Quaking and shaking...

When H. left his career as a succesful lawyer to go to a tiny seminary in the middle of the Australian pampa, he felt so "weird" that his body gave way and he had to be hospitalised on the first day. Lying on a hospital bed, completely confused for days, he was visited by an unassuming second year seminarian every day. That guy is still his best friend.

I'm going to wear the shining rain

A while ago I found a wedding dress in an Edinburgh charity shop. It was beautiful and brand new (with tags on and all) so I got it thinking "that can be my backup, and that will take away the stress of having to find a dress, if the worse comes to the worse, I can just wear that one".

But the more I look at "real" dresses from "real shops", the more I like my dress. But still I feel pretty cheap having bought it in a charity shop, while hunting for books and funky crockery and not at all for a wedding dress.

Then I thought, well, if I feel cheap, I can just make an equivalent donation to some cool charity, like the guy from our parish who goes and digs wells in Tanzania every year (the really deep ones that ensure a permanent supply of clean water for the forseable future and keep water-borne diseases at bay).

You can have a dress made of the brilliance of raindrops caught in the brambles that shimmer

in the sun while you brush your teeth. You can have a dress weaved of the unspoken,

unknown joy even, of a mother whose child will not die but thrive. An ivory dress, the colour

of an old washed out skull come to think of it, and shining as the raindrops

in the brambles on some sunny morning, in the whirlwind of time.

F*ck I'm weird. That was my next thought. Okay, calm down and let's make an effort to think some normal thoughts here. Like what's for lunch. That kind of normal.

My days are few, O fail not,

With thine immortal power,

To hold me that I quail not...

HEY! You bizarro psyche of mine, I said normal thoughts, not launch into a seventeenth century hymn. Maybe there is no hope.

I love that Italian quotation so much I can't believe I haven't blogged it before...

"It is a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation"
Roberto Benigni.

I am the experiment

Okay so I've been reading the sermons of Martin Luther King on the train from Leeds to Durham one evening instead of playing bubble breaker on my phone. I guess that's an improvement.

I highly recommend them. The most striking thing about them is the level of empathy that MLK expresses in his sermons. Here is a man that relates to the feelings of his congregations. He himself was highly educated and had a number of valorising subject-positions which would have enabled him to feel pretty good about himself. MLK also had the intelligence, self-awareness and access to the right books and the right people that would have enabled him to avoid feeling fear or a sense of inferiority and move on to be emotionally comfortable if that had been his choice.

But he feels these things nonetheless, pathologically at times, and speaks to people that feel them too. At the same time, he retains the amazing humility of acknowledging the many ways in which his congregation have pointed him back to being connected to the love of God when he was loosing his sense of this reality and could not find his way back on his own.

From my point of view, there is something holy about being shown the real deal. Something in us that says: That is of God. This something makes the stinky train carriage full of weary commuters dearer to me than the most stunning cathedral. A moment of the real deal.

A lot of passages in MLK's sermons are stunning, but for some reason, his approach to his suffering really resonnated with me. So I thought I'd reproduce the passage here:

As my suffering mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation - either to react with bitterness or to seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the later course. Recognizing the necessity of suffering I have tried to make it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transfigure myself and heal the people involved in the tragic sitaution which now obtains.

This attitude echoes the work of Bruno Bettelheim, who emotionally survived the n*zi death camps by seeking to understand the hows and the whys of the human behaviour he was observing. He kept trying to make sense of it so it could be used to help the human race understand itself and connect to its created purpose.

What Martin Luther King and Bruno Bettelheim are giving us is a recipe against burnout. Their approach takes the pain and makes something of it rather than seeking to escape it, or just taking it without a purpose. Both have fought horrendously hard to not succoumb the bitterness in two of the most harrowing times of the 20th century. But nowadays nobody teaches us what to do with pain anymore, and so we are increasingly feeling depleted and unable to go on. Jesus asks us to not fear suffering and to not fear death. And to not let the fear of these things interfere with our purpose. MLK says: Well, I'm going to suffer and it's not going away, so how do I survive this without becoming bitter?

MLK's hero was St. Paul, by the way. He never ceased to be amazed at St Paul's lack of bitterness and wanted some of that attitude (or Grace or whatever) for himself.

So I'm adopting their approach. I'm the experiment. If the going gets tough I'm going to be in tune with what I need in order to not become bitter or burnt out. I will transcend the pain and, through curiosity, vulnerability and child-like prayer, turn it into more love. There is a way out of burnout. I'm going to find out what it is and write it down right here. Maybe one day someone will print it and read it on the train.

And I'm pleased. Because I've been living without passion for a while, and did not have a clue how to reconnect with it. I have the honour of working with some of the most passionate do-gooders in the UK, and quite often I sat there watching them wondering why do I feel dead inside? What have they got that I haven't?

I lived for months with that question, but I found a way through. I hadn't counted the cost. I hadn't acknowledged just how much I yearn to be normal, to buy girly clothes in a clothes shop without thinking that "if they are made by a child, or an exploited young woman, you can't wear them at the Eucharist". How much I yearned to maximimize my income instead of only working part time and volunteering. How much I yearned for the respect of a mega-successful profession rather than having people think that I'm not clever enough to be a City lawyer or an investment banker. How much I wanted these things. And how lonely I feel when all the other volunteers are bored housewives in their late sixties and nobody gets me.

And there was my passion. The more the cost, the more the passion. If it costs you 40 quids a day to take a train from York back to the North East in order to volunteer in a prison while everyone else is working full time jobs and buying houses. Then you have to ask yourself every day why you're doing this. And you have to find an answer. And you have to make a choice again every day. And you have to take the pain like Martin Luther King (even if its not commensurate). Welcome to the straight and narrow.