Tag: spirituality

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Lament

Lament means ceasing to try to protect God from our anger, disillusionment and despair.

Lament … searches out the deepest places in the heart and exposes them to the presence of God. It is a whole-body experience.

Lament can be said to have reached its core when the true dimension of grief has been felt, touched, named and articulated.

People get the idea that they’re somehow deficient and defective if they feel pain. People of faith have done a terrible disservice to one another by thinking that, if they love God, they’re not supposed to feel pain.

These thoughts yet again come from Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen, Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence.

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Those who learn stillness

And another quote from Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen’s Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence:

Those who learn … stillness find that their lives become a sabbath for those who encounter them. … Their lives become an embrace of the qualities and gifts in those around them that others have been too busy or too threatened or too self-absorbed to see and encourage. Their lives become an invitation into a place of depth, but an exhilarating invitation because it is depth without fear, depth as an adventure in which you are expecting to be met by God. Their lives become a place and a time of renewal in which others rediscover who they are and who God is.

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Silence

In Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence, Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen talk about the importance of silence, the silence of listening, the silence of being present, the silence of solidarity, the ministry of silence. When confronted with the pain of others, ‘we want to speak’, they admit, ‘because we don’t want to feel, and we speak to stop people from feeling’. Yet silence is so important because it says:

I am not going to tell you I’m too busy. I am not going to make light of your struggles. I am not going to tell you something more interesting actually happened to me. I am not going to say, ‘I know,’ when you’re exploring a feeling for the first time. I am not going to change the subject when you bring up something that’s hard to hear. … You can trust me to listen. You can trust me to withhold my personal investment for another time and another place. You can trust me to be alert to the ways of God, however strange the story you tell.

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Walls of fear

Jean Vanier’s article ‘The Fragility of L’Arche and the Friendship of God’ offers some important observations on fear, compassion and transformation. Vanier notes that:

Transformation has to do with the way the walls separating us from others and from our deepest self begin to disappear. Between all of us fragile human beings stand walls built on loneliness and the absence of God, walls built on fear – fear that becomes depression or a compulsion to prove that we are special.

However, as Vanier points out, ‘God cannot stand walls of fear and division’ and that ‘to be a Christian is to grow in compassion’.

The article can be found in Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.

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Perfect love overcomes fear

In his concluding observations to Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, John Swinton notes that ‘Vanier continues to draw our attention to fear as a source of violence. Perfect love overcomes fear, but fear turns us in on ourselves and opens us to the possibility of violence’.

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Things are as big as you make them

Things are as big as you make them –
I can fill a whole body,
a whole day of life
with worry
on one scrap of paper;
yet, the same evening,
looking up,
can frame my fingers
to fit the sky
in my cupped hands.

Lucy Partington, whose remains were among those discovered in the basement of Fred and Rosemary West. The quote is from Marian Partington, If You Sit Very Still.