Last week, in light of the story of The Old Man and His Grandson, we suggested a way of interpreting our experience. One approach is to see each experience as a gift and call to bring something to life rather than put something to death, and to bring something to life, even out of the many deaths in the midst of life. I thought it might be interesting to expand a little on these thoughts.

In the story, it is the action of the child, with whatever degree of understanding it contained, that brought awareness to the couple.

We can mention a few examples. If we lose a friend, we cannot simply expect that the following day we will go out and form a new friend. As the story of Rapunzel intimates, the unfolding of friendship takes time and is built stand by strand by sharing what is within us. Yet it requires the same openness, vulnerability, and trust on the part of another. This reciprocity cannot be manipulated, but only received. We can be open to friendship, yet cannot produce it on our own. It is a gift. At the same time, with the gift of friendship, comes the task, demand, or call not to betray it. When someone honours us with the gift of who they are, it is important to respect that gift.

Similarly, if someone confides in us, tells us of their deepest anxieties and hopes, fears and dreams, they are entrusting us with the deepest part of themselves. This too is a gift. But with it comes the responsibility not to violate that trust. Or if someone close to us dies, it seems less of a gift than a burden, a sorrowful, lonely weight imposed upon us. But with this more shadowed “gift” comes the challenge gradually to recognize and deal with our grief, and the whole train of feelings and conflicts which it draws in its wake. Beneath the weight of sorrow may gradually emerge a sense of gratitude for this person and the life we have shared with them.

From this way of looking at things, every experience is a gift and call. This appears to be the pattern of human experience. We suggested further that this gift and call themselves have a pattern.

In the story, if the couple did not change their treatment of the grandfather, they would further hurt and sadden him, perhaps even kill his spirit. On the other hand, to respond to the challenge, as they did, would help to heal his wound, gladden his heart, and bring new life to his last days.

In the case of friendship, to betray a friend is to harm, diminish, or even destroy the friendship. To share more fully one’s inner life and outer life with the friend is to foster and develop that friendship, to forge a stronger and more lasting bond. Similarly, to betray a trust can be shattering to a person, whereas to maintain trust can help a person to grow. As I have put it elsewhere, if we become a safe place for another, or they for us, we offer a foundation to stand on and reach from. In a similar way, as we wrestle with the grief of a loss, we can become more aware of our various and even conflicting feelings, and gradually become more compassionate to ourselves and others, in a way that is life-giving.

The same underlying dynamic and pattern seems to be clear: either we bring something to life or put something to death in ourselves and others. We can either enliven or kill; create or destroy life. And this can refer to all the forms and dimensions of life, physical, emotional, mental, artistic, economic, political, international, etc. The basic gift and task concerns life and death: bringing to life or putting to death, even to the point of bringing something to life out of the many deaths in the midst of life.

We can recall again the words of Richard Rohr that suffering is either transformed or transmitted. Suffering is transmitted in destructive ways that may embody unfaced fear that flows into hostility. These readily seek to control, attack, and destroy others, and so are death-dealing. Transformed suffering, on the other hand, leads to kindness, compassion, and justice, which are life giving.

There may be a basic recognition that life itself is a gift, and that the understanding, love, and beauty that make life meaningful are gifts. This recognition shows forth in a life lived with an undertone of gratitude. I recall a humorous comment of a friend who was very difficult as a child yet had loving parents. His words were: “I’m grateful that my parents let me live.”

Gratitude has the same Latin roots as the words grateful, grace, gracious, gratuitous, which essentially mean thankfulness for what is freely given and is valuable. The corresponding word from the Greek, charism, has the same sense of gift, grace, beauty, and kindness, at first received, then shared..If life and its meaning are gifts, and felt as such, then there is an underlying tone of gratitude in our lives, which implies a recognition of gift. What is given rather than earned is then freely shared. The recognition of gift leads to generosity.

