Three Words for a Time of Crisis

It is tempting, these days, to ask oneself:

Am I doing enough?

Enough soul searching?

Enough bridge-building?

Enough using my small tool kit of skills, talents, insight…

To — what? — change the world in which I find myself?

Then, there’s the alternative:

I’m powerless.

I should just pull shut the latch and wait for it all to be over.

This week, a wise friend shared the words of another wise friend.  This, of course, is how it always works — when it works.  We pass along the questions that open inner doors.  We repeat the values that have, up to this point, made us more human.

The second of these wise ones, the poet Steve Garnass-Holmes, has penned a beautiful prayer of hope for these times.  He writes:

Give us hope and dissatisfaction.
Give us strength and patience.
Give us humility and courage.

I read this to mean: allow us the steadfastness to hold to what we know to be true and good, even as we grant a space for our moral restlessness.  Not the restlessness of the idle, or the neurotic.

This is the restlessness of our deepest convictions pressing into a world crying out for transformation.

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I want to imagine today the path of renewal.  What does this look like for you?

For someone, it will look like adjusting expectations in the face of a mortal illness.

For another, it will look like finally letting go of an envy that doesn’t allow others the full expression of their gifts.

For a third, it will mean releasing the routines of accommodation that corrode our sense of integrity and, ultimately, of hope.

Each of these paths can as readily apply to personal struggles as to our public life.

— When the patient is mortally sick, the remedy is to rest, resist the gaping isolation that illness creates, and to open the spirit to the larger life beyond immediate suffering.

— When the hand is clenched due to an attitude of scarcity (there’s only so much affirmation to go around), the mending entails discovery: life is ever enriched by the abundance and diversity of our gifts, and always threatened by extinction when monocultures take over.

— When we have allowed our dearest values to grow lax, we must accept the goads that wake us up.

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Give us hope and dissatisfaction.
Give us strength and patience.
Give us humility and courage.

Renewal begins with acknowledging that we need to take the first small steps.  Progress will be slow, sometimes invisible.  Sometimes one step forward, two back.  But our dissatisfaction, and patience, and courage are on hand to help us work our own small part of the transformation.

Namaste.