Caring for our own

We want other people to know our joys and our suffering, yet we fear people who would use what they know about us to hurt us.

Alcoholics Anonymous has built a powerful organization around people sharing their deepest hurts and joys with each other while at least pretending not to know more than the other people's first names. I think, though, that we long for more than that, even if we will settle for one of the "Anonymous" groups, should that be all we can find.

Church people pray for each other. But all of us know that sharing prayer concerns can very easily become "Did you hear about so-and-so?" I'm not always sure that I want church people praying for me.

I trust family more. Family know we're still family and will live or hang together, even when we don't think alike or even like each other all that much, even when we don't spend that much time together. Some people's experience of family, though, is very different from mine. And if I'm honest, I must admit that many of the people I treat as family are not blood relatives of any kind.

The people I trust are the people who have shown that the union between us doesn't go away even when we disagree strongly or when we don't see things the same. We do seek the best for each other, even when we don't agree very much about the means to that end.

The prayers of such people can make all the difference in the world. A woman at work told me of how she was going through a period in her life when she just couldn't make any sense of the suffering she had to endure. She told a friend about this. Over the next few months, she came to understand better and better what God was doing in her life. This amazed her, because she hadn't been able to see any of this before. One day she told her friend of what she had been experiencing and of her amazement at what she could see now, of how she couldn't understand why she hadn't been able to see it before. Her friend told her that she had been praying about this for her ever since she had spoken with her.

Sometimes, though, people will hurt us, intentionally or not. We must train ourselves to seek our identity in God alone and not in what others think or say. When others hurt me, I must make myself take what they say or think to God, for His appraisal. Unless He confirms it, it means absolutely nothing. It will be soon gone without a memory. If I fail to go to God, I will suffer, but I should recognize before long that my hurt is of my own making. I did not seek God's appraisal.

There is a mystery--and a joy--in all this and we are not often getting it right these days.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

(T.S. Eliot, East Coker)