Meta-Happy

Acceptance, Healing, Joy, Life, Trials 0

There are moments when I feel, suddenly, lucky and thankful and shocked at how happy I am. I have called this the hardest season in my adult life, which it is, and it is not what I had planned in the least, but it is also a secretly beautiful, special season at the same time. It’s hard, because some relationships still feel broken, and because we have a lot less money, and because I am afraid, sometimes, about the future, but at the same time, I surprise myself with how okay it is and how okay I am with not knowing exactly what will come next.

— Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines, p. 206

Just Past the Curse

Beauty, Faith, God, Healing, Trials, Waiting 0

When you can invest yourself deeply and unremittingly in the life that surrounds you instead of declaring yourself out of the game once and for all, because what’s happened to you is too bad, too deep, too ugly for anyone to expect you to move on from, that’s that good, rich place. That’s the place where the things that looked for all intents and purposes like curses start to stand up and shimmer and dance, and you realize with a gasp that they may have been blessings all along. Or maybe not. Maybe they were curses, in fact, but the force of your belief and your hope and your desperate love for life as it is actually unfolding, has brought a blessing from a curse, like water from a stone, like life from a tomb, like the actual story of God over and over.

I would never try to tell you that every bad thing is really a good thing, just waiting to be gazed at with pretty new eyes, just waiting to be shined up and — ta da! — discovered as fantastic. But what I know is that for me, and for my friend Jon, and for a lot of the people I love, we’re discovering that lots of times, not every time, maybe, but more often than not, there is something just past the heartbreak, just past the curse, just past the despair, and that thing is beautiful. You don’t want it to be beautiful, at first. You want to stay in the pain and the blackness because it feels familiar, and because you’re not done feeling victimized and smashed up. But one day you’ll wake up surprised and humbled, staring at something you thought for sure was a curse and has revealed itself to be a blessing — a beautiful, delicate blessing.

— Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines, p. 178-179

Cycles

Gratitude, Healing, Life, Trials 0

Most of us figure out by a certain age — some of us later than others — that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don’t have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the Complaints Department. But if you’ve been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.

— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 50

Imagination

God, Growth, Healing 0

And imagination is from God. It is part of the way we understand the world. I think it’s okay to imagine God and grace the best you can. Some of the stuff we imagine engages and connects and calls for the very best in us to come out. Other imaginings disengage us, and shut us down. My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.

Imagining God can be so different from wishful thinking, if your spiritual experiences change your behavior over time. Have you become more generous, which is the ultimate healing? Or more patient, which is a close second? Did your world become bigger and juicier and more tender? Have you become ever so slightly kinder to yourself? This is how you tell.

— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 21

Prayer

Healing, Prayer 0

Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.

— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow, p. 5-6

What’s Wrong With Verbal Abuse

Growth, Healing, Relationships 0

No matter how overt or covert the abuser is, all abusers do one thing universally. That one thing is this: abusers define their partners as if they were living within them and knew their inner world: what they are, their motives, thoughts, feelings, and so forth.

Abusers behave as though they were their partner, child, friend, or acquaintance. That is, abusers act as if they know what another person is, thinks, needs, feels, wants, and is doing, did, and should do.

In summary, when someone defines you in any way, tells you what you are (“too sensitive,” “stupid,” “hopeless.”), or actually tells you your motives (for example, “You’re trying to start a fight,” “You want to win,” “You want to have the last word”), he or she is behaving as if he or she were you, or were God!

In normal discourse among people, if you criticize someone, you are usually quick to apologize when you realize that you have no right (unless invited) to critique the other.

If verbal abuse has slammed into your consciousness with assaults that attempt to erase your own awareness of who you are and how you perceive yourself and even your existence, then verbal abuse may brainwash you into believing that you actually are a person who is too sensitive.

This is what is wrong with verbal abuse and why I support your victory over it.

— Patricia Evans, Victory Over Verbal Abuse, p. 36

Bathed in Light

God, Healing, Prayer 0

In prayer, I see the suffering bathed in light. In God, there is no darkness. I see God’s light permeate them, soak into them, guide their feet. I want to tell God what to do: “Look, Pal, this is a catastrophe. You have got to shape up.” But it wouldn’t work. So I pray for people who are hurting, that they be filled with air and light. Air and light heal; they somehow get into those dark, musty places, like spiritual antibiotics.

— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 16

Two Kinds of Forgiveness

Forgiveness, Healing 0

Poor September! How much easier, to be hard and bright and heartless. Instead, a very adult thing was happening in that green, new heart. For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them. You, being sharp and clever, will have noticed that I used “practice.” Forgiveness always takes practice to get right, and September was very new at it. She had none of the first sort in her.

— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, p. 200