She was wondering because her new friend at rock climbing camp had to go see one. I responded that God made people and people who speak English made the word orthodontist.

This question is the latest in the wonderings about God and how the planet works. Last week’s topics were: Why did God make homelessness? And why did God make drugs? This is one of the many times I wish I had a more rooted theology so I didn’t have to think so hard when faced with these interesting questions. Theology like my father’s Presbyterianism which kept him so grounded in his 40 year career as a pastor. Sometimes I wish my heart would settle for just picking a group and joining so I could hide under the collective cover.

But I’ve found some consolation reading Holy Envy by Barbara Brown Taylor where she recounts her time teaching World Religions at a small college in Georgia. What struck me is not only how she came to love all the religious traditions but also that she came to see that none of us believes in exactly the same way. I resonated with both of those sentiments. No two people believe exactly the same way even if they do pick a particular camp. And I’m an equal opportunity pursuer of wisdom – after eschewing religion for many years because I couldn’t do Presbyterianism in exactly the way my parents had and then coming back to it via meditation, and adopting some Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other faiths. I’ve come to walk a path that isn’t just obedient to what my parents did, nor rebellious against that but reflects my inner life. For me, sitting in meditation to find that center again and again works to experience Truth and recognize it in others.

In my conversations with my dad when he was in his late 70’s, he said he’d become a big tent person – someone that believed that it didn’t matter what door you came in as long as you had faith. That to me feels like the sentiment I want to convey to my kids. As my daughter tries to puzzle out this key issue of what God does and does not control in this world, free will and the ills of the world, I say as little as possible so she can start to own her answers. She piped up a little later after considering the question of drugs and said, “I know why God made bad drugs, to give us choices.” Not wanting to wade into the complexity of addiction, I just complimented her for making her own deductions about the experience of life. And I smiled inwardly because I believe God does give us choices starting with how we choose to believe.

Dare to Dream

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“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I had three days this past week where both of my kids were at school/daycare. Do you know what I did? Nothing. Well, not nothing exactly.

I allowed myself to believe that we could start to find a regular routine for school and work.

I relaxed that core part of my body that has been holding me upright for 18 months as I’ve been afraid that if I didn’t stand tall my little family would crumble.

I breathed in to the space created by being able to give up the jobs of teacher, school janitor, lunch lady, PE coach, and school social coordinator for a 6-year-old.

I dared to dream that I might have some energy left for me to grow as we return to more normal days.

Like famed psychiatrist and author Dr. Scott Peck answered when asked how he gets so much done – “it’s because I spend two hours a day doing nothing.” I suspect doing nothing looks different for every person – meditating, reading, praying, playing but out of it comes a renewed spirit.

I think of all the hard times I’ve gone through – divorce, grief, sickness, this pandemic and how there’s an inflection point where all of a sudden I realize that I’m through it. Not that I believe that this pandemic is done, especially because my kids are not yet eligible to be vaccinated and not the day-to-day was bad. It’s just that I was holding back a little reserve in order to gut it out.

When I first started mountain climbing, a guide taught me how to pressure breathe. To breathe out so forcefully that all the stale air in the lungs is expelled and it is possible to take a full inhale. The last three days feel like one big pressure breath, an exhale so powerful that I feel invigorated by all the fresh air I was able to breathe in.

And all that extra energy reminded me that it’s been a long time since I believed that I could really dream about what else is possible in my life. That’s what I did for the last 3 days – dreamed big, audacious dreams.

Low Battery Indicator

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“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” – Corrie ten Boom

The battery in the carbon monoxide detector ran low last night. At 11:21pm actually which is when I opened my eyes and realized that the high-frequency pip-pip-pips I was hearing weren’t actually a part of my dream but something else. Then I was thrust into comical action mode as I, being as quiet as I could, hunted down which safety device was emitting these sounds before it awoke the kids. When I got my hands on the thing I stood by the kitchen sink trying to slip out the battery and sleepily tried to reassure myself that it was just a low battery warning and not an alarm itself. On one hand, I wasn’t sure I even knew what it would sound like if it was trying to alert us but on the other hand, there was nothing on inside the house that I thought could be producing carbon monoxide.

I was pretty sure it was low batteries. But that isn’t a 100% and a lot of worries can slip through that crack between pretty sure and positive. And I’m quite sure I’m not alone with this, but when I’m worried, it’s hard to go to sleep.

Worrying for me is that need for certainty. To be certain that everyone is safe. To know what will happen in that meeting I’m thinking about. To have a response to any criticism that I could imagine might arise. To know the end of the story. Worry is the indicator that my faith is running on low batteries.

