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By Mama Paloma, 08/04/2012 09:42

I posted last night’s essay, rather impulsively, without waiting, at 12:30am. The first thought I had on waking this morning was this:

Redemption isn’t about receiving love, it’s about giving love.

What? The other half of my brain responded. But that’s backwards.

As I pondered it more, this idea began to make more sense to me. I reflected again on the piece I read last night about the “penal-substitution theory of atonement.” The author proposes that Jesus didn’t die to balance some kind of cosmic account. He didn’t “pay our price” because that would mean God didn’t really forgive but just transferred our balance to someone else who paid. He died because he lived out his practice. Gently, relentlessly, he spoke over and over of God’s unbelievable love and forgiveness. This was so threatening to the powers that be that he was killed. He lived his practice of love even though it killed him.

Whether you believe that accounts of Jesus are literally true or not (for the record, I don’t really know and this doesn’t bother me), the Jesus of  Biblical stories was indeed the perfect role model of love. He redeemed through his love. I consider myself a Christian (though others won’t because of that last parenthetical comment) because I endeavor to follow that example of living from love. (And am supported in this by Buddhist and Taoist teaching and meditation, especially, as they give practical direction on reigning in the ‘ego’ that so often gets in the way of that radical kind of love.)

Still, somewhere in my rational, Western mind, redemption has been sort of separate from love. Love is great and all but people need to be accountable.

This has been a major barrier in sorting things out with the-one-I-am-having-such-a-hard-time-loving. I realized that have demanded in a number of ways that he be accountable for his actions as a precondition for my continuing to show loving-kindess towards him. I can pray for his happiness and well being but I still, somewhere deep down, want him to pay.

I have been looking at the other person as being the one in need of redemption and forgiveness. He’s the one who did wrong, right?

Right?

I get heaps of support for this. Righteous anger and disappointment are reflected by all who care for my son and I. And, indeed, I want justice, I want consequences, I want him to know that he has wronged us and suffer for it.

Of course that’s right.

Except for this. As I realized this morning, all evidence to the contrary, I am actually not in a position to judge him–his motivations, intentions, or worthiness. My practice is acting and living out of love and equanimity. It’s what I aim for, continually move toward and back to.

The situation, as it stands, where I stand, is that I am the one in need of redemption. I have stepped off of my path of love and into the murky, dangerous realm of the cosmic balance sheet. I am mired in the muck, tangled up in the twining roots of trees that choke out the sun and hide all manner of creepy crawly things that bite.

I have felt stuck here for a long time.

What struck me this morning is that release from this stuckness – a practical and spiritual redemption – is readily available.

All I am required to do is to return to the path of kindness, gentleness, compassion, equanimity, and love regardless of the other’s actions.

Because, truly, that’s what Jesus did. He showed the way, loving even those who couldn’t see their worth and worthiness. Holding to the truth of the-Love-greater-than-we-can-imagine-or-understand even when it meant his execution and still not being held down by this – which is why we have Easter, right? – somehow rising up from destruction to live on eternally as The Inspiration to love.

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By Mama Paloma, 08/04/2012 00:20

Today, a friend (and writer in her own right)  posted a piece from Huffington Post entitled “Is God Angry at You?” In it, the author challenges the dominant Christian interpretation of Easter – what is referred to as the ”penal-substitution theory of atonement” – which I won’t go into here other than to say that I really enjoyed the writer’s critique of this taken-for-granted-in-many-circles understanding of God.

And it got me thinking about forgiveness.

Years ago, I wrote about saying prayers with my son. He was a tiny baby then, but this act had taken on some significance for me. Each night, as a part of our ritual, I would say “Please be with Addison’s daddy, wherever he is, keep him safe, and give him everything he needs to be happy.” You see, (and to save you the trouble of reading back for that bit of our story), this guy had dropped off the face of the earth about half-way through my pregnancy and we hadn’t heard from him since.

