A Father’s Day Gift!
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Good morning friends!
We have had a good week of family vacation in the mountains and in the coming days I turn back toward some work. I hope you are finding some respite and renewal and a slower place that allows for reflection.
I have been grinding the beans, catching up on some reading, especially The Insurmountable Darkness of Love by Douglas Christie, and attending to a few administrative matters. We have had meals with friends and have been paying attention to the heavy rainfall and some flooding after a season of drought.
I am well into the series “Shrinking”. I know the language and content is well beyond PG13, and it is likely not to everyone’s sense of taste, and to stay with it is to enter some trauma and messiness and darkness. At the same time it does a number of things extremely well; among them:
It features the reality of aging in the workplace and the onset of a debilitating disease in one of the main characters.
It attends to the ways we become stuck and unstuck.
It models how we have hard conversations and how we avoid them.
It portrays the complexity and process of forgiveness.
It is about the fluidity of families and the importance of friendships.
It is about how we sometimes give too much help to be helpful.
And it is about the presence and absence of community.
“Shrinking” (Apple TV) was created by the team that gave us Ted Lasso, which was a part of what led me to watch it. The subject matter is definitely for adults, and the language is unfiltered. I will also say that it has a depth and quality not unlike Ted Lasso, even if it contains more darkness and fewer protagonists. I am early in the third season so no spoilers please (smile).
An interlude: Ted Lasso returns for a fourth season later this summer. And a PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved By The Beauty of the World, comes to us in late August.
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Our nation is in the midst of several unfortunate realities that also convey a darkness–a war in search of a purpose, with the loss of human lives and a financial indebtedness ahead to fund it; weakening of regulations in agriculture have led to health hazards related to eating lettuce (the farmer’s market I frequent had no lettuce for sale this week, and they acknowledged this as the reason); a missing senator hidden from public view; the politicization of a disaster response, extended now for almost two years, with some of our counties receiving little federal assistance; and the weakening of our democratic processes.
On this last subject, I will be leading an in-person study of Building Beloved Community on August 5, and a zoom meeting for leaders of study circles on August 6. Let me know if you want more details about either gathering.
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I mentioned The Insurmountable Darkness of Love, which is a study of the mystics in the Christian tradition and how they made sense of absence, loss, grief and emptiness. In the tradition this is known as apophatic spirituality. This conversation is set alongside communities who have known historical injustice and suffering, and the author’s personal journey with loss. My spiritual director recommended it, and I am into the last third of the book. It is excellent and it is not light reading. But this week I came across a passage from Thomas Merton, some words he wrote toward the end of his life. Merton speaks of the life of prayer, and how we do not always perceive the presence or blessing of God or each other. I have read these words many times, and can recall their being important to me in a retreat I made in my late twenties. They speak to me again:
“In prayer, we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have and you realize you are already there. We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.”
(Insurmountable Darkness of Love, 98; from Thomas Merton, Woods, Shore, Desert).
I was formed in a tradition that understood prayer primarily as petition, asking God for something new, something better, something wonderful. I do believe in both petition and intercession. But Merton calls me to consider the possibility that I am surrounded by goodness, blessing and providence, even in the midst of adversity or disappointment.
Prayer is holding space and paying attention, it is slowing down and listening, it is waiting and watching.
If you have ever had an illness or an injury, you may have come into such a space. If you ever really taken a vacation or a sabbatical, you may have come into such a space. If you have entered retirement, or lost a loved one, you may have entered into such a space. If you have ever felt laid aside or underemployed, you may have entered into such a space. And if you have felt that your value came in what you are doing, and when that has changed you wonder about what it now means, you may have entered into such a space.
Perhaps you are stuck, or on the precipice of a hard conversation, or sense your mental or physical faculties shifting. And while this is not quite a mashup of Shrinking (a popular television series) and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love (an Oxford University Press book that I imagine less than one hundred people across the world will read), I do invite you to read Merton’s words again.
All we need is to experience what we already possess.
Thank you for reading, sharing, subscribing and recommending. Mostly thank you for your friendship and the connection.
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