Time To Pull The Strands Of Life Together
She is 6 years old and suffers easily. When she sees Jafar attack Jasmine on the movie screen, she hugs her Momma close. When she dreams that Grandma, who is sick, has died, she cries out in the night. When her Dad reaches out his car window and gives some Christmas money to a panhandler, she asks, “Is that man OK? He looks sick.” I explain to her what it means to be down on one’s luck, to have lost one’s job, one’s family, even perhaps one’s reason for living. She ponders this, her face crooked with consternation, sadness and pain. She is 6 years old. Empathy comes naturally to her.
She is 6 years old, and Christmas is upon her. She loves the toys but she’s a thinker, too. “Who was Jesus?” she asks. “Why did he die?” I, her father, am charged with bringing wisdom to her. To me this charge means that I must help her weave meaning by noticing the many strands of her life and showing her how they fit together.
“Who was Jesus? Why did he die?” I am not a doctrinal person. Simply to tell my daughter that Jesus died for her sins does little for me. I need to weave something else for her, something about suffering. Yes, something about suffering, because right now, as this Christmas Day comes, with her Grandma quite sick, suffering has become her companion.
So I think of what sin is to me - it is suffering. I think of who Jesus is to me. He is a symbol of God and faith. I say to my daughter, “Christmas is a time to remember that if you believe in God you can understand suffering. If you don’t believe in God, you can never understand it.”
“If you believe in God, will suffering stop?” she asks. “No,” I answer. And I try to explain that suffering will always exist, but people of faith know and trust themselves as integral parts of a divine totality of energy - for these people, suffering can have meaning. Faith in Jesus, I try to explain, is an act of giving up control over what cannot be controlled, surrendering not one’s unique individuality but one’s general and unfulfillable desire for control over the world.
Have faith, I tell her, that Aladdin and Jasmine live a destiny uncontrollable by you and me. Have faith that Grandma lives a destiny uncontrollable by us. She is in God’s hands. Have faith that the homeless man is, too. We’ll do what we can to help, but also we’ll believe in a divine reality over which our own individual powers have little control.
My daughter, of course, loses me somewhere in the middle of all this. But the strands of wisdom came together somewhere. “Maybe I should pray for Grandma,” she says.
I embrace her. Yes, do that. I say to her, in kid’s words, try asking not for God to cure Grandma but for God to help Grandma find her way. This interests Gabrielle. Behind her eyes I can see divine mind thinking. “Find her way to where, Daddy?”
“I don’t know,” I shrug. “But I trust God knows.”
And so my little daughter prays for her sick Grandma to find her way. Through her prayers her imagination fills with images of new worlds for Grandma, and when those worlds pale, her mind’s eye spies beautiful angels to lead her along.
Gabrielle makes joy of her suffering this Christmas. Praying for a cure for Grandma hasn’t led her to much joy. It has led her to more and more false illusions that she can control Grandma’s sickness. When she sees how clearly she cannot, she becomes disappointed. But praying for Grandma to find her way opens up new possibilities. In Gabrielle’s heart, so filled with empathy, so good at suffering for Jasmine and the homeless and Grandma, new possibilities are divine breath.
In helping her weave the strands of her life together, I see how I must let go of control and desire. I see how much more fully I must have faith in the universe, my community, myself.
When I hear that Jesus died for my sins, when I hear that I should pray to Jesus, I do not take literally what the words say, I take them another way, hearing that it is possible for me to have a faith so strong suffering will cease. It is possible for me to develop a language, a focus of my energy, so powerful, that I can always be in connection to the divine, all-seeing Energy of which I am an integral part.
Today and tomorrow are holy days set aside for us by history and society that we may bring the strands of our lives together. Do this hard, wise work this weekend. And then, just for a time, sit back and let it all go.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Gurian The Spokesman-Review