About three months after baby-daddy went AWOL, I was reading an Anne Lamott book in which the protagonist was facing betrayal and decided that she didn’t want bitterness to consume her – so she started praying for the betrayer. This resonated so strongly with me that I started doing the same. Every time he came to mind, every time someone else made a disparaging comment about his character or intentions, every time I thought of the pain my son would likely experience in his dad’s absence, I repeated this mantra. Well, maybe not every time, but many times, as I caught myself falling into  bitterness – mine or another’s – this little prayer pulled me back from the edge.

After a while, it got to be less hard. With the baby, it was easy, because I could imagine that his dad being happy would likely create the most possibilities for him. When the guy finally called, around the time AJ was two, there was space in my mind and heart to not turn him away from knowing his son.

But then it got real. He hadn’t become a different person. He was still dishonest and manipulative.  And now he’s done it again. After a year and a half of regular correspondence, calls, and some visits, he’s dropped off the face of the earth.

And I am pissed.

It’s one thing to mess with me…and another to mess with your child. It’s heartbreaking to be told, several times a day, “I need my daddy” or “I want my daddy” and know it’s so true and know there is nothing you can do about it.

I am pissed and I am becoming bitter. I want to punish like the God of the penal-substitution theory only I don’t want a substitute. I want retribution because it must be, or maybe it is about substitution…I want him to feel the pain that our son is feeling and going to feel in the future.

Fucker.

And, at the same time, I feel the pull of my heart – the truer, better part of myself that knows what I really want – back to that place of that simple yet profound prayer.

It was easier when he wasn’t real, when I knew nothing about him. When I could imagine he’d never actually come back.

It was easier before I had spent four plus years trying to sort out some reasonable child support situation without going to court, going further and further into debt in an effort to preserve my son’s connection only to come to this place where I can accidentally notice that he is getting along quite well, thank you, with a new life and lots of partying that somehow keeps him from bothering to call or even text his four-year-old kid who remembers that the last time they talked was his birthday two months ago.

It was easier then.

It’s more important now.

For my son, for this guy I have to fight not to despise and wish ill on. For me. I have to do it. I have to keep forgiving and wishing well and holding his safety and happiness in my heart and mind. I have to forgive myself for letting him in and exposing my child to this heartache. I have to let this forgiveness and well wishing peel back my grip on the need for justice and retribution so that I can take steps forward without entirely justifiable  malice.

I have to, as someone in the Twittersphere so eloquently put it today, speak for my anger, but not from my anger. I must speak from love.

Fuck.

Perhaps those who pray can pray for me on that one…”Give her everything she needs to be loving.”

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By Mama Paloma, 18/03/2012 23:24

“Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.” –Brené Brown

The past few weeks, I have had several opportunities to shine and stand up and get-it-done. And I’ve felt shitty about each and every one. I can so relate to her ‘vulnerability hangover.’

Vulnerability feels, well, vulnerable and Shame loves to step in at those moments…showing me where I’m not the best or the brightest. Yet, something keeps me going, putting myself out there, setting myself up for yet another not-quite, almost, could-have-been-awesome.

I am so glad that I’m not the only one who faces Shame and stays in the arena.

Listening to Shame

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By Mama Paloma, 19/09/2011 00:08

Tonight, Addison John couldn’t fall asleep. He was scared. Of sounds. Of noises. He had to pee. It may be time to do away with his afternoon nap. These late nights are KILLING me.

But it was more than his not being sleepy. Something was eating at him.
“Mommy!” he called me from the bedroom.
‘Go to sleep, Addison. If I hear any more words from you, I will close the door.’
“Mommy!!!”
‘OK, I guess I need to close the door?’ I stood up and went to the room.
“But, MOMMY, I am trying to TELL you something.”
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
“Mommy, are you getting OLDER?”
Seriously? ‘Yes, I am getting older waiting for you to go to SLEEP.’
“Mommy, are you going to die?”
There was something in his tone that stopped me. This was more than preschool-child-trying-to-avoid-bedtime.
‘I am not going to die any time soon, honey, I am going to take care of you.’
“But WHEN are you going to die?”
“When is Grandma going to die?”
“Are we all going to die?”
I said something about how someday, everyone’s body stops working but it’s all right, it’s a part of life and it isn’t going to happen for a very long time.
“So, my whole family is going to die and we won’t be able to have our bodies any more!” he almost wailed.

