The Second Half of Life

 
What we evade we can never avoid
 
People say we can’t help how we feel. It’s true we can’t help unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral feelings arising when one or more of the six senses have made contact with something that has a familiar feeling tone or reminds us of something that we went through at an earlier time but never allowed ourselves to feel. We multiply the intensity of feeling every time we move away from something pleasant or unpleasant; we create a vicious cycle of craving and aversion. This is a truth that is important to understand that what we evade we can never ultimately avoid. It is not by moving away from but towards that which seems so unpleasant that we find peace and healing. Unpleasant emotions and cravings will pursue us and not let us find peace until we give them space and allow them to have their place in our lives. These are all sacred parts of ourselves that seek to come home, they belong to our core Self and nowhere else. All suppression or repression can do is to consign them to the waiting room of the unconscious.
 
Wed 26th June
 
Allowing feelings to dictate thinking
When people say they can’t help how they feel, they are usually talking about their emotions being out of control. We can help how we experience our emotions. They are created by our unconscious, our conditioning and our conscious thinking. Changing how we think about our emotions and not simply allowing ourselves to think and act through them is vital since simply following our feelings can land us in deep trouble and even in jail. Our emotions can make us deny in the dark what we have known to be true in the light. We make our emotions worse by reaching out for external stimuli, by blaming others when we feel vulnerable or upset. Before we know it, we are angry, resentful, self-righteous, and begin to inhabit a storehouse of toxic thoughts, which suppress our uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability.
Thurs 27th June
Being patient with how we feel
The word patience comes from the Latin word patior that means to suffer. If we are patient, and suffer with them, without being afraid of them, our feelings will change of their own accord—some quicker than others. Our emotions will begin to change and lose their intensity; they won’t dominate us, or dictate our behavior. Eventually toxic emotions will disappear and nontoxic thinking will start to arise in our hearts, and one day there will be just thoughts without a thinker. There will be sounds without a hearer, tastes without a taster, smells without a smeller, sights without a seer, and touch without a toucher. What I mean by all of this is that things will arise and we will not identify with them as me, mine, or I. This is like being aware of how we feel, good or bad, but being ‘holy’ indifferent towards our emotions, knowing that they no longer have the power to define or determine who I am.
Fri 28th June
Inner Hospitality
If we practice inner hospitality with our emotions the time will come where there will be no judgments, interpretations, or stories about what we have just perceived. We will see the bigger picture, and not be caught by the clash of the senses, not reacting to whatever we have made contact with. We will feel the unpleasantness, pleasantness, neutralness, or even the mixture of all three feelings, and will turn toward it without an agitated mind. The heart and mind will accept all of it without protesting. It’s when we protest and reject that toxic emotions begin to emerge and have a field day in our lives.
Sat 29th June
Repression
Our hearts simply well up with toxins because we push away our painful feelings. Many of us have a lifetime behind us of doing our utmost to push them down. We won’t allow ourselves to stop. Our busy lives don’t seem to give us time to feel our feelings. When we turn toward our experience, we will often find feeling tones or sensations in the body. We turn away from the experience in the body with thoughts and thinking. We try to compartmentalize in our heads thinking we have everything sorted. If we have the courage to face the feeling tone, we will discover there is nothing there, no I or me, just a flow of sensations that may be painful, pleasurable, or neutral. We need to always give space to whatever emotion that is, and so to treat it as a friend rather than an enemy.
Sun 3oth June
Exploring Healing
 
When we look at the ministry of Christ, we find that he was nearly always engaged in healing of one kind or another. Sometimes it was of the miraculous kind like like the woman with the hemorrhage or the little girl in today’s Gospel, but more often it was about helping people come to terms with their lives and how their past was affecting their present. So he helped them to tell their story; he reassured them of God’s mercy and taught the importance of forgiveness, both towards themselves and others. He encouraged people to let go of judgments, to be less critical, always to look for the good and to love their neighbor as they loved themselves.
 
There is a quote from the late Archbishop Desmond Tuto that I have used on many occasions in relation to healing. ‘None of us have the power to say, ‘Let bye gones be bye-gones and hey presto they become bye-gones. Our common experience is just the opposite, that, the past far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet is embarrassingly persistent and will return to haunt us unless it has been dealt with adequately. If you don’t own your own story, then your story will own you, and for the rest of your life. Understand your story or it will play havoc with your life for the rest of your life.’
 
Only in recent years are we coming to realize that we don’t bury issues dead, rather we bury them alive and that in doing so we deny a part of ourselves. For so long we operated on the principle that what we don’t know can’t hurt us whereas now we are being forced to acknowledge that it is precisely what we don’t talk about that can affect us the most. In other words it is our past that continues to influence our present and in all sorts of ways. So we end up taking pills for depression but never ask the question what am I depressing. We might be irritable and difficult to live with but never look at what I need to forgive myself for. We may go to a doctor to have our symptoms cured while failing to look at the underlying cause of what is creating the problem in the first place.
 