As I climbed back into bed, I suddenly felt exhausted by my monkey mind worrying through all the factors prompted by a device that is supposed to keep us safe. The only thing I think of was to count the things I was grateful for instead…

That the kids didn’t wake up

That I have other detectors that were silent

That my heart was beating slower now

That now I had an idea of what to blog about in the morning

That I managed to get a good night’s sleep after all.

Fear of the Dark

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“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

I have a clock that projects the time and temperature onto the ceiling of my bedroom so that lying in my bed I can open my eyes and when they finally focus, I can see what time it is without so much as moving a muscle. It’s a pretty silly gadget but I’ve had it for more than 10 years and since it continues to display the time, I can’t very well justify getting a new clock. But it has to be dark enough in the room to see the numbers so I was surprised this morning when I awoke at 5:24am and could see it on the ceiling. The 16-hour days of summer have passed and even though it took me a couple more minutes to adjust to that and get myself out of bed, I loved getting up in the dark, it has an extra layer of quiet.

When I was younger, my sister used to call my “Pollyanna.” Which I think was a compliment but our relationship is fraught so it’s hard to tell for sure. Whether she meant it kindly or not, she definitely was using it according the Meriam-Webster definition “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” In other words, I’m a little bit sunny – or maybe a lot.

So it’s taken me a long time to appreciate my dark sides. Like how uncomfortable I am when things are edgy and pessimistic. And my inability to foresee that things just might not work out. The era of COVID has been a terrible time to be an optimist – I’ve been wrong on every prediction of when things would go back to “normal.”

Just as I’m enjoying the shorter days, I’m also learning to accept that I can be both light and dark. In fact, sunniness without some down time is exhausting. There’s very little I can do about my optimism which seems to be innate but as I’ve learned to listen to my fears, anxieties and wounds I’ve found a deeper humility by leaning into all of me. As I help my kids name their frustration, disappointment, envy and jealousy, I am finding it easier to name mine. The other day when I was feeling envious of a professional colleague who seemingly has no trouble promoting themselves, something that is very difficult for me, I named it and instantly felt more human.

When I rolled out of bed in the dark this morning, I found it more accepting of my sleepiness and more sacred in the quiet. Somehow, it’s easier to bring all of me, light and dark, to the meditation cushion when the sun hasn’t yet come out. The candles I light every morning glow brighter in the dark and I’m starting to discover that I need to accept both in order to fully see.

The Other Side

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“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” – Buddha

Last weekend I took my kids to a swimming beach in a very wealthy suburb of Seattle. It was beautiful – the grounds perfectly maintained, a recently built dock of all the latest materials so no one would get a splinter, a cabin as beautiful as you would hope for a restful lakeshore vacation for the lifeguards to use when they were off rotation and a play structure with no graffiti. It felt like an idyllic break from the signs of homelessness, addiction and lawlessness that are so evident in Seattle these days.

Within 10 minutes of peeling off our top layers and getting into the water I heard a father chastise his son, who looked about 10-years-old, “You are just a dumb kid.” And because I’ve read so much about how shame doesn’t work, especially in parenting, I felt shocked because I can’t recall hearing someone shame their kids in the six years I’ve been a parent. I’m in no way claiming that it doesn’t happen in the big city but just that I haven’t heard it.

We moved on to the play structure which was almost deserted except for two other kids. My daughter breathlessly ran over to where I was standing told me that a little boy who was about a year older than my toddler was punching my son in the stomach. The child’s mom was about 50 feet away, completely uninterested, so I walked over and the child had taken a lap around the structure and was now pushing my son. As I carried my son away from the child, I thought again how odd that was both to have kids touching each other these days and to have parents totally tuned out. These little incidents reminded me of the adage that money doesn’t solve everything.

My dear dad spent fifteen years as a senior pastor in a Presbyterian church in a very wealthy community before he retired. I remember the gist of many sermons he delivered to the very generous and lovely congregation was that quite often the problem with money is that it makes us think we don’t need faith. Whew, that at least is one problem that I don’t have. 😊

As I drove back to my middle-class neighborhood, I was thinking about our universal humanity. That I with my kids, the homeless heroin addict on the street and the wealthy patrons at the park on the other side of the lake all have hearts that ache for love, lungs that long for clean air, and backs that get tired when they carry too much. Maybe we only differ in how far we think we are from suffering. It made me remember again that there is no way to drive away from suffering but instead I just have to meet it, in me and in others, with as much faith and empathy as I can muster.