And I just held him and told him I know it’s scary and I promise it will be all right, feeling more than a little helpless with the knowledge that my little baby has tasted that existential angst at the tender age of three and there really isn’t much I can say to help him with that.

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By Mama Paloma, 31/08/2011 17:46

December 27 is to be my fortieth birthday. Yep, the big four-oh. This approaching anniversary has got me considering how I have lived my last forty years and how I want to live going forward.

I have also been thinking a lot about legacy–not in a morbid, what-will-I-leave-behind-when-I-die way but more in the what-will-people-remember-about-this-tomorrow way. I have been considering the wake we leave as we move from one interaction to the next. Over the next three months, as that day approaches, I am taking steps to shift some of my habits to be more in line with the legacy I’d like to leave in my wake, the ways I would prefer to experience myself and be experienced on a day-to-day basis.

I am starting with the concepts of attention and choice an the power we have in our choices about what we pay attention to.

This morning, I took a few minutes to watch today’s featured TED Talk TED.com

(If you love this as much as I do, please go to this link Julia Bacha: Pay Attention to Nonviolence and comment.)

this talk literally brought tears to my eyes. The impact of war, discrimination, and environmental exploitation on civilians is near to my heart and my work is driven by the same certainty that what is reported on in these situations will grow–violence or peace-making, disconnection or community. I wrote to Ms. Bacha immediately and hope to connect as colleagues and kindred spirits in this arena.

Closer to home, though, I was challenged by this statement (emphasis mine):

Parents can incentivize or dis-incentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children. But that’s true of adults, too. In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention.

It reminded me of yesterday morning. I had just gotten up after a virtually sleepless night, the result of 1) a rather distressing email from an employee (Oh, why did I peek at work emails just before going to bed?) and 2) my son waking up in the night, vomiting. My entire day was shot, the second in a row to be thrown off by external forces and my own physical limitations, and I was, shall we say, a bit cranky. And depressed.

I opened my computer to try to get something done and immediately this comment by Marianne Williamson popped up on my Twitter feed.

There it was, my life’s work being applied to my life. I sat there for a moment, considering where I have been affirming the power of the problems. It’s not a short list. Finances, the situation with my son’s father, an untenable work-life imbalance, a non-functioning nonprofit Board, my health, three-year-old AJ’s tantruming (Terrible twos? Try tyrannical threes!)–all of these had drawn me into a focus on what isn’t working, where the problems are, how I am stuck and powerless and alone.

I was confronted with the fact that this experience is to a large degree a choice, a series of choices I am making every day. Ironic, really, isn’t it? My therapy practice is called Talking Possibilities and here I was, choosing to talk about, ruminate on, and prioritize my own problems over the actually quite rich possibilities that are available to me.

Home with a sick child, I spent the day being with this awareness, considering how to shift each of these areas. I started noticing my reactions to things and shifting the meaning I was making.

This wasn’t just ‘positive self-talk’–which I find too often to be a kind of denial of what is. I was able to be with my son and empathize as he experienced that uniquely awful sensation of knowing another bout of vomiting is to come. At the same time, I was able to–not enjoy, I don’t want to ever see him unwell–appreciate the opportunity to give him the experience of being attended to, comforted, and understood and to teach him about self-care and patience. I was able to take time to consider how to respond to my employee with empathy, to value the opportunity that this situation presents me–to simplify and take back valuable time of my own–and to choose not to respond right away but give myself space to attend to other priorities. I still haven’t sorted out what to do with the more emotional parts of the baby-daddy situation but did realize that I had been choosing to believe I had to figure out things that I can and should get help with. I decided to wait for good advice and not throw my energy at the situation until I was clear as to what I should do. I called a friend for a referral to a specialist in International Family Law. Finally, I turned my attention to my own physical and emotional state. I took stock. I have been really depleted for some time now and, remarkably, no one has come to rescue me from that. I realized that it is high time that I take ownership of my own well-being, that I have many options for balancing and enriching my experience of life, and decided that this needs to be my top priority for the next few weeks.