The opposite is resentment, the sense that the life we have received, and therefore we ourselves, are not of much value. This feeling of resentful insignificance leads to fear, including a fear that what is of little worth can only pretend to importance or look to things outside of self to give a sense of worth that is not felt from within. It further leads to a need to control, to dominate others and a world that are felt as threatening. It is readily expressed in hostility in feeling, thought, and action. This whole approach seems to be an attempt to prove a worth that is neither felt nor believed. It fails to recognize that our worth cannot be proven or achieved, but only recognized as a gift to be accepted and cherished, and recognized in some sense in all that is.

We have said before how a child will ask: “Where did I come from?” We added that a child is not looking for a technical answer, a lab report, but wants to be told a story in which they are given a sense of worth and belonging. The very question itself implies that we do “come from,” that we do not create ourselves but receive our life, which may later be felt as a gift or a burden. One former colleague suggested that if we think of ourselves as a self-made person, we need only look at our navel as a reality check.

As a child’s longing for a story of worth and belonging suggests, we have a tremendous yearning that the life we have received–and not fashioned–is a precious gift, a sacredness that extends to the unique life and self that is ours. In that case the underlying call is to recognize and accept that gift, to honour it in thought, word, activity, and life. It is a recognition of a corresponding call to honour that gift, not only in ourselves, but extending to all others and indeed to all that is, in appropriate ways.

May you come more and more to recognize your own sacred worth, to accept and cherish it, to be freed from the burden of proof, and to realize and live that worth in self and others. As a result may you more and more live a life permeated with a gratitude that flows into generosity, kindness, compassion, and justice.

Norman King
May 16, 2022

We have been speaking of words, especially in images and stories. We have mentioned how these speak to our heart. They help us to get in touch with and to name our deepest experience. The corresponding insight is that human beings grow and develop by being listeners, listening from the heart. The Rule of St. Benedict, a from the early sixth century, begins with the invitation to listen with the ears of the heart.

Before we learn to speak, we learn to listen, and probably before we speak words, we sing them. We tend to think of a word as having an exact correspondence with a specific object or person. I believe it is truer to say that a word gathers a whole pattern of experience into a single sound. For the young child, “tree” is not simply that object out there, but is a whole cluster of colour and size and shape moved by the wind and heard as the wind rustles through its leaves. “Mother” is not that person I see in front of me, but a whole pattern of sights and sounds and smells and touches, and the feelings that they evoke.

It is a matter then of tuning in to a whole variety of experiences, discerning or separating a cluster of these into a pattern, and finding a sound that expresses that pattern. In turn the words we learn shape our very experience.

Psychologist, Benedictine monk, and Zen Buddhist master, David Steindl-Rast, draws on the roots of the words obedience and absurdity to develop the understanding of listening. The word “obedience” in its Latin origin does not mean to follow blindly. Rather it means to listen fully, to tune in to the meaning of life in each present moment. “Absurdity,” also in its Latin roots means to be totally deaf, to miss the meaning of our life.

Here we have a sense of listening as a tuning in. To listen to another in this sense is not merely to be quiet until they finish speaking, but to be truly present to that person, to be aware of the person beneath the words, and to respond appropriately, I have often said before that we cannot talk another person into something, but we can listen them into their own truth.
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Listening specialist Alfred Tomatis has distinguished between hearing and listening. Hearing simply happens in that the sound around us enters our ears without any attention or intention. Listening only takes place when we focus our mind and heart on the music that is playing or the person who is speaking, when we are in fact present to and participate in the meaningful sounds we encounter. Hearing is the passive reception of sound, while listening is the active participation in what we hear. It is possible to have good hearing, but poor listening.

Genuine dialogue, whether in personal conversation, classroom discussion, or interfaith communication, involves an honest openness, a real listening and tuning in to what is heard and to the person who is speaking. According to Leonard Swidler, who has engaged extensively in dialogue and has written about it, the purpose of dialogue is to grow, to be open to be changed by what we hear and to allow it to influence how we live.