A man once told me that all his life he had been burdened by a feeling of being ugly and that it had really held him back in his ability to relate to others. To anyone seeing him he looked quite normal but to himself he was ugly. His very first memory when little more than a toddler was of his mother asking his elder sisters to get messages from the shop and to take him for the walk. They kicked up a fuss and one of them said, ‘If anyone sees us with that ugly little yoke they will laugh us silly.’ It was just a throwaway remark by a sister who was in a strop but for him it was a poisoned arrow that pierced his heart and continued to release its venom for the rest of his life. How many of us carry deep wounds from careless and insensitive remarks made by significant people in our childhoods that still affect how we see ourselves as adults in the world.
 
Everyone has a story and every story is sacred and deserves to be heard and treated with the utmost respect. The first time we open up our story to another it takes a lot of courage because we might just be admitting something to ourselves for the very first time. After doing that we feel a lot lighter and soon it becomes easier to share it with others in a manner that could be helpful for them.
 
 

 
Who gets up our nose?
 
The carving shown is one made during Covid lockdown. At first sight it seems like someone with a dirty grin picking his nose but it was made more with a question in mind, ‘who is it that gets up our nose? There will always be people in our families and communities who we will find ourselves reacting to. These are those who for some reason push our buttons and we find ourselves uncomfortable in their presence, blaming them for how we feel or just having nothing to do with them altogether. If instead of acting so childish we could only stop and see that this person is just a huge mirror showing me something in myself that I least want to see but most need to know. Instead of ranting on and on about that so and so and how they behave if I could just stop the finger pointing and ask the basic question; what is it in me that is causing me to react to that person? In other words what is it that is going on in me that is causing my upset. Perhaps they remind me of someone else in my earlier life who was angry manipulative or controlling. Someone who put me down may be long dead but alive and well in someone else. So lets be a little more mature, nobody ever upsets me and nobody ever has. I upset myself by how I choose to react and that’s what I need to take responsibility for. Blaming gets me nowhere while taking responsibility for how I am feeling and reacting is what puts me on the path of Christian discipleship.
Mon 1st July
The Burning Bush
A useful image for how we might deal with intense emotions is to be found in the Book of Exodus where God appears to Moses in the form of a burning bush. Moses is told ‘to take off his shoes that he is standing on holy ground’. Then he notices that while the bush is burning it is not being consumed by the flames. This is a brilliant insight as to how we experience what we perceive to be the destructive power of our most intense emotions. We feel and we fear that we will be consumed, that we will be burned up and not survive. In fact they may be so ‘hot’ that we may be convinced that we could not possibly come through this experience unscathed. Yet by some miracle we do, and like Moses with a much clearer sense of our mission in life. In effect we become enlightened and have grown in awareness as a result of the experience.
 

 


Religious or Spiritual?
 
This is one of the most often heard statements of our age that, ‘I’m not religious, I don’t go to church, but I am spiritual’. The latter part about being spiritual is quite nebulous and can range from having a deep awareness of God in my life and being committed to a spiritual discipline, to having given up on church but still holding on to vestiges of former beliefs. Any claim to being spiritual that is isolationist and doesn’t carry a good degree of interconnectedness and belonging has to be considered suspect. Spirituality and relatedness are like the two sides of the one coin and so to believe that one can maintain a spiritual life while living in splendid isolation is simply not possible. To paraphrase the Book of Genesis, ‘It is not good for man/woman to be alone; we need helpmates for our journey. It is worth noting how in that account of Creation God saw all that He had made and saw that ‘it was good’. The only thing He declared that was not good, was ‘for man to be alone’.
 
Religion and Isolation
 
Our traditional religious practice while it revolved around church attendance was also quite isolationist. Churches were designed in a manner where the minimum of social interaction was possible, with seats in rows and everyone looking towards the Altar. Christ was far more recognized in the tabernacle on the altar than in the tabernacle of the heart. Talking was frowned on, and no one could turn sideways for too long without straining their necks. The church spire was seen to point to God up there rather than to the transcendent God both within and without. Religious vocabulary used expressions like ‘Him up there’, ‘saving my soul’ and ‘fulfilling my obligations’. In many homes religion was seen to be so divisive that like politics it was not to be talked about. In effect religion was understood to be a private matter where the essential link between communion, coming together and community was scarcely understood.
 
Religion V Spirituality
 
Christ warned his followers about the danger of ‘honoring him with their lips while their hearts were far from him’. Here he was obviously defining religion as a matter of the heart, and not just of external observance. It is an unfortunate fact that so much of our Catholicism in the past was defined much more in terms of external observance than interior disposition. Like the religion of the Scribes and Pharisees in New Testament times our religion became identified with adherence to rules and regulations and at its most basic level a catholic was classed as someone who went to Mass on Sundays. Within that context there was an abundance of sincerity, piety and devotion, but coinciding with an absence of spiritual awareness. The God of Fear had superseded the God of unconditional love, and so many good people lived and died with guilt, and a deep sense of unworthiness where no matter what they did, it was never good enough.
 