All of this from a choice. Had I chosen, even by default, to give my attention to all of the challenges I am facing on a day-to-day basis, I would have likely been immobilized and buried by noon. The choice, in a moment of abject discouragement, to give my attention to the possibilities, shifted my experience immediately and space almost magically opened up for solutions to emerge and for me to take steps toward them.

We give our power to what we pay attention to, whether we are talking about international peace-building, parenting, or peace of mind.

We live in a flash of light;
evening comes and it is night forever.
It’s only a flash and we waste it.
We waste it with our anxiety, our worries,
our concerns, our burdens.
~Anthony De Mello~

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By Mama Paloma, 14/08/2011 23:35

I have been thinking a lot lately about legacies, the little legacies we leave throughout our lives and the ways we live on when we are gone. The thoughts are still brewing but today the urge to put some of those thoughts down took hold.

And, in this moment of reflection, what came to me? Monty Python. Yes, more specifically the Monty Python bit in Life of Brian where Brian (mistaken for the messiah) tells the gathered crowd,

“You are all individuals”

and the crowd responds, in unison,

“Yes, we are all individuals!”

I have come to think that this may be the greatest myth of Western culture. We (American white kids, especially) are taught from our earliest days that self-definition and self-sufficiency are the measures of success and accomplishment. Such narcissism has been enshrined in the same New Age mishmash that encourages (very selfish) people to spout truisms like “We are all just vibrating interconnected energy.”  This, too, I think is a myth or at least an exaggeration of what is..

Because, for me, one of life’s great mysteries is how we are individuals and yet also interconnected. How our sense of individuality and identity can only be experienced in the context of our connections to others.

Okay, now I must resist waxing even more academic and philosophical here. I could go on and on about my observations of how selves are experienced very differently in other cultures, how our taken-for-granted sense of individualism is very strange and sad to others.

But this isn’t a professional space. I come here as a mother. Right now this mother is struggling to make peace with my child’s father, and sometimes wondering if he shouldn’t just be pushed away, where he can’t hurt anyone.

This happens before each visit–coming up on the fourth of these–and in the context of a repeat pattern of dishonest/controlling/inconsiderate behavior on the part of the person in question. I get scared. Scared of suffering some new indignity, scared of being caught up in some drama not of my own making, scared of not having important information, scared of my son being hurt by or–perhaps worse–learning from this, his idol, that being a man requires dishonesty, control, and destructive self-absorption.

I also get angry. My ego jumps up and says “I am better than this. No one can treat me this way! Who the f@#k does he think he is? Just tell him to f&^k off!” My ego schemes ways to give him his come-uppance, have the final word, make him see me and wish he had behaved better.

But then there is my son. This gorgeous, brilliant, amazingly articulate child who loves his ‘daddy.’ I put it in quotes because most people in our lives don’t really see him that way. In my son’s 3.5 years, they have spent exactly 21 days in each other’s vicinity. Admittedly, distance, cost and other logistical issues have been the main issue since daddy decided to show up a year and a half ago. And it is also true that he is, when present, an attentive, loving dad. Still, the degree to which our little guy has internalized this connection is remarkable. He talks about his daddy, makes frequent references to things they have done together, cries for missing him.

So, I have been sitting, once again, in a stew of fear and anger as I have before. It’s an awful, scary place. It is a place that takes me far from who I want to be and how I want to choose to act from love and compassion to the exclusion of fear and self-righteousness.

Thankfully, someone or something always shows up to remind me of what is really important, of who I am and continue to choose to be regardless of the actions of others. Today it was Alice Walker. I have been meandering through her book Temple of My Familiar, in moments before sleep, for some time.

Now, I had planned to do laundry, organize the hall closet, clean up the house but then my neighbors had a very noisy party that moved from the bars to their apartment at 2:00am and didn’t let me sleep until I knocked myself out with a couple of Benadryl at 4:00am. Today, I am tired and cranky and have to be at a schmoozy thing for work at 5:00pm so I just cut myself some slack while AJ napped and set about finishing the book. As I read, I came across this passage.

