A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (13 page)

There are two kinds of compassion and care. One is honest kindness, and the other, dishonest kindness. How many times have we promised, or pretended to be available, to listen, to care, when, in that moment, we honestly had no such capacity? And do we imagine that dishonest kindness actually brings healing and ease to another—or do we seed an unintended suffering? I do not know the answer to this. But I cannot help but ask the question.

If we pretend to care but have no ability to really care, are we not practicing dishonest kindness? We may be distracted,
worried, bone-weary, just going through the motions. Yet many of us feel it is the “good” thing, the “right” thing to do.

When we are brazen enough to stand and claim to be able to serve, to care, what do we really have to offer? Our company. Our time, our listening, our hands, our heart’s best unhurried attention. More than this is grandiose and foolish. It is one thing to share what we have. Our most genuine, honest kindness, then, begins with a clear sense of our humility in who we are and what we have to offer.

To feel we must always give away more than we have is a stunningly effective blueprint for a life of relentless inner poverty and aching insufficiency.

The Rhythm of Giving and Receiving

T
here is a time to give and a time to receive. If we can rest comfortably in this natural rhythm, allowing time and attention for both, we begin to cultivate an easy, effortless sense of replenishing abundance.

Giving and receiving are equally necessary elements of generosity. Any authentic act of generosity is that action from which both giver and receiver find some nourishment or blessing. Just as we breathe in and out, we give, we receive, we give again, and the gifts of life and love, care and attention, meander this way and that, gentle as a cool mountain stream, quenching the thirst of each as it passes through our hands and hearts. Still, while both giving and receiving are fundamental to genuine generosity, it may be difficult to imagine that our ability to receive, with humility and grace, is as deeply essential as our capacity to give.

Our reluctance to receive has many origins. One comes from a fear that whatever we take for ourselves will somehow limit what will be available for others, that our receiving is going to take something away from someone else. Another is rooted more in fear, a reluctance to give up some illusion of control. Author Laura Doyle, writing about this dynamic in couples in her book
The Surrendered Wife
suggests, “The more
you’re willing to make yourself vulnerable, giving up that degree of control, the closer you’re both going to feel.”

The tenderness required for healthy, loving intimacy invites us to surrender this armor of feeling that “I can do it all” and acknowledge—to ourselves and our partner—that we have real needs and name what they might be. Only then can we possibly be open to receiving.

One of our most prevalent models of generosity is the “suffering servant.” But the Hebrew commandment regarding giving and receiving, which Jesus reiterated in his own ministry as “love your neighbor as yourself,” gives us a better model for understanding spiritual nourishment and authentic loving care. It presumes that genuine kindness and generosity evoke in both parties a certainty of being fully and completely loved.

Of course, there are times when sacrifice is called for. For example, from the outside, many acts of parenting may look like sacrifice. But as anyone who has been a parent knows, there is rarely any thought of doing anything else. This kind of love—giving all we have for our children’s safety, health, happiness, and well-being—rarely feels like sacrifice at all. It merely feels like love.

However, even in parenting, there are times when our sacrifice is, in fact, too much, when our children are engaged in self-destructive behavior or have become so spoiled and entitled that our giving is terribly out of balance. Over time, this kind of love can turn into exhaustion, disappointment, even anger and resentment. We see how some practice of rigorous honesty with ourselves and others is the foundation for genuine love and care.

If we are attentive and awake, we know when we honestly have care and attention to give and when we are actually in need of care and attention ourselves. Many of us are inclined to give and give without ever asking for anything in return. We may think this is a sign of generosity, or even heroism. But it may also reveal some secret pride that says: “I don’t need help from you or from anyone. I only want to give.” When we always give without receiving, we soon become dry, brittle, even secretly resentful. But if we learn instead to attend to our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs—and ask for and become willing to receive whatever care we truly need—we may discover that giving and receiving can be a joyful, liberating conversation of hearts.

My dear friend Mark Nepo described to me in a conversation a lesson he learned during a long and painful pilgrimage through two years of struggle with a complicated, life-threatening cancer:

During my cancer journey, everyone near me was loving, trying to help me—and I sorely needed all the help they could give. But, over a three-year period of struggling with illness and treatment and hospitals even those who loved me most would get burned out. As much as they loved me, it was hurting them to care so much for me. But when they talked openly to me about
their
weariness, and
their
pain, I suddenly felt I was needed.
I
could give to
them
. It went both ways. Over time, there were many moments when we weren’t sure who was sick and who was well, because as they were doing all kinds of things for me, I could give something back to them. That became powerful medicine for me.

The Sufficiency of Presence

P
erhaps the greatest wealth you possess, the most precious, valuable gift you can ever hope to offer any human being, is this one, simple, true thing: You. Your presence. Showing up. Being in the company of another, undistracted, unhurried, with an open heart, gentle hands, and a patient soul. Willing and able to listen, do something or do nothing, willing to be surprised by whatever emerges in the soil of sharing your present, loving company with another human being.

To paraphrase Jesus:
Whenever two or more are gathered, something is born in the soil of our having joined in one another’s open-hearted company
. Compassion begins with being able to sit, without hurry or distraction, in the open-hearted company of those sitting in the fire of their most unbearable sorrow, even when you are utterly powerless to alleviate their suffering.

On a clear, perfect, autumnal day, Joan was driving her mother and her two young sons, Forest, four, and Bryce, two, up to the mountains for the day. Here in northern New Mexico, blue sky frames elegant curving mountains, and gently winding roads weave playfully among hills clothed in fiery aspen and cottonwood. Joan wanted to bless her loved ones with a beautiful drive through the elegant eruption of fall.