Put a little differently, we listen truly only if we are open to be changed by what we hear. It is far more than simply waiting until another stops talking so that we can make our own predetermined point. As I like to say, we are transformed by what we let affect us deeply. We are shaped by the experiences that we let in to our heart. That is why a friend once closed their eyes before a violent movie scene, not wanting to let that image work on their imagination.

Transformation occurs when the outside experience or influence meets with our openness from the heart, whether the kindness of a friend, the tragedy of a loss, or really anything whatever. In the story of Narcissus, he runs from himself until he finds a reflection of himself as lovable, as someone of worth. Then he does not need to run any more. In the story of Echo, she loses her own voice and fades away as a result. We lose who we are unless we are in touch with, in tune with our own inmost voice. Real growth seems to occur, then, when inner openness and outer events blend.

Listening to our deepest self the voice of who we truly are and of our deepest longing seems to be a gradual process. We can be distracted by more surface needs and wants. We can fail to discern the difference between what we feel like on the surface and what we really long for from our centre. In the story of Rapunzel, the greed of one parent and the fear of the other lead to the loss of the child. This is the loss of the future, the loss of one’s real self. In the same story, it is in her solitude that the young woman discovers her own voice and its beauty, and her own beauty. That beauty is expressed in her singing which reaches out to another, from the core of one person to the core of another.

In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm says in a similar vein, that what is talked about is less important than whether we experience ourselves and communicate from the centre of our existence. What is essential, in this sense, is to listen with the ears of the heart, and to speak and sing from that core.

In sum, we are exposed to many voices, both from within and without. The challenge is both to decide who or what to listen to from the heart. The challenge also is to listen as well, to tune in, to our own deepest voice, the voice of who we truly are and who we are becoming.

May you come more and more to discover and listen to your own deepest voice, your own deepest self. And may you communicate from there. And may you find fulfillment within yourself self and within your connection with others.

Norman King, April 25, 2022

We have often spoken of story and retold many stories in our weekly reflections. We might recall again that, in some sense, we see our life as a story, and we have a certain image of the kind of person we are and are becoming. And in living out our life, we follow a certain script.

On the one hand, the images and stories we are exposed to from childhood on, shape the image and script we at first follow. We interpret ourselves in the light of this script. A dominant script in our society is that of financial success. Yet it has been questioned for many ages, as in the Greek myth of King Midas and the more modern play, Death of a Salesman. In this latter play, the main character, Willy Loman, finds that, in the end, this script destroys him. King Midas is granted a wish that everything he touches turns to gold. When he tries to eat and then to hug his daughter, they both turn to gold. His gift can lead to loss of life itself and the loss of the love that gives it meaning. This theme is echoed in the key sentence in the story of Rumpelstiltskin: “Something living is more precious than all the treasures of the world.”

In effect, every story contains a way of looking at life. The script we have inherited provides the eyes through which we look at life. As we become aware of this pattern our life is following, we can reaffirm, modify or change it. What is crucial is to have a life-story that offers an image of ourselves as a person of sacred worth, and a script that takes into account all the complexities of life, its joys and sorrows, and the whole array of feelings, both positive and negative.The truth of a story concerns not so much the facts of the story–whether or not it actually happened. It concerns more deeply the vision of life the story contains: the picture of what a human being is and what life really means.

Our change in script may come through suffering. A friend once told me that we change only when we are hurts so much that we have to move. We can also change when we are given a better vision of life, a better set of eyes through which to look at life, or a better heart through which to experience life. Or we can simply outgrow our present stage of development, just as a crab outgrows its shell, and sheds it to grow a new shell. Our own growth can be a process of shedding shells that run counter to or at least do not reflect who we truly are or where we belong, where our true home lies.