“…if our parents are not present in us, consciously present, there is much, very much about ourselves we can never know.”

This rang so true for me, for my little boy. He needs to know his dad–with all of that man’s gifts and charms and flaws and failings–to know an important bit of himself.

I wish I could be sure he will create his identity only out of the gifts and charms, knowing even as I wish it that this is absurd.

The reality is that legacies are as complicated as the humans that leave them. I hope that, as we struggle with our flaws and failings, his dad and I are leaving our son at least a glimpse about how to be and to become, not an isolated individual, but a whole person in the context of a perfectly imperfect, slightly bizarro family.

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By Mama Paloma, 31/07/2011 21:30

I have been thinking a lot about horror lately. Not fun, B-movie horror, but bona-fide, can-comprehend-but-wish-I-couldn’t, awful, terrible horror.

The last ten years have somewhat inured me to horror. Not that I feel nothing about the endless wars, the shocking human rights abuses, the awfulness that is out there. Rather, these things have, sadly, become a part of my reality because they are reality. We (the US of A) declared war on terror and terror is fighting back. My mind has incorporated this into it’s map of the world. It’s not all right but it’s not a surprise.

Then came the terrorist attacks in Norway. Norway? My mind said. This guy went after kids? That can’t be right. I was horrified. Not because a bunch of affluent white kids being gunned down is any more horrific than a bunch of poor black kids dying of malnutrition or a bunch of Saudi protesters being tortured. It was just shocking, unexpected in a way that these other horrific realities are horrifically not.

A few days ago, I came across a story I would likely have heard of before if I had a TV or listened to talk radio. This guy in Michigan is on trial for the disappearance of his three sons. The story is awful. The father seems like a crazy, control-freak, scary guy. But what got me was their photo.

I am haunted.

Perhaps in part it is their wide-eyed resemblance to my son and his near-future selves, perhaps it is their apparent happiness and lack of fear, but something about this picture left me particularly horrified. More than that, though, is the realization that these boys are gone (perhaps forever) and there is nothing I can do about it. My heart goes out to their mother, who clings to the hope that they are secreted away somewhere, alive because to think anything else (until she has to) is just too much.

This has me thinking about what we do in circumstances like these, times when platitudes about ‘everything happening for a reason’ or ‘ God being in control’ just don’t cut it. There is no silver lining, nothing to be learned. There is nothing we can do.

It reminds me of working with war survivors in West Africa. Sometimes, the horror was so great, so overpowering, so incomprehensible, our approaches to ‘trauma counseling’ seemed not only inadequate but irrelevant.

These events, this terror, this awfulness is intolerable. But what are we to do? How can we help ourselves or others to cope in the face of the un-faceable?

There is a poem called The Invitation that speaks so well to the work I do. In it is the line,

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I have been thinking about this. I have been thinking that, sometimes–when we see a child starving, when we know of people imprisoned–we can and should act. We shouldn’t stop acting until something is done, something shifts. We should rail against inequity and injustice to the best of our abilities until the day we die.

Other times, after a man filled with hate and racist ideology murders scores of people, after a father is imprisoned for probably snuffing out three bright little lives, there really is nothing for us to do.

But to be with the pain. To see it and share it and let it be painful.

To honor these kids and their mothers and their memories with our tears.

And I want to know who will do that with me.

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By Mama Paloma, 28/06/2011 06:00

…but what is it?

See, I have this list of things I should get done:

• Figure out what to do when my car lease ends
• Sort through my clothes
• Get some new clothes
• Sort out the paperwork on that time that woman hit us in February
• Polish grandma’s silver
• Update my accounts
• Send last year’s holiday cards (they’re postcards, with AJ and my photo on them)
• Finish decorating my office
• Fill in AJ’s baby book
• …

And that list stays virtually the same. Week after week. Month after month. Yes, now, year after year.

It wasn’t always like this. I used to be quite capable of mapping out the projects, getting through them, staying on top of things. There was a period of months when my ex and I did nothing but remodel. 6:00 in the morning to night, every weekend. During graduate school, I maintained straight “A”s while working at a crisis intervention center at least 50 hours a week. I enjoyed that focus, being able to immerse myself in whatever had my attention.