Catholic Guilt
 
Talking to an elderly parishioner one day he told me of how he was preparing for his final journey. He was a kind loving man who had lived a good life and had never caused hurt nor harm to anyone. He spoke of how he was looking forward to meeting his parents and all his old friends on the other side and anticipated a joyful reunion. Then he paused and with sadness said, ‘I guess that could still be a long way off, I will first have to get through the ‘bit’ in between. Obviously he was thinking of Purgatory, after a lifetime of being indoctrinated with the belief that while God is merciful and does forgive our sins, there is a remnant of guilt that still exists that only a time in Purgatory can resolve. In effect it was a belief that God forgives but He still remembers. His eyes lit up with the news that when we remember and confess our sins, God forgets. It was this bit of good news that allowed him to find peace, to walk with a pep in his step and only a few months later to die with a smile on his face.
 
When we remember God forgets
 
Here is a truth that is worth reflecting on – ‘when we forget God remembers but when we remember God forgets.’ From the Bible we have the divine reassurance that God is All Merciful and when we confess our sins he casts them to the bottom of the sea. In effect He forgets. This is the eternal nature of God that doesn’t change, yet our experience shows us that we suffer as a consequence of our actions and bad choices. This feels as if God is punishing us for our wrongdoing. However, could the deeper truth be that we are punished by our sins rather than for them? Drawing on many texts from the Scriptures especially the Gospel of St John, we can glean that only that which is held in darkness is subject to judgment, while that which is exposed to the light is beyond judgment. In other words, to live in a state of denial, where we fail to acknowledge our dark side, and instead project it onto others, is in effect to experience the dark side of the God who paradoxically remains all light.
 
Last Judgment
 
The American writer Mark Twain said one time that it wasn’t the passages of the Bible that he couldn’t understand that he found most difficult but the ones that he could clearly understand. I can think of hardly any passage in the Scriptures that is more challenging than that one today concerning the Last Judgment. It could be phrased as a simple question: Who will stand firm at the Last Judgment? The answer it spells out so clearly is the one who lovingly stands by those in need.
 
From the early Kingdom of Spain comes a story that is very similar to that of the Gospel message. One day King Richard was out hunting. When deep in the forest he was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm and found himself soaked to the bone, alone and hopelessly lost. It was evening and as he tried to find his way back to the royal palace he wasn’t able. As the night came on it became cold and he was out in the open. Tormented with hunger he wandered endlessly around the forest. Wet and exhausted he came at last in the early morning to a lonely farmhouse. He knocked on the door and knocked several times but no one answered. In despair he tried the door that was not fastened and creaked open. The peasant farmer leapt from his kitchen table and shouted ‘You scroundrel, you’re trying to steal something here. See that you get out immediately or I will set the dogs on you.
 
The King begged and pleaded but the peasant only got more angry. Finally he struck the king in the face and slammed the door after him. Some people were passing by and with their help the king managed to get back home. Days later the king invited the peasant to visit the Palace. The peasant thought, why am I being called to see the king, I have done nothing to him and I don’t even know him.
 
He had to enter the great hall all by himself and stand before the assembled princes of the kingdom. The king was on his throne with his royal robes with scepter in hand and crown on his head. For a long time he gazed at the trembling peasant in silence and then asked; ‘do you know me’? Suddenly the penny dropped for the peasant and he was so struck by those words that he just collapsed and died.
 
All the great religions of the world have a similar version of the last judgment and they all say that we will each hear those words….. I was hungry……. I was sick………I was a stranger ……….I was naked.
 
Our challenge is to so live that Christ will not have to say to any of us, You failed to recognize me in the least of your brothers and sisters, away with you into everlasting fire. What you failed to do to your brothers and sisters you failed to do to me.
 
Ideology or Humanness
 
In general humanity divides into two categories: Those who place ideology above humanness and those who place humanness above ideology. Unfortunately traditional Catholicism could be classed as an ideology, since it quite disrespected the reality of our humanness. As a religion that was based on the Incarnation, God becoming human, this was a total contradiction where one would have expected to be taught that to become more human was to become more like God. Yet the reality was that our bodies were to beaten into submission, our sexuality was to be feared, our emotions were suspect, our personal or ancestral story was given little importance and relationships were viewed with suspicion. No wonder Patrick Kavanagh the Monaghan poet called the Catholicism of his time, and to a fair extent what has been ours, ‘an insult to the Incarnation’. At the root of the widespread rejection of Catholicism of our time must surely lie this anti-human bias. This is such an unfortunate accretion that it distorts the Good News of God embracing us in the fullness of our humanity, and being comfortable to live in the messiness of being human.

 

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