In this regard, we spoke of the experience of fragmentation–of broken pieces in our life. This experience offers the challenge at once to grieve the brokenness and to seek a new wholeness. Sociologist and theologian, Gregory Baum, describes this experience in a striking way. “Life can be shattered. … Failures, sickness, disappointments, accidents remain part of life on this earth. It is possible to fall into situations where life is destroyed. It is possible to have one’s life shattered like a precious vase and despair over ever being able to rebuild it. We meet people … whose life has become a living death and we realize with fear and trembling that we too are vulnerable, we too could destroy our lives or have our lives destroyed by forces beyond our control. These deaths in the midst of life are what we are most afraid of.”

Yet, Baum adds that, even, out of the fragments left to us after the storm, there is the possibility and the summons for new life to emerge, for growth to a fuller humanness to occur. Another illustration is the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven, in which the storm movement is followed by a gently triumphant re-emergence of light and life and activity. The early film, Fantasia, offers a beautiful visual illustration of Beethoven’s music. In a similar way, the stories of Oedipus the King and King Lear portray the emerging of a new deeper and truer vision out of the experience of physical blindness, as does the blind singer in the Odyssey. The only lame Greek God, Hephaestus, is the one who forges great beauty.

What comes from all of these sources is the conviction that there is both joy and sorrow, suffering and healing, in human life. Yet, in the story of Pandora, as we retold it last week, these may be contained in, embraced by, and grounded in, a hope and love that take into account, but reach beyond all grief.

This conviction is also echoed in the words of Karl Rahner, who acknowledges that there is in life enough darkness, as he puts it, to plunge us into despair. And yet, he goes on to conclude, is there not so much light, so much joy, truth, and love, as to foster a basic trust in the meaningfulness of life, and the meaningfulness our own life.

I think that the folk or fairy tales are a marvellous example of this perspective of hope deeper than despair, sacredness deeper than words, and light out of darkness I first heard these stories as a child. Later I told them, along with other stories, to children in a residential treatment centre. They were quite taken by them and had a real understanding of them. This experience prompted me to engage in an in-depth study of these stories. That endeavour was itself later enriched by the challenge of learning Greek Mythology and the joy of sharing it with my godson. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, it is acknowledged that we all have hedges of thorns around us. Yet the inner beauty remains and is awakened especially by love given and received.

I would like to cite a favourite example, that I’m sure to have used before, Rapunzel. In the Grimm Brothers’ version, the blinded young prince stumbles through the forest, and hears Rapunzel singing again, as she ekes out an existence for herself and their children. He gropes his way towards the sound of her voice. Rapunzel sees him from a distance and runs to embrace him. As she does so, two of her tears fall on his eyes and restore their sight. The symbolic meaning, the truth of the story, is that our own sorrow, borne creatively, can be a source of healing and vision for one another.

Writer, G. K Chesterton, says that it was good to be in the fairy tale. These stories evoked a sense of wonder and gratitude, a gratitude essentially for the gift of life itself. He adds that just as children are grateful for gifts place in their stockings at Christmas, he is grateful for the gift of legs in his own stockings.

May you find or deepen an image of your sacred self, and a story that honours the richness of your inner life, and leads you to a sense of gratitude that contains and goes beyond all sorrows, and that flows into a healing generosity for others.

Norman King, April 11, 2022
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Last week, I referred to an interview in which children’s book author, Kate DiCamillo said that life is chaos and art is pattern. She said as well that story and other arts are genuine if they name life truthfully but with love. She cites Charlotte’s Web as an example. E. B. White, its author, tells of the sad death of Charlotte, the spider, yet does so with a genuine love.

She suggests that: “E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.” Her words recall my experience with the novels of Margaret Lawrence. She reveals flaws in all her characters, yet really loves them.

Author, Sam Keen in his interview and book, Your Mythic Journey, says that, in any relationship, we discover that neither we nor the other person lives up to our idealized picture. We are then faced with the challenge of whether we can love this “flawed creature.” It is interesting that the word flaw has the same origin as a flake of snow, a flagstone or piece of stone, or indeed a fragment, that is, a broken piece, of anything.

