Confiteor

Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,  . . .  quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

This keeps running through my head, both in English and in Latin: “. . . I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed. My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”

 
When it comes into my head in Latin, you know it’s deeply rooted and deadly serious. Lord, have mercy—please not the Latin version.
 
I have sinned in thought. The self-centeredness, the continual struggle with compassion, the failure to keep my mind focused on the things of God instead of getting distracted with the acquisition and maintenance of my petty possessions. The struggle with forgiveness.

I have sinned in word. The mouth from which springs the most idiotic things at the wrong place and time. The sad story that runs on a continuous loop. The drama queen. The it’s-all-about-me sickening syndrome. The gossiping, both thinking and saying unkind things. Lord, I wish I could blame this on an evil force but I am sorry to say it’s my own stupidity, my bottomless pit of weakness.

I have sinned in deed. Indeed I have. The unkind things I have thought and spoken also can be counted among the deeds. I have wasted money, I have had too much to eat and drink. I have not bothered to tell the clerk that she gave me change for $20 instead of $10 or that I didn’t pay for the cat litter that was in the bottom of my grocery cart. When I was too sensitive and thought people were mistreating me, I took it personally instead of cutting them some slack—no, it was all about me again.

Of course, there’s a viscous loop in operation here—I get hurt, I feel like a failure, I withdraw from polite society because I don’t want to impose myself on anyone else for fear of more rejection. This is more self-centered depressed behavior. I think I’m a jerk, everyone else thinks I’m a jerk, so I’m sure God must think I’m a jerk too.

The only way out of this is grace, grace, and more grace. I’m standing in the need of grace, Lord. Bring it on!

Forgiveness revisited

Yesterday Ben Freeth, a farmer from Zimbabwe, spoke at church. He and his family were farmers in Zimbabwe until the government brutally ousted all white property owners from their land. He told a compelling story of how he and other family members were abducted by thugs and taken to a remote area where they were bound and beaten. (Freeth’s skull was fractured and he had many broken bones. His father-in-law later died of his injuries.)

The most compelling part of his story is his account of how he forgave his captors in what he describes as a supernatural experience, something that only could have come from God. His hands and feet were bound and he was lying face-down in the dirt. He recounts his experience in his book Mugabe and the White African:

I saw a leg right in front of my face and I knew what I had to do. I managed to reach out and touch it and said, “May the Lord Jesus bless you.” I saw another and I reached out again, saying, “May the Lord Jesus bless you,” and another, and another.

This kind of forgiveness is beyond amazing. After Freeth spoke, our pastor prayed and challenged each of us to forgive someone we have not been able to forgive. He guided us through prayer and called on us to insert the name of a person we have been unable to forgive. So I did it—I prayed and called the unforgiven one by name. This was at the end of the service and I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I went through the motions but left the church in tears and spent the rest of the day in a funk because this issue, this unforgiveness that keeps rearing its ugly head. I think I’m over it and then it overcomes me again. I know all the pop-psych adages about by not forgiving you only hurt yourself, and so on. I’ve pounded my fist and prayed and said I was done with it. But I wasn’t done with it. Why can't I forgive like Ben Freeth?

So last night I sat and prayed some more. I told God it wasn’t fair. (Like He hasn’t heard that one before.) I said I needed Jesus beside me, needed the intercession of the Holy Spirit, pleaded for this to be resolved for good. I could not connect with God, didn’t feel His presence, not a word. I felt the frustration of knowing that I had been unable to resolve this forgiveness thing and I felt that God was absent. I acknowledged that He must be there, just like He’s always there, so the disconnect must have been my fault. I asked Him, “Is there some reason I’m hanging on to this? Am I getting something out of this victim role? I don’t need it, Lord—do something!” No response.

