Trying to Stop

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . . ”

Frederick Buechner, "Telling Secrets"

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Dear Kate,

It's hard, isn't it, to let it go, whatever or whoever "it" is.

When Buechner was 10 his father went into the garage and ran his Chevy but going nowhere.

Young Buechner and his brother James subsequently saw their father's body on the driveway and also the frantic aftermath of mother and grandma trying to reverse the irreversible, an image, a picture of life standing still, that would go on to haunt him all his days, especially during his daughter's struggle with anorexia.  There was no funeral to mark his father's passing, and it's understood among the family that it shouldn't be marked by any recollection either.

What marked his life then, as a result, was fear and anxiety, often hidden, secretive, the inner dialogue, the endless chatter of human thought.  What am I going to lose next?  What can I do to stop that?

Such is the context of today's quote.  Buechner, a great novelist, also happens to be a great preacher.  But he is not sermonizing here.  An exorcism of his own demons is more like it.  He writes with blood sweat and tears.

It's easy to agree with what he says here if I want a monkey off my back, to be free from the control or scrutiny of others.  It's not easy when I need to be the monkey to others, more often than not someone I claim and am in a way obligated to care for, even love.

Having to manage other's business is unpleasant.  That it being a role expectation, a sacred duty makes it doubly so.  That it being the very cross we get nailed on makes "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" our soliloquy of choice.  All parents know what I mean.  We surely can't let our children kill themselves.

"I am not responsible for your happiness and neither are you mine."  There is something beautifully vital in our living to acknowledge this to others, not out of bitterness or cynicism, not to unburden ourselves of the weight of glory in every human interaction, but to trust God is the one going about his business in everyone's life and there's a limit in how far he would involve us, in even our own becoming.

Our saying No is as a big a statement of faith in God as our saying Yes.

Kate, you told me just now, this morning, that you "hate" what you wrote last night (on Buechner's quote) and you will "fix" and send me another revision soon.

I asked you to pick out the verbs in your message and pay attention to them, because you are a woman of action.  I asked, Why "hate"?  What is so hateable about what you wrote, words you let out of you, words that are part of who you are?  And how are you going to "fix" your piece?  To fix up something is to assume there is for it a better state of fixed-up-ness, a certain desirable standard to answer to, and what would that be?  And what and who else do you plan to fix up down the pike today, tomorrow, the rest of your life?

How often do we know what is truly good, when concerning even only our own business (which is always messily embroiled in the business of others)?  And how often do we fail to live out, live up to what we know to be good, in even how we treat our Selves?

These are humbling thoughts of freedom.  Do you agree?

Of course this is not to say I won't betray Buechner's wisdom at least three times before the cock crows at nightfall.  (And that too, will likely be a miscalculation.)

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

All things seem to start and stop in space and spin, except for pain. It feels timeless as gravity, weightless in breath.

In whiteness pain blooms from the dark. It reveals you deeper than love, boils faster than rage, an endless dive in amniotic fluid.

Pain conceives happiness, not sympathy or loss of dignity, a 2-fingered, thumbless grasp for life scattered in spectacular chaos. Try to stop, judge or manage pain, and it shall become gorged ever more astonishingly with regret.

Tonight after his usual 12-hour work shift, my husband retreated past the dining table and walls into the bedroom, a blur of body and brokenness in bonding. His single meal for the day had been lunch. Our teen daughter was sick again. Pressed between pillow and pain, he closed his eyes to look closer at her. An hour later before midnight, he awoke with an involuntary scream in 3 syllables of gibberish, his rebirth to a lively nightmare beyond management.

Earlier today, my colleague recounted her story of another sort in torment unmanageable. Her car had recently crashed from a speed of 70 mph to a permanent halt within seconds on I-5 freeway, soaring into triple aerial flips transcending Olympic standards as witnessed by commuters. Her spine split, smashing her on knees to crawl for weeks. Today was her first return to work, a miracle she let me capture on photo. More than twice, she cracked: “I am so happy to be back again.”

Buechner tells us to release our fists, relent as managers of lives and liabilities, rip the human thought in constant chatter. He recognizes our mission impossible in letting go of us to let in more of God, let out more blood to let death rid us of self-reliance. Pain bridges for us between the impossible to tangible, suffocation to sacrament, night to sunrise.

Whether tangibly reduced to 2 fingers of a grip or amplified to a scream or triple rollovers, pain is best managed without our management, our truthful passage to the cross. Let it be. Let me be - even in a place of pain preserved.

Yours, Kate