We all experience some degree of brokenness, a lack of wholeness, a fragmentation, and the accompanying sense of pain and sorrow and loss. The challenge, as we have said many times, is to recognize at once this flawed character, in ourselves, others, and our world, yet still maintain its sacred worth. It is to blend truth with kindness, including towards ourselves. It is to love the flawed yet sacred creature in each of us.

In saying that “ life is chaos and art is pattern,” Kate DiCamillo echoes the creation stories from many traditions. They speak of drawing meaning out of chaos, often through words, which usually means, in effect, through stories. She observes that she tries “to make sense of the world through stories.” And adds: “We have been given the task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and of each other.”

We have spoken of the heart as the core or centre of a person from which flow and into which are gathered all the experiences of life. A heart made large is one that is stretched to experience widely and deeply and, in that process, to learn to love. Referring to the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, she speaks of experiencing the totality of life with a sense of wonder, and then of naming it with love.

It reminds me of the story of Pandora, as retold by myself and my six-year-old godson, which I will include here.

     Pandora’s Box.
Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman named Pandora. Her name means all the gifts, and she was endowed with all the gifts that any person could want. She had a beautiful box that she kept unlocked by her side for a long time.

One day she thought that it was time to open the box. So she called all the people she knew and even many that she did not yet know. She gathered them all around her and brought out the beautiful box.

She then carefully and gently inserted the gold key and turned it. The lock clicked open. She slowly lifted the lid, And out came all kinds of creatures, some beautiful, and a few others not so. Out flew joy and peace, wisdom and courage, truth and justice, compassion and strength. But then came fear and hurt, sadness and anger. And finally hope and love.

The people were confused. They recognized all the feelings but did not know how they fit together. Then hope spoke. “Sometimes you will feel afraid, and sometimes you will be sad or angry. But I will always be with you if you turn to me. And I will help you in difficult times.”

Then love spoke. “You will sometimes feel lonely and lost, but turn to me and I will walk with you. I will lead you to people who will care for you. And I will help you to care for people too. Then I will be like the box that contains everything within something beautiful.

“And you will know that the box is life. It contains everything, It contains all the feelings. But it is a beautiful box, and it will always be open.”
Retold by Aidan and Norm

May you find your own inner story, the story at the heart of who you are. And may you respond to your story with a heart of wonder and love. And may you expand that heartfelt story in ever wider circles, for the healing of the world.

Norman King. April 04, 2022

Last week, I spoke, in part , of the meaning of the Greek word, alethia, and the Latin word, revelatio. Alethia, which has come to mean truth actually means the removal of forgetfulness, or remembering. In this sense awareness, or understanding, means coming to realize what we may have forgotten or lost sight of. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that we have forgotten who we truly are. In Greek mythology, memory is the daughter of earth and sky and the mother of the muses. These are the many arts, literature, music, sculpture, and much else. This association suggests that it is story and painting and music and the like that help us get in touch with our true self, that help us remember who we truly are.

I heard recently a podcast interview in which children’s book author, Kate DiCamillo said that life is chaos and art is pattern. Story and other arts are genuine if they name life truthfully but with love. She cites Charlotte’s Web as an example. E. B. White tells of the sad death of Charlotte the thoughtful spider, yet does so with a genuine love.

The pragmatic orientation in much of education today regards it as job preparation, essentially preparation for yesterday’s jobs. It readily reduces us to an economic cog and neglects the fulness of our humanity. A more rounded exposure to the arts and sciences, beyond pragmatic information, helps us to grow and develop as a human being and not just an economic function. Exposure to the best that humans have thought and created enriches us as full persons. It helps us to create a life and not just make a living. It helps us make of our lives a work of art and mot just a product

The Latin word revelatio has a similar sense. It is a removal of a veil, that is, whatever prevents our seeing or understanding. The word blind likewise has a sense of darkness or absence of light, and has the same root as, the words black, blank, or bleak. As we noted, it is used metaphorically in literature, in stories of King Oedipus or King Lear, or in the song Amazing Grace, to indicate a lack of vision, a lack of understanding. Both Oedipus and Lear progress from mere cleverness to wisdom, from a more surface attachment to a deeper love, but not without suffering.

