I’ll re-tell it, similar to how the minister re-told it, since it’s shorter and more to the point:

There were two brothers who lived on an island, who were willing to fishing in a certain area of the sea, which, while a tremendous spot for fishing, was also terribly dangerous, for terrible whirlpools opened up two or three times a day, depending on the weather, that sucked down everything around them.  Now, these two brothers were the only people who fished this area of the sea, for they were the only ones brave enough, and some might say foolhardy enough, to risk death.  So it was that one day, a day on which the brothers judged the weather fair, they set sail unto this part of the sea to fish, and were bringing in a good catch.  The weather started to shift quickly, however, and despite their attempts to navigate to shore, a stern wind pushed them farther out to sea.  Soon thereafter, one of the infamous whirlpools opened up, and the brothers, and their boat, were caught.

As the boat dipped over the edge of the whirlpool, one brother, the younger, grabbed on fast to a ring-bolt at the prow of the boat, to keep from falling out.  His brother, at the other end of the boat, grabbed on to an empty cask that had been tied down and held on tight.  The younger brother, terrified, thought death was imminent.  He closed his eyes tight, and prepared for to be enveloped and crushed by water.  Thirty seconds later, still holding on to the ring-bolt, and yet not crushed by water, he opened his eyes and looked around.  The boat and its occupants, he realized, where on a slow descent, round and round the funnel of the whirlpool, gradually and inevitably headed towards the bottom.

A strange calm descended over the younger brother, and as all fear exited his body, he decided that since he was going to go at some point anyway, what better and more glorious way to go than in this powerful and strangely beautiful creation of nature.  All of a sudden he felt another grasping at the ring-bolt; his brother had worked his way down the ship and was desperately trying to gain firm hold on the ring-bolt as well.  Realizing that there wasn’t room for two, and having accepted his fate, the younger brother let go of the ring-bolt, and worked his way up to take his brother’s place holding on the to cask.

As he was holding on to the cask, and watching the powerful currents around him, he realized that a barrel that had been on level with the ship not too long ago was now floating significantly higher in the funnel of the whirlpool than the ship.  Looking around carefully, he noticed several other oblong, cylindrical objects floating up near the top of whirlpool, and decided to take a risk.  He shouted to his brother, and gestured and pointed, explaining his idea, but to no avail. Despite all attempts at explanation of buoyancy and what their eyes were telling him, the older brother would not and could not let go of the safety the ring-bolt provided.

Realizing he was out of time, and with great angst and sadness for having to leave his brother behind, the younger brother lashed himself to the cask, cut the cask free from the ship and through himself overboard.  He then watched, helplessly, as the ship and his brother spiraled farther and farther down, eventually disappearing at the bottom of the vortex.  He too moved downward, though at a much slower pace, and short while after the ship had disappeared, he noticed a lessening in the pull of the waters in the whirlpool.  Slowly but surely the winds subsided, and the whirlpool began to shrink, and then finally disappeared.  The younger brother floated, on calm waters, for several hours, before the other local fisher-folk finally saw him and came out to sea and rescued him.

The End

This is a follow up to the post on letting go and mourning death; I thought this story represented a powerful version of the “death” story, of how sometimes we hold on to things for security and safety that are, in reality, no longer safe and secure, and yet we cling so hard to them, without realizing they are in fact dragging us down.  And of how hard it can be to realize, that to live, to survive, to float free, we need to let go out of what is known, and take a risk, so that we may float forward into the future.

I recognize and know from my own life how hard this, what a tremendous challenge it can be to move away from what is known, to let it go, even when the thing that is known is as clear a “negative” thing as pain and anxiety.  Let alone things less easy to discern as negative, such as jobs or friendships, to name two of many.

A metaphor I came across recently comes to mind in this moment, originally applied to strategic planning, but which I also think is apt for life: thinking you know your final destination in life and trying to make decisions based on that destination is like hoping to have the headlights of your car illuminate the final destination of your drive.  Headlights only illuminate the next, immediate part of your journey, and that is all that we can hope for ourselves: some illumination and idea of where we’re going on the next part of our journey.

