Pop 89: Practicing Redemption
By Madonna Hamel
The word “practice” is a tricky one. In some cases, it brings relief; we are remained that we are free to make mistakes - we're just practising, after all. In other cases, the notion that the practitioner has not yet mastered their skill is disturbing - as in the case of a doctor practising medicine or a lawyer practicing law. Then there's something a bass player once taught me after I fronted a jazz group that was way out of my league: "Remember, it's all practice - performance included." I suppose this is a good way to view life - as a practice never perfected. Perfection, I am reminded often by sober people far saner than I, is not the goal - progress is. Though, sometimes I feel the goal is Presence. Presence over perfection. Because progress can easily and sneakily be translated as "perfecting."
On days when events come at you from all sides, most of them unwelcome, perfecting our responses to them does not help. In fact, it absents us from the room. And when the people you love are hurting, they do not need you to try and make it better, they need you to be brave enough to sit and listen and just be present. Stay in the room; don't demean them and yourself with empty bromides. Don't busy yourself baking another batch of cookies or vacuum under their chair.
And still, I try to offer calming words or reminders to my brother when he hits on an insight about his post-stroke life. I come up with an "idea" exactly when what he needs is to keep experiencing what he is feeling, all the way through, from beginning to end, including: the slow dawning awareness of a pending loss, the excruciating loss itself, the long dark settling of the loss like a coffin lowered into the ground, and ultimately, inevitably - the freedom, the bursting forth of the soul full of itself, released from anticipation, anxiety, over-active imagination, doom and dread, released from what ifs, if only's and why me's, released from every well-meaning escapist idea. This well-lit moment - lit, as in "luminous" and lit, as in "buoyant" - some call "resurrection."
Resurrection is the point of Lent. We practice Lent by trying. Trying to pray regularly, trying to give to others, if not our cash, our time and attention, trying to fast from gossip, despair, and animosity, if not from heavy meals. We try to remember the whole symphony of life, not just the upbeat, catchy, dance-y bits. We try to be present to the things that scare us. To sit with immense suffering - ours and others - not to show what great believers we are (though that is what some of the old school nuns would have us believe) - but to endure life in its least seductive aspects so that eventually redemption will show up and reward us.
But with what? I admit I like the idea of handing a "suffering" coupon to the Great Cashier in the sky to redeem my reward. But what will that reward be? And don't tell me "my place in heaven" unless Heaven is here and now. Which, by the way, mystics do believe. Like them, I believe if we don't know intimately in our bones and fingertips and belly what Heaven feels like, we'll never see it when we're gone from here.
Me, I know I've managed to glimpse a bit of Heaven when my teeth start to tingle. Also, when my eyes revert to a kind of gentle squint and I'm somehow aware I'm on an edge, a thin place, where just maybe I'll spot an angel or a sprite or the ghost of an ancient ancestor or feel the unmistakable breeze of the Holy Spirit hovering very near. It helps to go walking at dawn and especially at twilight, when the world is low lit, twice (good lighting is everything), and animals and plants shift in and out of various shapes. I call this being in the Twinkle Zone. It's when, as the great carol says, "the soul feels its worth."
Resurrect the sense of wonder you once had as a small child struck by the singular beauty of a single stone, one of a million ordinary stones in your path as you walk from the car to the front door (and your mom, standing in the open doorway who is laughing and moaning that it will take a year at this rate to get you into the house.) Resurrect your passion for something - like my brother is doing now with Jungian psychology. At this very moment, he is accomplishing the Herculean task of reading while his brain is convincing his eyes they are cherries and oranges in a one-armed bandit slot machine, endlessly rolling up and down in his head. How he keeps going is nothing short of miraculous, is something worth praying for, is why I continue to pray fifty-five Hail Mary's at night and another dozen, for good measure, during the day.
Today is Holy Thursday, tonight the Last Supper, and the ultimate loneliness of Gethsemane when the apostles fall asleep and rob Jesus of the company that could help to ease the terror and aloneness in his last hours. Tomorrow, of course is Good Friday, the day he chose nonviolence and forgiveness over spectacle and smoting as a way of making "fans."
Good Friday is what those of us struggling to recover from some sickness of body, heart, mind and/or soul might call hitting bottom and the deepest depth of despair. We can only contain that truth if we believe in the redeeming value of that struggle. If we can sit Saturday vigil in an atmosphere of anticipated Grace, we can make it out of the darkness and reap the gift of Sunday's resurrection. We can redeem the truth of who we are and what makes our soul sing at every single stone on the ground between the road and home.