As Viktor Frankl stresses, such wisdom and compassion come, not through masochistic wallowing, but through a courageous response to inevitable suffering. Many of the religious traditions also speak of enlightenment, and the healing of blindness, a coming out of darkness into light.

A similar theme is found in Plato’s allegory of the cave, or in E. M. Forster 1909 story, The Machine Stops. The folk tale, The Blind Boy and the Loon, tells of how a blind Inuit child is immersed in water three times, each time ever more deeply, until he is able to see clearly. Coming to see, growing in our vision, is an ever deepening process from darkness to light, from ignorance to awareness, from indifference to compassion, from self-preoccupation to justice.

Sometimes the notion of discipline is conveyed as a form of cruelty to ourselves, of punishing ourselves, not just for allegedly doing wrong but for being wrong, not just for what we do but for who we are. The original meaning of the word, however, is to learn. Our growth can perhaps be viewed as a process of struggling to learn, or better to understand, to develop a vision. This process can involve first, to experience life fully in all its chaos, its hurt, and especially its wonder; and then to name experience with truth and depth and love. It can perhaps be viewed as a struggle with what prevents us from seeing clearly and deeply, with what hold us back from being more completely free, and inseparably with what hinders our sense of sacred worth and consequently our capacity to love.

In this regard, we have spoken before of the role of solitude, friendship, and social involvement. We might just add here a few words on silence. Spiritual writer, Morton Kelsey, notes: “Detachment from habitual, unthinking activity is part of the process of growing up. It is the first step in learning to live as a separate individual and trying to stand on one’s own two feet. … Only in silence … does self-knowledge begin.” He adds: “Out of silence disturbing emotions often come to the surface which are difficult to control. … In the silence one can allow the feelings to arise, disconnected from their ordinary targets in the outer world, and learn to deal with the depth of the psyche directly.”

Along similar lines, Benedictine nun and social activist, Joan Chittister writes: “Silence separates you from all the masks and distractions of life. … Only silence can bring you to the union of the self with the spirit within you that makes life true, makes life authentic, makes life worth living.” Again in the words of a child in Kathleen Norris’s class “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”

That is perhaps the challenge: to be in touch with our soul, to be at home to our inmost self, to remember who we truly are: a being of sacred worth, deeper and more than, and not overcome by our mistakes or even our betrayals. This process makes possible and is inseparable from our compassion for one another and our sense of justice.

Spiritual writer, Thomas Merton puts it this way: “One who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his or her own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love. will not have anything to give others.” Elsewhere, he describes this deepening and its effects: Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, … If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. …At the centre of our being is a point … pure truth. … It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

May you come to be more an more at home to “the secret beauty of your heart,” and may that sacred centre radiate more an more outwards at wherever you are and in whatever you do.

Norman King, March 28, 2022

The long months of the pandemic have not only been an unfamiliar experience for many, but have often created a profound feeling of weariness, lassitude, and lethargy for many, as well as a sense of sadness and irritability. As many of you know, I have an interest the root meaning of words. I came across a definition of lassitude as a condition characterized by lack of interest, energy, or spirit. The word itself has the same stem as the word “late,” which also relates to the sense of weariness, slowness, or sluggishness.

The word “lethargy” comes from ancient Greek and means inactive through forgetfulness. In Greek mythology, lethe was the river of forgetfulness, where one’s past life was lost to memory. And Plato spoke of knowledge as remembering. The word alethia, is literally, non-forgetting, and has evolved into its meaning as truth. It is similar to the word “revelation, which from its latin roots is the removal of a veil. As the song, Amazing Grace, voices it. “I once was blind but now I see.” It strikes me that when we hear something that strikes us as profoundly true, it is less a matter of discovering something new but of becoming aware of something we always some how knew but perhaps did not realize. One of the most gratifying moments in many years of teaching came when an adult student said to me. “You put into words what I always somehow knew but couldn’t say.”