Then, I had a kid.

And lost my mind.

Six weeks after AJ was born, I had a question for my OB. “Can you ask Kerry,” I said, as the receptionist scribbled on her message pad, “When AJ was born…” (more scribbling)”…did my brain come out with the placenta?” We had a good laugh about that. It still felt true.

I have realized since that my brain is still right where it was, in the space between my ears. It just doesn’t work the same.

Things take forever.

Like tonight, when it took me fully three hours to order a couple of things online. In my former strategic planning life, I would have allowed 30 minutes max for this task. These days, though, I know I am not so quick to map out the options and make a decision.

Of course, tonight, I was also doing several loads of laundry, having to repeatedly settle a little guy going through a growth spurt (read, antsy and exhausted at the same time), and watching back seasons of Peep Show on Hulu (no TV since 2005 = fun viewing to catch up on).

There just isn’t time for projects. The little guy gets off to bed and I am spent and a weekend project is not going to happen in a weekend.

Maybe not ever.

I am coming to terms with this. It is freeing. Things that need to get done do, somehow. The rest gets figured out. Or not.

And I am embracing my priorities. Like tonight, when my little squirmy monkey said, “No, mama, stay with me,” and pulled on my arm. I had so much to do but instead let him pull me down next to him and tell me  about his plans to wow everyone with his new swimming goggles in the wading pool tomorrow.

Which might seem like procrastination but is really a new kind of focus that is at once expansive and even more single-minded than my former house remodeling, graduate-school acing self.

The silver, the closet, the box of photos and baby memories will all be there tomorrow, next week, in 2020. That story about the goggles, my little boy’s three year old dreams, will not.

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By Mama Paloma, 25/04/2011 21:01

As I gazed at the rafters of my mom’s church this Easter Sunday, I was carried back to Easters past–years of Easters in Methodist, Assemblies of God, and (gasp!) Lutheran congregations who all believe what I believed then:

1. That the Christian Bible is the literal Word of God and the only thing we need to know about God.
2. That Jesus was the Son of God.
3. That He died for our sins.
4. That his coming back to life was a fact that proved Christianity is the only right religion.
5. That the key to getting into Heaven (a specific place, that is amazingly wonderful) and avoiding Hell (also a specific place, horrible) is accepting these things as fact. Then, every incorrect-to-evil thing you ever did or would do would be wiped from the record.

These are the tenets with which I was raised. And this Sunday, listening to her pastor preach what is regarded as the fundamentals of the Christian faith, I found myself wondering if I could ever believe them again. You see, I didn’t rebel, renouncing faith in a fit of post-adolescent intellectualism. I liked believing these things. I was saved and even if I fucked up really, really bad (like, say, by smoking or using the word ‘fuck’) it didn’t matter. I was forgiven. I could relax. I was right. I was going to heaven and so was anyone I could convince to say the little prayer asking Jesus into their heart.

Starting in High School, though, I began to notice that this rightness felt, well, a bit wrong. Over time, many years actually, I found that I just couldn’t believe it all any more. Rather than going through all of those thought trails I will say that the place I ended up is that I do believe that Christ offered us a model of how to live and how to die and following His example is about as good as I could do in this life.

I am a Christian most Christians would say is going to Hell. I don’t believe the Bible is the literal Word of God. I understand the metaphors of communion and other rites quite differently than the ways I was taught.

I admit I have no certainty about what follows death.

Most of the time, this doesn’t worry me. However, when someone I knew and respected dies, and when I look at my son. I want that certainty. Perhaps this is why so many people turn to religion as they die. To even think there is a guarantee is a comfort.

This Easter, the pastor presented the same two options  I had heard over and over as a kid.

He went on to present and the same as well:

• Plan A — Try to earn your way into heaven through good works.
• Plan B — “Trust Christ, The way, the truth, the life”

He want on to offer this prescription for salvation: “Reject Plan A, Receive Plan B” and mocked ideas that what we do, how we live matters. He referred to the resurrection of Christ as “one of the most attested facts” in human history, citing a mention that 500 people witnessed Jesus’ reported ascention into Heaven.