He wasn’t responding and I wasn’t going to sit there any longer talking to the walls. So I turned on my computer and typed in “Why can’t I forgive” into the search box. The very first entry that came up was an interview with a contemplative Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. I knew of Richard Rohr and had read other work of his. The mere fact that this was the first thing that came up on my computer blew me away. Okay, Lord, forget what I said earlier—obviously He heard me and responded with a message, exactly what He wanted me to hear. These are some of the things that Father Rohr said in the interview:
 

•  "Forgiveness is a decision, but making that decision doesn't override the emotional residue that often takes much longer to release. That feeling of wanting revenge or wanting to assert your rightness or your victimhood—depending on the depth of your wounding—can take days, weeks, months and even years to dissipate. On certain days, when you're in a down mood, your psyche will want to grab onto that hurt. You have to go through that necessary period of feeling half dead, half angry, half in denial—this is the liminal [transitional] space in which we grow for some reason.
• "I don't know why God made an imperfect world. . . But recognizing that there's an essentially tragic nature to life, one that you have to forgive and accept in a foundational way, allows you to forgive the smaller daily dramas with much greater ease. As much as we want to see the person who hurt us as an evil person—as if they were a major exception to the rule, since we have falsely imagined a perfect world—we need to realize that we're all an exception to the rule of perfection and expectation. Humans are inherently imperfect. That is what differentiates us from the Divine level.
• “Surely people have hurt you and you wish you could punish them, but whether you recognize it or not, you yourself were forgiven when you also were broken and mistaken. All, without exception, live under the waterfall of divine mercy. There is, of course, an essential and direct connection between our receptivity to undeserved love and forgiveness and our ability to forgive other imperfect people. There is not much point in weighing which fault was the greater; that is merely the ego protecting itself. When you understand your own limited but lovely place within this universally imperfect world, you will find it almost natural to become more patient and forgiving with other people too."
• “If we can find a way to live inside of a deep gratitude for our own undeserved grace and mercy, past hurts have very little power to cause us pain in any lasting way. They are not worth our time or energy. They are mere sludge and dredge in the great school and journey of life. The gratuitous surrendering of hurts ("forgiveness"), the refusal to make them our identity, is almost the heart of the matter. If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others. And, I am afraid, you will have pain! Both the Buddha and Jesus seem to say that pain is part of the deal, and its overcoming is the very shape of enlightenment."

So, God led me to some guidance on this issue of forgiveness in the form of words from Richard Rohr found on the Internet. (1) Forgiveness is a decision, but I should not be surprised if I see it rear its ugly head from time to time. So I guess I shouldn’t beat myself over the head about this. (2) The world is broken, imperfect and it’s full of broken, imperfect people. That surely includes me. I do not deserve the love and forgiveness—the grace—that God has given me. Is it my ego that makes me think I deserve special consideration? Wrong again. (3) Focus on God. Keep my eyes on His overwhelming blessings. Move out the hurt and the pain (the "mere sludge and dredge") and fill that space with gratitude.

 

Once again I am incredibly moved by our awesome, awesome God.

Interview with Richard Rohr accessed on June 7, 2015. Online at http://www.oprah.com/spirit/The-Truth-About-the-People-You-Cant-Forgive#ixzz3cUUiYWM7

The heartless Miss Hart

Well into his 80s Daddy would tell us stories from his childhood, stories we had never heard before. His brain was agile and healthy until the end of his life, so it wasn’t a case of him losing mental faculties and slipping back into his youth.

One story he told made our hearts ache. Apparently he had a teacher in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, when he was very young (perhaps first or second grade) named Miss Hart. Miss Hart didn’t like little Donald and she used to scold him and humiliate him. Daddy said that she put him the corner of the classroom and made him wear the shameful dunce cap—she told him he was stupid. Or she made him sit under her desk as punishment.

What my father could have done to elicit this severe humiliation is inconceivable. He was the sweetest, kindest, most hardworking man I have ever known. He was conscientious and he was very smart. He could figure out how to fix anything or build anything. He even cut my hair when I was in high school and my friends asked if he would cut their hair. There was nothing he couldn’t do or figure out how to do. He deserved a crown, a Nobel prize, canonization, not a dunce cap.