In ancient Greece, too, a contrast was made between physical sight and spiritual insight. It was reflected in the legend that Homer to whom the authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed, was blind. A blind poet sings of the journey of Odysseus, a blind seer warns Oedipus of the danger of uncovering a painful truth, and Oedipus himself becomes wise only after he is blinded. This thought is continued as well in the Shakespearian play, King Lear. Like Oedipus, Lear only realizes the meaning and importance of love after he is blinded.

We can also recall the essay on folk tales by G. K. Chesterton who says that we have often forgotten our name, forgotten who we are and the experience of wonder, evoked by the folk tales, can help us to remember our true self. Wayne Muller also speaks of the inner voice of our true self.
Neither my pain nor my confusion can stop the relentless companionship of this true and faithful voice. Something more vital, strong and true lies embedded deep within me. Sometimes I barely see it, can’t quite touch it. Then I experience a starry night, a forest after a rain, a loving embrace, a strain of sweet and perfect melody–and that is all it takes to remind me who I am: a spirit, alive, and whole. It helps me remember my nature, hear my name.

All these rambling thoughts come down to the idea that the lack of energy, the sadness, the irritability, and even perhaps the depression we may feel, can cause us to lose sight of, to forget who we truly are. Muller says that we must be careful how we name ourselves “If we believe we are a thief, we will act like a criminal. If we think we are fragile and broken, we will live a fragile, broken life. If we believe we are strong and wise, we will live with enthusiasm and courage. The way we name ourselves colours the way we live. … We must be careful how we name ourselves.”

What this means, in our perspective, is that deeper than all weariness and much else, there is our sacred self, a being of intrinsic worth, a value that remains, even when we cannot feel it. Whatever else in life happens that can push us toward forgetfulness or veil this conviction for us, it is essential to cling to this sense of worth, even as if to a life raft.

How do we do so? I find it a continuous struggle. Henri Nouwen whose vast writings on spirituality, were rooted in the conviction of the “belovedness’ of every human being, found this to be a lifelong struggle, one that involved a lengthy period of depression. Parker Palmer is an author from the Quaker tradition which hold that there is “that of God,” an inner light in every human being. Yet he also experienced three profound periods of clinical depression, which he wrote about in a book, Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey through Depression.

Certainly, speaking with a wise and caring counsellor can be helpful as can a limited dependence on medication where there is a chemical imbalance. Yet the hope that “this too will pass,” the recognition that this experience that this experience will pass can also be helpful. We may also recognize that we may for a time lack the energy required for activity, and allow ourselves for a time to be in that space. At the same time, solitude, friendship, and social involvement are certain ways of responding to a whole variety of different life situations.

Solitude is quiet time by oneself. Its simplest traditional expression is simply to attend to one’s breathing in its three movements of breathing in, pausing, and breathing out. It can also be helpful to read something that speaks to us. This is not a reading to devour information, but a more reflective process in which we let the words we read sink into our heart and soul.

Friendship can also be helpful: a friendship which is rooted in mutual trust and expressed in open conversation from the heart. It is a matter of mutual speaking and listening from the heart, the core or centre of who we are. Author Sam Keen writes: “Strange as it may seem, self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart.”

In addition, we grow as well through some activity of outreach in which we do something for others. Even small acts of kindness can count for a lot. So too can involvement in some kind of organization that deals with something in which we have a personal stake or interest, such as Amnesty International or Doctors without Borders. At the same time, as I learned from my brother Mike, the basic gift we have to offer is our presence, being there and being all there for one another. Upon that presence, but not replacing it, can be built the possibilities offered by our particular gifts and interests, as they are able to respond to the present situation and conditions in which our life is currently lived out.

May you find within yourself both acceptance and strength, and a continual recognition of your sacred worth, despite any persisting weariness. And may learn to extend your presence, wisdom, and caring in ever wider circles.

Norman King, March 20, 2022