Weekly Soul: Week #48 - Unleashing Love (Craigie)
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie:
-48-
Love is inside us, just waiting to be unleashed. The
darkness is an invitation to light, calling forth the spirit in all of us. Every
problem implies a question: Are you ready to embody what you say you believe? Can
you reach within yourself for enough clarity, strength, forgiveness, serenity,
love, patience and faith to turn this around? That’s the spiritual meaning of
every situation; not what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us
and who we decide to become because of what happens to us.
Marianne Williamson
I have a remarkable colleague, Julie M
Bosch, Ph.D., ARNP, who was deployed twice to Afghanistan as a Lt Col nurse
practitioner. Her role was both clinical and educational, caring for casualties
of war and teaching nursing skills to Afghan staff. She came to realize that
her teaching was less about clinical procedures and more about modeling and
affirming human presence and compassionate care. “I learned,” she said, “that
the language of nursing care and compassion is universal. I didn't need an
interpreter most days as I could tell the level of pain by looking at my
patients' faces. I learned it came down to the basics: sitting down, listening,
caring, being present.”
Julie’s commitment to present and
compassionate care would be put to the test. Her first deployment took her
frequently “outside the wire,” leaving the relative safety of the base to
travel to outlying hospitals in a Humvee as part of a convoy. She carried
loaded sidearms at all times—incongruous and awkward for a nurse—in the
ultimate contingency of protecting her patients as mandated by the Geneva
Convention.
Julie arrived at a hospital one day to
find several patients who had just been admitted. She could sense disdain and
revulsion on the part of the Afghan nurses, who were refusing to take care of
them. They were, she was told, Taliban fighters who had been seriously wounded
when bombs they had been setting for her convoy had exploded prematurely.
She faced a stark choice. What do you do
when your professional work challenges you to care for someone who has been
trying to kill you? She tells the story:
The Afghan nurses didn’t want to take care
of them. Apparently, these guys were the enemy. I didn’t pretend to understand
the politics of it all. To me, they were patients. They wore hospital gowns. They
had long unruly beards and wild black hair that stuck out all over their heads.
They were not large men, not the monstrous visions I had in my head. They
looked poor and a little lost and scared. They had intravenous lines in their
arms, urinary catheters attached to their bodies that drained yellow urine, their
blood was red, they had grievous injuries from their wounds—they were wounded
humans. They weren't my enemy. They were my patients.
It was what I saw in their eyes that gave
me pause. I saw fear. I saw darkness. It was also suspicion and—hate. I still
just saw a patient. I just saw a human. I had been a nurse for nearly 30 years.
Being a nurse was my identity. It defined me in this scary place. If I turned
away or refused to take care of them, I would have been lost. I would have lost
my identity, my sense of my own self. I would never have been able to find my
way home, in every sense of the word. Everything I needed to know I saw in
their eyes. The rest was easy.
Do not give difficult people the power to
keep you from being who you are. The choice that Julie faced was clear. She
could follow a path of retribution by keeping her distance and ignoring the
suffering of these men who had had such heinous intentions toward her. Or she
could be faithful to her calling as a nurse. Her decision was that these men
were not going to have the power to keep her from honoring her fundamental and overarching
commitment to care for suffering.
Julie’s story frames the idea of
“difficult people” about as starkly as you can imagine, but the lesson is
played out in lesser ways every day. Can you respond to unfair criticism
without being punitive? Can you respond to sarcasm without becoming sarcastic
yourself? Can you resist the temptation to jump wholeheartedly with your
friends into a chorus of snide and self-righteous remarks about another person
whose behavior falls somewhere between annoying and reprehensible? Can you,
indeed, reach within yourself to find and draw upon the goodness and integrity
of who you really are?
The idea of holding true to your own
values and identity touches on both the inner and outer work of civility. The
inner work means recognizing the overarching values that make you who you are. The
outer work means honoring those values in relating to people whom you find
difficult. You can be direct and forthright with both your perspectives and
your emotions. But civility means living in ways that hold the possibility of
bringing a little more compassion and community into the world that so
desperately needs both.
Reflection
- Think more about the inner and
outer work of civility as remaining faithful and steadfast to the
overarching reality of who you are. Look at this from two angles. When has
there been a time when you have allowed yourself to be drawn in to
reacting to a difficult person in ways that don’t honor the values that
are important to you? How did this feel? When has there been a time when
you have been steadfast in being the person you want to be, even when the
temptation or social pressure was pulling you in a different direction? How
did that feel?
- I mention the temptation of
joining with your friends in a “chorus of snide and self-righteous
remarks” about other people. Any of us who are less pure than Mother
Teresa probably do joke about other people from time to time (as I imagine
they do about us). But it’s a slippery slope. It is easy to get caught up
in joining with like-minded friends in getting some laughs by vilifying
somebody else. Where is the line drawn, where good-natured ribbing becomes
toxic? Where is the line drawn where earnest criticism of somebody else
becomes personally demeaning and vindictive? Are you able to recognize
when you are in danger of crossing these lines?
- Create a mantra for your own
use for times when you are challenged to stay faithful to your own values
in the face of mistreatment from people you find difficult. Six or seven
words. “When I am faced with people whose behavior I find difficult, I
will not give them the power to make me respond in ways that dishonor who
I am. Instead, I will (mantra)”
- In the week to come, cultivate
civility by noticing how you are able to hold fast to values that are
important to you in the face of difficult people.
Author
Marianne Williamson (b. 1952) is an American
writer and social activist. She has had countless names applied to her life and
work, some with affection and some—especially as she has been publicly engaged
in the political world—with derision. Apparently, she particularly chafes at
the term, New Age guru, and her preference is to be called simply an author.
Williamson’s early adult years were marked
by a series of troubles with relationships, substances, and mental health
issues. In the mid-1970s, she happened upon A Course in Miracles, a
non-religious, nonsectarian program of spiritual life and growth centered
around universal human themes of love and forgiveness. After some initial
reservations, she began studying and then speaking about the Course with great
enthusiasm, and its tenets have informed her life and service since that time.
While maintaining her own work of writing
and speaking, Williamson has been active in a number of arenas of community
development. She has chartered programs supporting people affected by HIV/AIDS,
promoting national and international peace initiatives, and providing
leadership training for women in politics. Williamson, herself, ran
unsuccessfully as an independent for Congress in California in 1994 and for
president in the 2020 cycle. She participated in the first two Democratic
presidential debates, giving voice to some positions that had been little
addressed in her party, such as moving the health care debate toward the social
and environmental conditions that make people sick, resolving college debt,
exploring reparations for the legacy of racial injustice, and frankly drawing
upon the force of love in political discourse.
Williamson is the author of over a dozen books, many of them best-sellers, including The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), from which the quotation comes.
Book Description:
Keywords:
meditation; reflection; inspiration; miracles; aliveness; purpose; laughter; joy; presence; mindfulness; activism; acceptance; gratitude; forgiveness; creativity; civility; hope; affirmation; wholeness; well-being; mental health; personal growth; transformation; inner peace; personal reflection; joy; joyful living; inspirational quotes; inspirational commentary
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