a reminder to take care of you
The older I get, the more the old saying of Jesus "Physician, heal thyself" makes sense. I've spent more than two decades doing a lot of caring. But the more attend to myself, the more sadness I find, the more anxiety I feel, the more trauma I notice. The more I realize that I desperately need to take time to slow down, to feel, to notice the places of pain and, more importantly, the places of sacred presence, remembering that Jesus dwells amidst it all, loving each and every weary and wounded part.
Part of growing up is becoming aware, and at least a part of this is choosing to feel your own pain and the pain of the world around you. Of course, in typical either-or ways, some choose to bury their heads in the sand while others choose complete immersion in the pain. It has always interested me that Jesus chose neither extreme. How many people in pain did Jesus walk by during his earthly sojourn? Many. How many could he have healed with a better time-and-ministry management strategy? Many. But neither did he refuse to engage the pain - he absorbed the sin of the whole world into his own body!
Somehow, we engage - sometimes at great cost - but we might also take the counsel of St. Teresa - to measure our efforts so as to not exhaust ourselves.
I weighed this over the past weeks as I grieved the untimely death of my father-in-law, just months after my mother-in-law. I felt a confusing array of emotions in me - sadness, anger, relief. We also celebrated my birthday, our 25th anniversary, and my daughter's high school graduation with a hastily planned and wildly providential trip to Hawaii, made possible because my father-in-law's passing caused us to cancel a long-planned trip and opened up substantially cheaper rates for flights to Hawaii. How could I hold joy, sadness, gratitude, anger, joy, relief, and confusion in this moment?
But then, the pain on the world doesn't pause when you take a vacation. Each day, our family would process what seems to be a daily torrent of sad, confusing, enraging, and demoralizing stories. My daughters - 18 and almost 17 - are of a generation of information deluge. I don't know how they can possibly process everything they take in. I want them to choose to hold the particularly painful stories with some kind of sanctity. And I know they wrestle with the obvious tensions. They feel, in their own young bodies, the weight of Christian school classmates who've told fellow students of color to "go home." Like me, they struggle with the daily moral contradictions of political leadership. I'm a student of narcissism and trauma and a counselor to many - hell, I've got a book coming out on narcissism -and I barely feel capable of psychological and spiritual resilience myself, at times, as I witness this daily decomposition of human dignity and character. Somehow, each of us must assess our own threshold of trauma tolerance, and do the careful work of engaging, but also appropriately disengaging (without dissociating).
Physician, heal thyself. In other words, take care of you. Guard your heart. Even Jesus stepped away from the crowds for silence, for intimate conversations with friends, for a meal. Rest. Eat. Exercise. Vacation. Be silent in prayer. Breathe. Listen.
At least a part of what it means to be "in Christ," I suspect, is to recognize you're in Christ, not Christ himself, not the savior of the world. Don't hesitate to enter the painful world and speak truth. But don't be fooled into thinking your participation is the hinge upon which everything swings. The older I get, the more I realize that there was pain before me, that there is pain today, and that pain will outlive me. All of creation groans, longing for redemption. I do want to be present to it, but I also do realize that I'm limited. If I've learned anything from studying narcissism, abuse, and trauma, it's this - if our wounds go unhealed, we will distribute our woundedness to others. Pain that isn't healed is hurled in every direction.
Take good care, these days. Invest deeply and passionately, and rest wholeheartedly. Pay attention, not just to what's on the news, but to what you need. And always, rest deeply as the beloved one, held in unfathomable love forever.
Peace.