Living Deeply: Trial and Triumph

Since about my thirtieth year, and more and more clearly as the years go by, and despite intervals of sterility caused by suffering, bad luck, drunkenness, over-eating, sluggishness of soul, lassitude of heart: suddenly, in the midst of anguish or distress, it is there: gratitude. The response to my often unconscious but tireless interior allocution---continued probably during sleep also; the response which is not inspiration or idea or anything else but this, wholly, simply, uniquely: gratitude. . . .

Last year, I found myself stopping halfway down the stairs, one foot on one step, the other on the next. This month, I found myself, and above all was found by joy, in the act of taking off my spectacles. The time it takes for the hand to be lowered, with the spectacle in the finer: and that was when the grace of gratitude welled up within me, interflowing with the response I was seeking . . .

My own humble experience is not that of ecstasy. I do not levitate, I am not transported, I am not somewhere else, nor outside myself, nor with God---nothing of that. Just a poor brute suddenly stopping halfway down the stairs, or slowly taking off his glasses. But those two or three minutes in the life of a man, are the reason why I shall not have lived in vain.

One of the troubles with being a man who spends most of his life writing books is that I don't have many adventures. Other people go off into their workplace. They come back and have stories to tell about the people they have seen and the things they have done. The adventures I have are mainly the ones that I have inside my head, except every once in a while. I am going to tell you about one small adventure I had last summer that meant a lot to me and has left its mark.

My wife and I went to Texas for the first time. I spoke at a number of different places, one of which is a marvelous retreat center called Laity Lodge in Kerrville, Texas. If you have never been there, give it a try. It is a magic place, located in the Frio River Valley. To get to it, you have to drive in the river for about a mile and a half, actually in the water with it sloshing around your hub caps. It is magic also in terms of the magic that is generated by the people there. A lot of them have been coming back for a long time. I found that within a very short time of our arrival -- we were there for about a week -- I felt extraordinarily safe in the way you would normally think of feeling safe only in the bosom of your own family; safe to be whoever I was, to say whatever came into my mind, not worried about making a good show or anything like that.

I was wondering what I would talk to them about. They said, "Wing it." I thought, "I don't mind doing that because I feel so comfortable here." I said, "How would you like me to wing it? Wing it about what?"

They said, "How about telling your own story?" I volunteered to do that and did. In place of telling them about my childhood, I read them a small section from a recent book of mine, actually written for children, though published as a regular adult book, called The Wizard's Tide. I described an episode of my childhood which I said could stand for the shadow side of it and what made it tough.

I'll quickly tell you about that episode. It took place in the 1930's during the Depression when there wasn't much money; an awful lot of drinking was going on in the world and in my family; an unsettled and unsettling time even for a child of ten, which I was.

The episode I described concerned a time when my father had come back from somewhere. He had obviously had too much to drink. My mother did not want him to take the car. She got the keys from him somehow and gave them to me and said, "Don't let you father have these." I had already gone to bed. I took the car keys and I had them in my fist under the pillow. My father came and somehow knew I had the keys and said, "Give them to me. I have got to have them. I have got to go some place."

I didn't know what to say, what to be or how to react. I was frightened, sad and all the rest of it. I lay there and listened to him, pleading really, "Give me the keys."

I pulled the covers over my head to escape the situation and then finally, went to sleep with his voice in my ears. A sad story which stood for a lot of other sadness of those early years.

When I finished reading it, Howard Butt, who is head of the Butt Foundation which finances Laity Lodge, came up to me and said something for which I was utterly unprepared. He said, "You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it."

That phrase caught me absolutely off guard -- to be a steward of your pain. I didn't hear it as a compliment particularly. It is not as if I had set out to be a steward of my pain, but rather something that happened.

I thought a lot about what the stewardship of pain means; the ways in which we deal with pain. Beside being a steward of it, there are alternatives. The most tempting is to forget it, to hide it, to cover it over, to pretend it never happened, because it is too hard to deal with. It is too unsettling to remember.

