How we are remembered

How we are remembered

“Not many of us will be remembered for what we have done, though we may have accomplished a lot. As important as we once were, what remains is not what we have built, but who we have inspired. The lives we touched will go on. The minds we opened, the hearts we cherished, the spirits we set free, It is in relationship that our names are remembered. It is in how well we shared our love that will live on in ways unchanging.” Bishop Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Meditation

My Grandparents, Joe and Annie Whaley, whom by the way I am named after, mostly raised me. They nurtured me and cared for me and loved me without conditions. My greatest memory of my grandmother, however, is one single event occurring one of the days I went back to college in another state.

I always go to say goodbye to my grandparent at their nearby home on my way out of town. I only stay a few minutes. This day my grandmother is playing canasta with her sisters. I kiss her goodbye and leave. Then I remember I have forgotten something. I go back to their house and my grandmother is not at the card table. I ask her sisters, “Where is she?” After a pause my Aunt Julia whispers, “She went upstairs to her bedroom to cry. She misses you so much when you are gone.”

I suddenly realize how little time I spend with my grandparents on these infrequent visits home from college. I am usually absorbed with my friends or schoolwork I bring home. I become acutely aware of how much my grandmother loves me. I run up the stairs, hug her one more time, and witness her love embarrassed by her tears. I can still feel today that love my grandmother showed me with her secretly concealed bedroom tears.

Are there tears of love by which we will be remembered?

It is possible that we may be most remembered like my grandmother for just one small act of love?

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Rohr: 3 Boxes

Richard Rohr: 3 boxes

“Let’s think in terms of what I call ‘the three boxes:’ order > disorder > reorder.”

Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, July 14, 2017, Adapted from Richard Rohr, “How Do We Get Everything to Belong?” disc 2 (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download; and Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 43-44, 101, 158-159, 171.

We can identify with Rohr’s stages or boxes. We begin our lives trying to find order. If we try to stay in order, safety and control, we end up only serving ourselves. Rohr believes that conservatives become trapped in this phase needing order while progressives may get stuck in this next disorder phase. As we move out of ourselves and interact with others we indeed experience disorder or chaos.

We spend the first half of our lives trying to make order out of this chaos, living as children in an adult world, sibling rivalries, adolescence, being teenagers, trying to become adults, finding careers, raising families. It nearly kills our minds and our relationships and our bodies.

The Quaker writer, Parker Palmer, writes in Let Your Life Speak about one of the failures of leaders is an inability to accept chaos. The Genesis story of creation from the get go reminds us that creation comes out of chaos. I so admire children and youth leaders at our church and in our schools. They better than any of us daily see and admire and appreciate creation out of chaos. The “quick fix” to chaos and the wounds to our egos are only Band-Aids that easily come off in our next scrimmage, and the wound becomes gaping and deeper.

Spiritual friends are taught to share with each other the gold and creativity in their chaos or at least wait and live in it a little longer until we can see a little glimpse of the treasure or reordering it will bring to our lives.

Rohr cautions us not to look for the quick fix. As we become older, we learn that our wounds become our teachers. Life experiences daily can teach us that holding the tension between order and chaos to a reordering of our lives is acceptance, gratitude, and living in the present.

This again also is called resurrection.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Acceptation

Acceptation

“The problem of personal mastery versus self-surrender exists in every moment of choice. It appears in the most mundane of daily decisions, and it glows fiercely in the way we view the very meaning of existence. It presents us with a dilemma; a dilemma that can confuse us and may—if taken far enough—even destroy us. Fundamentally, this dilemma has to do with whether we engage the deepest levels of our lives in willing or in willful ways.” Gerald G. May, Will & Spirit, Inwardoutward.org, Daily Quote, May 9, 2018.

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Acceptance is a huge part of living life on life’s terms in recovery groups as well as all spiritual practices connecting us to living in the present moment.

I try to learn a new word each day. The one for today is acceptation, which means a favorable reception or approval of acceptance. This is in my prayers for today that we will live in acceptation, receiving the gift of acceptance and surrender just for today.

Balbir Matbur would tell us that the other conditions needed to travel in his boat called surrender or acceptance would be gratitude and forgiveness.

Acceptation, however, is not just giving up and lying down on a fainting couch of old, even though this may be what we need to do at the beginning. Pausing, waiting is definitely necessary at first before we undertake an ill-fated action or rhetoric. We rest, try to find a connection to God in the spiritual practices we know. As we paddle along using Matbur’s oars of gratitude and forgiveness, we will find answers, strength to go on downstream or even upstream and do what we think and feel we may be called to do next.

Sometimes it is more waiting. Eventually we are led to action. The action is usually trying to change the situation by changing how we react to it. We learn that our reaction may be on the right course when we experience peace and love that make ripples and sometimes even waves of the same.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com