The Meaning of Life?

photo by Anna Reavis

 

"We are not made to love immortal things.  Only what is irreplaceable, unique, and mortal can touch our deepest human sensitivities and be a source of hope and consolation."  Henri Nouwen

 

Reading authors like Henri Nouwen and Frederick Buechner reassure me because they remind me that I am not alone in my questioning, not alone in my doubt.  It has always been hard for me to realize how many thoughtful people of deep faith struggle with the same non-belief I often feel.  We seem to live in a climate of such thoughtless surety.  I recently re-read Turning My Mourning Into Dancing by Nouwen and finished A Room Called Remember by Buechner. This post is going to be some of my thoughts from the Nouwen book.

 

One of the most important issues most of us struggle with is the search for meaning in our lives.  At our low moments I expect a lot of us slide into some form of existential angst where we feel overwhelmed by the absurdity of our existence.  Our society has become so insular, so alienating; we are so closed in on ourselves.  The mindset that leads to such insularity is breaking us.  What if our goal, both personally and as a society, became as Nouwen hopes “[to] live in a world without zealously defended borders”?    Nouwen, along with many others, asserts that love is the meaning of life, that loving each other should be our purpose, that we should strive to be a vessel to carry love to others, to let love flow through us without attempting to hoard and clutch it for ourselves.  To make as our goal learning to love one another without suspicion, insecurity, or manipulation.  Love often means accepting, without impatience or judgment, what we have no ability to understand.  We must allow others to be just that:  other.

How difficult it is, though, to love others purely and truly when we aren’t able to love ourselves, when our own needs clamor for attention at every passing moment.  We need justification, praise, validation, attention, and on and on.  Seems like it should be easy to love and forgive yourself, but I think it is one of the hardest processes we struggle with every day. We try to earn love, forgiveness, salvation…from ourselves and from others.  We can’t accept that these are gifts born not of striving, born simply of grace.  We to try craft our own image from the praise and validation we get from others.  We use people to meet our own needs.  How hard it seems to be to see everyone as worthy of love, patience, and acceptance.  The homed and the homeless, the criminal and the judge, the addict and the priest, are people, flawed and broken, just like I am.  We seem to have no real ability to understand another’s pain and often no real ability to understand or accept our own.  Sometimes helping others becomes a method for manipulation and a way to avoid dealing with our own problems.  We make people into projects, objects for improvement, ignoring or bulldozing their personhood and their pain.  Loneliness and neediness create demand and disappointment and break, rather than heal.  What if we learned to love and accept without attempting to change or influence?  To listen without predicting or assuming.  What if we become conduits for love to pass through, rather than receptacles for its landing?

Our openness to each moment as it happens is probably the most important indicator of our own happiness.  I would like to learn to ignore the compartmentalization and dictates of time and society and learn truly just to be in every moment, even if I am doing no more than sitting on the porch reflecting. I need to learn to be alone, open, honest, vulnerable and to listen for the voice of God, even if it comes back to me as the voice of my one true self.  It will be the voice that tells me to accept, love, and forgive myself without impediment, and to extend to others the same gift.



Letting Go Henri Nouwen Style

“It is our great illusion that life is a property to be owned or an object to be grasped, that people can be managed or manipulated.”  Henri Nouwen

I’m a control freak.  I recognize this about myself.  Everything in its place; everything planned; everything on time, or I’m irritated.  I was well into adulthood before I realized other people weren’t usually like me.  I’m much more relaxed now than I used to be, but I still function better in an organized space, following a routine.  The problem with being a control freak is that you can’t control the people around you, the people you love.

In part two of Henri Nouwen’s Turn My Mourning Into Dancing, he addresses the issue of learning to let go and of realizing how much happier your life will be if you learn to relinquish control.  The metaphorical theme he employs in this part is of trapeze artists, noting “Before they can be caught they must let go.”  Personally, I cannot imagine letting go of a swing in mid-air and trusting someone else to time the catch correctly enough to save me from a fall.  Maybe that’s a good metaphor for why I am single, because Nouwen goes on to quote CS Lewis’s observation, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”  And I suck at being vulnerable.  It’s not in my nature.  Vulnerability implies giving over control, and well, we’ve already determined I’m a control freak.  

Nouwen asserts that life, love, the journey, all of it, is not about our ability to choreograph every step, but about our willingness to let it drag us along, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes laughing and reveling, to ends and destinations we can’t foresee.  When we try to assert our will over our lives, we are also trying to assert our will over those around us, with no regard for what they might want or need.  The truth is that we are all self-centered; we all want what we want.  The question is can we let go enough to love what we get and let go of what we think we want?  It’s so hard not to be afraid of the unknown.  It’s so hard not to try to control and organize everything, but we’ll never find out what waits for us if we don’t learn to let go of the known and accept the unknown.  Live outside your comfort zone; try something new. Be afraid; it's ok. You'll be amazed what your life can become.

"Our Glory Is Hidden In Our Pain"

 

 

 

"..the gift of life has revealed itself in the midst of all the losses." Henri Nouwen

 

 

I’m going to do something a little different with the slim volume I’m reading called Turn My Mourning Into Dancing by Henri Nouwen.  I’m going to write about each section of the book because to do otherwise would be unmanageable.  The book reveals too many truths and inspires too many thoughts to do less.  

The first section of the book addresses how we deal with our own suffering.  There are so many different kinds of brokenness and loss in our lives.  We all struggle with letting the same situations and the same people break our hearts over and over again.  The worst pain doesn’t come at the time of wounding; it comes at the time of scarring.  We have all been scarred; we are all wounded.

Nouwen teaches that the way out of suffering is “in and through,” that we must accept suffering and move through it instead of fleeing from it.  He says that only those who can fully face, confront, and accept their pain can heal and grow.  Attempting to avoid and forget pain only temporarily masks it.  Embracing your whole life, including your pain, and finding peace in spite of it keeps you whole.  It sounds facile and cliched to say that it’s not about what happens to you but how you handle it, but it really is true.   And this is a truth we have to learn and re-learn every day.  It is perhaps the most difficult, yet most important of all truths of who we are, who we become, and how we affect the world around us.

Often, we need only to step outside of ourselves and our lives to forget in order to remember:   to forget the overwhelming mess we live in and to remember the overwhelming beauty that we live among.  Sometimes, just doing one little thing:  a walk, a ride, a movie, dinner with a friend will re-center our entire lives for that one moment in time.  And sometimes, that’s the best we can hope for -- one calm moment.  Because all life is really about is choosing to keep breathing in gratitude and breathing out compassion.  When we are wrapped up in our own pain, we skip right over the pain of others.  When circumstances around us seem to be spiralling out of control, we feel helpless and insignificant, and we rant and rave just to be heard, to exert some kind of control and influence.  But the voice that heals is the quiet voice of peace.