I have been thinking that it would be good to share short reflections on very meaningful things I have forgotten, but once knew. This story in Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, called Remembering, is about a woman who sees herself as selfish and ruthless.
Rachel starts the story with “What we do to survive is often different from what we need to do in order to live.”
I find this really a profound story for now, as the world melts and shrinks, and what we thought were safe walls begin to crumble like a sandcastle at high tide, or in a time of such dryness that it is impossible for the grains of sand to hold together: things fall apart.
At her birthday party on zoom, Rachel reminded me that when we met, I told her I am a medieval Catholic in a postmodern world. I just heard a talk about St. Therese of Lisieux, who is named a doctor of the church, for her “little way”. I had read her book “Journey of a Soul” just before meeting Rachel. She died of tuberculosis in a Carmelite convent in France, when she was 24. But the book has helped many others on their spiritual journeys, which so often are like the book of Exodus— we wander in the desert for 40 years before we get to a sense of belonging and coherence, although we may have glimpses as we go. St. Therese was a model of studying one’s own feelings and coming to terms with them and how they affect our actions, while trusting in a loving God. It is that trusting in a benevolent source of love and energy which most helps me have hope, in spite of things falling apart. The person speaking about St. Therese said she maintained a “non-adversarial stance” toward difficult, damaged and disturbed people, often people who were in chronic pain, and bitter and angry, small-minded but struggling to “be good”.
This is a lot like the virtue of “detaching with love” — to not take personally a person’s cruelty and stupidity, but to try to hold in compassion, these difficult people. It is not naive. It also helps us face our own poverty and imperfection, to try to hold ourselves in this same compassion toward ourselves. This is a very Buddhist kind of thinking, and helpful to me now. “May all beings be free of suffering.” Perennial wisdom.
The story is great, as the woman begins to bud, and bloom, as she is healing and learning to have compassion for herself.
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