This is where my affinity for modern Christianity and its tenets breaks down.  ”Most attested”? Really? The same pastor would scoff at the thousands who have witnessed tears of blood from statues of the Virgin Mary. The Hindu Milk Miracle (yes, referring you all to Wikipedia here), reported around the world in 1995? Hogwash. Any number of other unbelievable occurrences? People’s desire to see what they want/urge to believe in something/stupidity. But a report written decades, if not centuries, later of an estimated 500 people seeing a person who had died but came back to life rise up into the sky? One of the most attested events in history.

Now, I am skeptical of all of these stories as fact. I also happen to think that it doesn’t matter if they are really true.  These are the meanings people have made about their observations and experiences and meaning is what it all, ultimately is about. Meaning shapes while it is shaped by belief–in what is natural and what is not, in what can be expected, in how things should be–we all have beliefs, whether based in facts or not.

But belief isn’t, really, faith. In fact, at times, it may be the opposite of it.

Faith is trust without evidence. Faith is, indeed, living with uncertainty without giving in to fear. Claims to certainty, offers of evidence of one’s faith claims, assertions of holding or having found ‘the truth’ (whether by a Christian minister, a yoga teacher, or annoying guy at a coffee shop) are grounded in and received by people’s fear, not their faith.

For me, faith is what is called for in the Christian Bible, when it reads, “Trust the Lord, with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding” (emphasis mine). I don’t remember the citation, but I remember the words because they were so powerful and, at the same time, so far from what I observed in the church.

Over and over, Jesus counseled those who questioned to comprehend to instead emulate his ways of living, to trust without all of the facts in hand, to be present to the people and need and life in front of them.

So, I choose to live with Plan C — to have faith that I don’t understand and can’t explain it all so the best I can do is understand the best I can and live out as much as possible the best example I have. I have faith that I will be prepared for whatever comes after life and will be no more alone there than I am here, where I sense a power greater than my own that is unknowable and unexplainable and speaks to me in a myriad of ways.

Including this pastor on Easter. Before he got the the Hell and Heaven, Plan A and Plan B part of his message, he said something that moved and inspired me. Something about trusting God, that God can handle things in ways we can’t imagine. In short, he reminded me of my faith that, if I keep coming back the example of love and compassion, self-sacrifice and redemption that Easter represents, I will somehow find the path I can’t always see.

Comments (1)

By Mama Paloma, 14/04/2011 23:46

I shouldn’t be writing this right now. After my weekend revelation, I started off strong with giving my bed the quality time it deserves but the past few days have been creeping down from eight hours to seven…

…so, as I have been taught to do when meditating, I am noticing that shift and bringing back my attention to the original intention.

This has become part of the plan, as well. A renewal/development of  other things that I find restful and restorative.

Like signing up for Marianne Elliot’s 30 Days of Yoga course. This program is designed for people like me (in both present and past incarnations) who, due to our work as mothers/humanitarians/otherpeople are challenged to get to a class more than once a week/month/year.

I haven’t started it yet. Apparently, Marianne and I need to sort out my intentions and what kind of practice will work best for me…which I love. My recent rant about parenting gurus could apply to many fora, including the ‘self-help’ realm where judgment rules covertly behind “accept yourself right where you are” platitudes. Marianne talks about kindness in our practices and I think she means it.

So, once we figure out what I am moving towards these next few weeks, I’ll get started and let you all know how it goes.

In the meantime, Marianne shared a lovely guided meditation from Peter Fernando whose Month of Mindfulness may just be the next piece I want to add in, once the yoga is a bit more on track.

In the meantime, I think I’ll just listen to the meditation Marianne shared over and over. It is about Gratitude and Joy.

The past couple of months have been tough in that shake things up, reevaluate, start making things happen kinda way. I am ready to make my life more the way I’d like it to be and Joy and Gratitude seem like a good place to start.

More later. Now, I sleep!