As Joan was slowly rounding a blind curve, a pickup truck crossed the double yellow line into their lane, perhaps hoping to shave a second or two off his trip. He hit them directly, head on, at some ridiculous speed, killing her mother in the passenger seat beside her. Both boys—secured and properly belted in their respective car seats—died instantly. Joan miraculously survived.

Joan and her husband, Cullen, came to see me just a few weeks after they lost both their children and Joan’s mother in one impossible, horrific instant. They came, they said, because they had no idea what to do. They didn’t know how to live with this searing ache in their hearts, no idea how to hold on to anything as true or reliable. How, when your children and mother are ripped from your family in a searing instant, does anyone in the world find a way to wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and do anything at all? Will they ever, they worried, be able to do whatever it is that people do over the course of a day?

I could have offered to teach them about the stages of grief, the importance of moving the body and not allowing such deep sadness to paralyze them. I could have cautioned them against isolating, advised them to seek out the loving company of others, to allow the waves of sadness to come, but not to wallow in it either, and to allow the possibility for new life, new hope to emerge.

But none of that felt in any way necessary, useful, or true. In truth, I had nothing, no words, no advice, nothing comforting to say. We all felt utterly powerless. This was perhaps the most true thing we shared. Without words, advice, or consoling predictions, what could I possibly have to offer?

In that moment, which resembled so many moments in the past, and so many more to come, I was being invited to simply bear witness, to accompany them on their journey. To listen together to the sound of hearts breaking, the silent scream of unspeakable grief, the way unbearable sorrow enters our lives as it will, without warning or permission. I could only bend my ear, without fear or hesitation, toward the unknowable, unfixable, worst nightmare of every parent in the world. To become so thoroughly empty of purpose or usefulness, refuse to invoke any skill or craft, bereft of any reasonable treatment plan other than to bear honorable witness to this immeasurable, wordless, heart-shredding grief.

They ached to be seen and known, loved and held, and not ever fixed, healed, or treated but simply loved with gently patient mercy, my knee bent in awesome respect. I needed only to hold their hands and feel in their hearts this most horribly true thing. Nothing to say, nothing to fix. Life, death, sorrow, joy—some things simply need to be held and honored as simply and finally true.

We spent months together in this way. Listening. Weeping. Wondering. Waiting.

Eventually, after traversing so many caverns of inner darkness and light, Joan and Cullen decided they would have more children, who would be siblings to Forest and Bryce, siblings of older brothers they would never know.

Joan and Cullen are now parents of a new son and daughter. Whenever they see me, we hold one another, and they, for all I had done to accompany them to the other side of this raging inferno of life and death, thank me for my company, my witness, my quiet presence and patient, loving attention.

And yet, to this day, part of me remains astonished by what really happened, joining together in fertile companionship, two or more gathered, descending into the most anguished chambers of the shredded heart. Reminded again and again that whatever it was I offered by bringing my simple, patient, merciful presence, and whatever it was we found there together, seemed, in the end, to be enough.

Bearing Witness

M
y dear friend Marianna has volunteered some of her time sitting with mothers who are dying of breast cancer and asking them to tell her their stories. She—and many other women who volunteer with the Mother’s Living Stories project—go to women’s homes, sit by their side for many, many hours, and listen to women tell about their lives. But the stories are not for Marianna. The stories are for the dying women’s children.

These women will never see their children grow up. And their children will never be able to ask their mother about her life, about her dreams, her disappointments and her triumphs, her best choices and her life’s defining moments. They will never have the opportunity to ask: How should I love? Where can I find courage? How do I know what is right? What did you do when you were my age?

So Marianna asks the women to tell her everything they would tell their growing children, for when they are older, for when they need a mother’s loving words to tell them what they need to hear. Marianna collects these stories on tape, compiles edited transcripts of her conversations, and puts it all in a beautiful box decorated with photos from the woman’s life, friends, and family. In this way, she keeps the stories safe,
until the right time, until they are needed, and the children are ready to hear them.

How many of us would have treasured such a gift from a loved one passed too soon? How many questions would we ask, if we could?

What Grows After a Fire

T
en years ago, a fire ravaged Lama Mountain, home to many families and a beloved retreat center in the hills of northern New Mexico. The fire was quick and furious. It destroyed dozens of homes and all but a few of the buildings at the retreat center.

Soon after the fire, I hiked with a close friend through blackened hillsides, once dense with thick, old-growth forests of oak and pine, now eerily punctuated with smoldering stumps of hundred-year-old trees. At the time, as directors of local charitable foundations, we hoped to provide emergency relief for the community, most importantly swift restoration of water and electricity. Everywhere we looked, we saw inconceivable shades of charcoal, silver gray, and shiny black, reflecting the light of the sun that suddenly filtered through bare, charred, and twisted branches.

Not long ago, this had been an inferno. But on this day—only three weeks later—there spread out before us an impossible sea of green. Small oak seedlings, six to ten inches high, completely blanketed the forest floor. Without any human effort to clear or seed, already the earth was pushing out life. Creation creates life at every revolution; it is incapable of doing otherwise.

This is what the earth does after a fire, after a death. It creates life. It refuses to do any less. This is what the earth does. This is what we do. This is what our hearts do. They resurrect, rise from ash and death, and offer new seeds, new hope, new possibilities. All life depends on the absolute truth of this one thing.

Whatever burns, whatever is taken, life fills the vacuum with immediate sufficiency. Without planting, without planning or tending, it grows, fresh, green, and new. We too are made of this; like the earth, we create life. We cannot stop it; we are not in charge of making it happen. When we learn this, when we finally realize who we are, what we know, and of what we are truly capable, any fear of never having enough of anything gradually and inevitably falls away.