I love Jesus but I drink a little.

Check it out! =)

I just finished up my first class of “Pastoral Care through the Lifecycle” and came away with what I thought were a few great quotes from the professor:

“The stories we tell about our lives are in fact the stories we live out.”

“It is not what happens to you in your life that matters, what matters is the meaning you ascribe to what happened to you.” – Alice Miller

“The recurrent theme that runs across developmental and lifecycle theory is: growth comes through loss, through letting go, and through change. To live is to mourn. To live is to rejoice in the new. We have to learn how to help people embrace the one constancy of life, which is change.”

These quotes speak profoundly to me about the choices we have in our experience of the world. I have been doing a lot of work with my spiritual director on re-interpreting many of my old stories about the world, letting go of some of them, and creating some new ones to take their place. The quote from Alice Miller in particular I think is very profound, in that it reflects the reality of how much choice we have in our experience of life. The professor referenced the book “Healing from the War” by Arthur Egendorf, where Egendorf asks the question that why and how is it that some people returned from Vietnam and were able to stay essentially healthy and fucntional, and some people returned and were shattered. The only common denominator he found among the healthy group was that they had all managed to switch from being a recipient of care to a provider of care; they were able to user their terrible experiences as a positive tool to help others, and thereby gave it positive meaning. Great stuff.

“Our role as pastoral caregivers is NOT primarily to learn how to fix anything. That’s where you get in trouble, when someone comes to you and they become the problem. We’re not dealing with problems here, we’re dealing with people’s sacred stories, and obstacles that they encounter. Most times, it would be more helpful for most of us to not think first and foremost about how to counsel the other, but instead to think about how we can have the most empowering and healing conversations possible. We’re a partner in conversation, rather than ‘the counselor’ or ‘the pastor.’”

This last quote touches on topics (my life is not a project, my life is not something to be fixed, my journey is my journey and it is sacred) that I have discussed in several different spiritual direction sessions, and I love the framing it presents of the challenges we all face in this world and in our lives. I am excited to be taking a class with a professor who seems to want to live and teach these ideals, and in such an important aspect of ministry at that! =)

I think we are in a time of not being able to set good boundaries for ourselves, that we have learned to set boundaries by removing ourselves from situations, from cutting off, and that we have not learned how to set healthy boundaries and yet remain connected.  I think we do this in internally as well, we do not know how to have healthy boundaries with feelings, so that we either disconnect from them (repress them) or are overwhelmed.

We have not learned, both in relation to ourselves and in our relation to others, how to have that space, how to remain separate yet connected, so that ourselves, or the other, can share and be healed.  We either disconnect (from ourselves or other) or we are overwhelmed and enmesh/fuse (with our feelings or theirs).

Learning how to relate to feelings, our own, and those of others, is one of the chief challenges of Americans in this day and age.

Click here to watch this great sketch on the California Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage.  It stars Jack Black and Neil Patrick Harris among others, and in addition to being entertaining, carries a nice loving message.

Check it out.

The following is my response/reaction to a comment made by the professor in my Intro to the Hebrew Bible class:

Life is not about trying to find the rules, because some circumstances will call for one “rule”, such as hold on no matter the cost, and other times will call for the opposite role, “you must let this go despite what you want.” Both are important concepts, for there are definitely times where we are called to be steadfast and hold firm, and other times where we must let go. You cannot say to always hold on tight, you cannot say you must always let go. Some times call for perseverance, some times for acceptance. We often get locked into the dualism of right vs. wrong, of wanting and needing white vs. black. Life is a shade of grey. The key for us is to find the right thing to do in any given situation, the balance that is right and loving for us in the moment. We cannot know whether we are right and wrong, we can only just do our best, and learn and learn from our experiences, and grow.

From Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the “Tao Te Ching”:

A poor farmer’s horse ran off into the country of the barbarians. All of his neighbors offered their condolences, but his father said, “How do you know that this isn’t good fortune?” After a few months the horse returned with a barbarian horse of excellent stock. All his neighbors offered their congratulations, but his father said, “How do you know that this isn’t a disaster?” The two horses bred, and the family became rich in fine horses. The farmer’s son spent much of his time riding them; one day he fell off and broke his hipbone. All his neighbors offered the farmer their condolences, but his father said, “How do you know that this isn’t good fortune?” Another year passed, and the barbarians invaded the frontier. All the able-bodied young men were conscripted, and nine-tenths of them died in the war. Thus good fortune can be disaster and vice versa. Who can tell how events will be transformed?

Original Tuesday, December 2nd post on pain avoidance:

We have learned so well to protect ourselves, that we forgot sometimes the cost of that protection, both in terms of our relationships and our learning and growing experiences. It is indeed important to protect ourselves, without a doubt, but I think we have become over-protective, at too great a cost. A liberal friend of mine whose family is much more conservative has challenging conversations when she goes to visit, some very challenging for her, particularly around areas of gay rights and gay marriage. Some of her friends have advocated cutting off that portion of her family entirely, and have a hard time understanding why she is planning on moving several states to be closer to home.

I think that we have become so protective of ourselves and so pain avoidant that we miss out on connections, to both friends and family, and on learning and growth opportunities. It is ok to have disagreements with people, especially people we care about and who are close to us, and still maintain the connection. It can be hard, especially when talking about issues with which we closely identify, because it feels like our very identity, who we are, is being threatened, when people disagree with us. So instead of learning to be more secure in ourselves by having this disagreements and coming through them still feeling whole, we avoid having the conversations, and often cut ourselves off entirely. This happens with friends and family alike; we avoid pain, we avoid conflict. Sometimes it is threat to identity we are avoiding, but other times it is truths about ourselves that we are avoiding, either because we are insecure or shameful about them, or because there is internal pain associated with the situation, fact, or event, and we want to avoid that pain at all costs. Unfortunately for us when we do this, we not only lose the connection to those we care about, we also prevent our own healing and growth. We avoid learning how to be able to disagree on matters that are dear to us, and still be secure in who we are. We avoid learning about places within ourselves that we feel shame about ourselves. And we avoid learning about places in ourselves that carry pain with them. In all three cases, we are better off in the short term, because we have avoided the pain in the moment, but we are not better off in the long term, because we have denied ourselves an opportunity to heal and grow (not to mention the possibility of eventually changing someone’s mind). That pain and shame is still there, it doesn’t go away just because we have avoided it, and we must still carry it, even if we are not consciously aware of it. To steal a paragraph from my own sermon that I delivered this past Sunday:

If you are carrying around a backpack with 20 pounds of rocks in it, all day, every day, and you even wear that backpack to bed, that sounds mighty uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Would pretending that the rocks weren’t in the backpack make the load any lighter? Would not thinking about the heaviness of the rocks and the pack make the work of carrying around that load any less onerous?

In the words of Sam Keen: “If you run from your own woundedness, it will fester. If you deny it, it will pollute others. The fundamental rule of the psyche is that whatever you resist, persists.”

There’s a lot of different components to living-by-loving, but the basic premise is that while we all usually profess to believing in love, and in acting in a loving manner, quite frequently our behavior does not reflect this belief.  Most importantly, our behavior and self-talk towards ourselves often does not reflect this belief, though of course how we treat others is important as well.  I believe that if we learn to truly love ourselves, then our abundance of love will flow naturally outwards towards those around us in our lives.

The challenge then is to learn how to relate to yourself first in a loving manner, and to truly live it, and not just say it and not just intellectually believe it. Living, truly living, means existing in a self-loving state.

Thus, living-by-loving.

I will be posting various appropriate thoughts from conversations, classes, worship services and other seminary-related activities as they happen. Hopefully they will be of interest and meaning to those who choose to visit.