I think the world is always asking us to do it that way. Our families are always, in a way, part of the family system and so apt to say, "Don't talk about things that cause pain. You can't trust the world with those secrets. Those are family secrets. Keep them hidden. Keep them hidden from each other. Keep them hidden from yourself. Don't allow yourself to feel them."

My mother lived to be almost 92 and survived very well in this world by, in a way, burying her bad times. Up to almost the end, she remained a very valuable, interesting person, but she paid a price for that because a certain part of her stopped growing in the direction of compassion and wisdom, etc.

Another thing you can do with your pain, of course, is to use it to win sympathy. I guess a sob story is a story you tell hoping that people will sob with you. Sort of an end in itself, a way almost of giving yourself a kind of stature in the eyes of the world as a suffering one.

Another way, I suppose, of dealing with your pain is using it as an excuse

for failure, if you think of yourself as a failure -- "If only I had gotten the breaks; if only those bad things hadn't happened, who knows where I might have been today."

Another great temptation about pain, I think, is to allow yourself to be embittered and trapped by it. The classic example of that is the tragic character of Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's wonderful novel, Great Expectations. She was deserted by her bridegroom on her wedding day. He never showed up. She spent the rest of her days sitting in the room where the great reception was to have been, her wedding cake moldering, her dress long since turned to rags, imprisoned in a sadness that she simply never could escape. All of these are options of dealing with pain.

Stewardship of pain. What does that mean? I have thought a lot about it. I think it means, before anything else, to keep in touch with your pain, to keep in touch with the sad times, with the hard times of your past for many reasons. I think it is often those times when we were most alive, when we were somehow closest to being most vitally human beings.

Keep in touch with it because it is at those moments of pain where you are most open to the pain of other people -- most open to your own deep places. Keep in touch with those sad times because it is then that you are most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed in a way by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God's power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Keeping in touch with your pain, I think, means also to be true to who in your depths you have it in you to be -- depths of pain and also in a way depths of joy, because they both come from the same place.

When I think of stewardship of pain, I think also of that strange, dark, harsh parable Jesus tells of the talents, which doesn't turn out at all the way you would expect. You remember, the master gives the three servants talents. He gives one five talents, another, two, and another, one talent. Off they go. He comes back on the day of reckoning and asks the five-talent man what he has done with his money and he says, "Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more." The Master says, "Well done, good and faithful servant...enter into the joy of your master." The two-talent man has made another two.

The one-talent man, you remember, says, "I was afraid and I went and hid my talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours." The Master says, "Wicked and slothful servant! Take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth."

To begin with the negative part of it first, it seems to me that the one-talent man represents what I said before, somebody who buried the richest treasure he had, not just pain, but the most alive part of himself, buried it in the ground. He was never able to become who he might have been. I think the outer darkness the Master casts him into is not to be thought of so much as a punishment, as it is to be thought of as the inevitable consequence of what it means to bury your life. If you bury your life, you don't leave your life. You don't meet other people who are alive. You are alone; you are in the dark.

"From him who hath not, it will taken." Those hard words. That if the life is buried, if the pain is somehow covered over and forgotten, instead of growing, you shrink. You become less; you become diminished.

The positive side of it, of course, is the other ones, the ones who came back with more than they started out with. As the parable says, they traded with their talents. They traded with their lives -- a wonderful phrase. We were made to be life traders, because I have what you need, which is me, and you have what you need, which is you. That is the joy into which the Master invites his servants.

Pain can become a treasure if we treasure it to the point where it can become compassion and healing, not just for ourselves, but also for other people. If you want to see that sort of thing in operation, the treasuring of pain, the using of pain to the healing of yourself and others, someday attend an open meeting of AA or any of the related groups. That is exactly what those people are doing, sharing their hurts, their experiences and their joys.

And remember the cross. It seems to me that the cross of Christ in a way speaks somewhat like this same word, saying that out of that greatest pain endured in love and faithfulness, comes the greatest beauty and our greatest hope. (Source: Sermon, 30 Good Minutes)