The only thing I can imagine he might have done to annoy the cruel Miss Hart is that he might have been a little too sociable. My father could talk the fleas off a dog. It was a trait so deeply ingrained he must have had it at birth so I’m sure he visited his little first grade classmates outside of visiting hours.

What is so sad is that he still felt the shame inflicted on him in that classroom some 80 years after the fact. He said he always felt like he was dumb. And these 80-plus years after the fact I’m angry that the heartless Miss Hart hurt that precious little boy who grew up to be my dad.

 

Dutiful wife

If only you could hear the internal dialogue in my head—it’s either amusing or frightening.

This morning I was cleaning my bedroom. I pulled out a basket under my bed and noted a significant amount of dust under the bed. And I said to myself, “Oh, you stupid, lazy woman! You need to stop wasting time, be a more dutiful wife, and get these things done.”

Was I temporarily transported back to the last millennium? A dutiful wife? I have been unmarried for nearly 18 years. Several weeks ago, I was signing a financial document and signed “Donna X. Burke”—that hasn’t been my name for 16 years since my divorce became final.

The dutiful wife is long gone. So the dialogue in my head and my slip back to signing my long-gone name could be alarming. One thing I can say with surety is that it’s not wishful thinking. I’m a different person now and I couldn’t go back to that life even if I wanted to go back.

Is my brain just distracted and unfocused sometimes? Of course. Everyone I know who is my age goes through these temporary blips in thought processes. It takes at least three of us an hour to remember the name of the actress who was in that movie—that movie based on the book, where her husband and family go away and she has a brief fling with that guy. No, that’s not the movie—it’s the one with the horse. That other guy, that famous American actor was in it. Who was that actor? And the actress, you know who she is—it’s that actress with dark hair. She’s English but she lives in France. I read that in a magazine at the beauty shop. She’s also in that movie where she’s in prison and she smokes a lot of cigarettes. I think the movie was in French. An hour later, when we’re comparing about our mothers’ atrocious recipes for Jell-O molds, someone blurts out “Kristin Scott Thomas!”. We all know what she’s talking about.

Or there’s another worst-case scenario. Am I developing some sort of senile dementia? Lord, please protect me!

Detach

This morning I sat on the floor, praying for the Biden family and all those with broken hearts who have just lost someone they love. I know that pain. I thought about what I had read in the newspaper—after Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car wreck and his two sons were badly injured, his mother gave him some advice: “Out of everything terrible that happens to you, something good will come of it if you look hard enough.”
 

If I look hard, I realize that out of the terrible things that have happened to me—the heartbreak, the seemingly unending losses, that something good had come of it for me. When I found myself on my knees, I realized that was where I needed to be. I needed to pray; I needed God in my life. I saw how little control I have over what unfolds in this earthly life and the only solution is for me to build a stronger relationship with God.

For years I have been on a crooked path, but a path that leads me to Him. Today I prayed, “Draw me closer to you. Show me how to live ever closer to your heart.” I prayed to stay on the mountain, for Him to show me how to live in this crazy broken world without losing the sense of being in God’s presence. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me every minute of every day. And as I sat in silence, trying to just feel the Lord's presence, a word floated through my consciousness. I dismissed it. It came back again—detach. And so, detachment it is.

With detachment, come both certainties and questions. I know that to detach means truly forgiving past hurts. (Period—end of sentence.) I know that I have to detach from petty earthly longings like status and beauty and accomplishment. What it means about possessions I need to figure out. I like trinkets—my little collection of Mexican pottery, vintage Indian sari quilts, and those luscious pieces of Native American silver jewelry. I like cashmere and linen and Eileen Fisher clothes. (In defense of myself, I should point out that most of these things have been bought at thrift stores. But feeling defensive also means I have a certain amount of guilt for wanting them and a certain amount of attachment to the trinkets.) Do I thank God for those things and appreciate their beauty, or do I go all Mother Teresa and give them to the poor? I don’t know.

 

All I do know is that in order to draw closer to God, I need to surrender any illusion that I control my life. He is telling me that I need to detach from earthly things. What that detachment looks like will evolve over time. I’m looking at everything, looking hard. Something good will come of it.