Читать книгу Lose, Love, Live - Dan Moseley - Страница 10

Someone once said, “Life after all is fair. Ultimately it breaks everybody’s heart.”¹ I would have thought I would have known this fact. After all, I spent over thirty years sharing the pain and joy of life with people in three congregations. As their pastor, I had spent countless hours walking alongside hundreds of people as they experienced all that life had to offer. I shared the agony of divorce with some of them, wept with some of them as they gave up their spouses to death, swore at the gods with some as they mourned the death of their newborn babies, descended into the depths with others as they were fired after twenty-four years with their company. I would have thought I’d have known that eventually life breaks everyone’s heart.

Ironically it took more for me to get that knowledge through my thick skin. Before that could happen, I had to be stripped of the insulation that protected me from the pain and confronted with more loss and death than I could handle. It began with the discovery of cancer and, three years later, the death of my first wife, Cindy. We had been married thirty-one years. Soon thereafter, the young custodian of the church I was serving took his lover and her children hostage and, before the night was over, killed his lover and himself. Then the last of my three children married and moved out. Finally, a month later my dad died.

Up to this point, I was accomplished at facing difficulty with other people. My role as minister gave me a way of being present to the pain without it cutting so deep. But when the losses began to pile up and rip through my self-understanding as a husband, a father, and a son, I was without enough resources to keep on going.

I continued to do my work as a preacher and pastor, but I found it increasingly difficult. Speaking words of meaning became hollow. I felt like a “noisy gong and a clanging cymbal” (2 Cor. 13:2). Prayer was simply hollow ritual without meaning or power.

When I visited people in the hospital, my body cried out in rebellion. I found myself avoiding the leadership responsibilities of my job.

Finally, I chose to leave the congregation that had mentored and nurtured me and that I had served for over twenty years. I chose to leave the profession of pastor, which had sustained me and given me identity for over thirty years. I chose to leave the city in which I had discovered my skills as a minister and where I had offered them as a gift to others. I chose to lose much more after facing losses over which I had no choice.

Only then did the full effect of the losses of my life come crashing in. As I moved to a new city and became a professor at a seminary, I began to spin into chaos. As the relationships that had sustained me through the crises of my life ended, I was left naked and on my own. I could no longer avoid my feelings. I could no longer pretend that life would be the same. I discovered the terror of not knowing who I was.

I discovered raw empathy. Susan Wiltshire, in her book about her brother dying from AIDS, describes a broken heart as like a broken biscuit. When torn in half, there is twice as much surface on which to spread the butter and honey.² I discovered that a broken heart also has twice as much surface on which to spread the pain and grief of others. Whereas I had been able to protect my heart by playing the role of pastor, I now had no such protection. While I was able to draw on the strength that people projected on me because I was a “man of God,” now I was just Dan. I had no presence to offer but my own, and the pain that others felt tore into my flesh. It was then I began to realize the truth of the statement “Life after all is fair. Eventually it breaks everyone’s heart.”

I found that our hearts are attached to familiar, dependable relationships and that when these change, by accident or by choice (it matters not), the heart gets ripped apart.

In the midst of this time in my life I began to reflect on my own journey—to discover if there was anything in this pain and loss that could help me understand and live life better. My heart had been ripped open, and the wounds of loss were raw. Sadness consumed me. The sharing of the Lord’s Supper, where brokenness and suffering are central, became a much richer and more powerful worship experience. Shed blood and broken body became visceral, and I felt shared pain with the One remembered and with the people in the pew beside me.

I yearned for comforting, for warm light to anoint the wounds and to heal me, for the suffering to ease and for hope to visit my heart again. I wanted to believe there was light coming in through the tears of my heart, but I didn’t know how to get through the pain to discover that light.

As I looked at what I was doing with my life, I grasped the truth of the poet Jack Gilbert, who said, “We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”³ I realized that the life I had created was no longer the life I could live. I had learned a particular way of naming reality. The people and actions of my life were constructed in a particular way, creating constellations by which I named them. The constellations were named husband, pastor, father, and son. But as life’s structures disappeared, I was unable to name myself and was left looking at a black sky with millions of stars. I could no longer see the constellations—just the stars.

Dim Lights

I found myself slowing down because I didn’t know who I was anymore. When I experienced the loss of my wife, my dad, my job, and the community I had called home, someone turned off the lights in my life. When you can’t see very well, you don’t move as fast.

The lights don’t go off all of a sudden. Sometimes when one experiences a painful loss, there is a sudden burst of bright light. Sometimes when one inquires how a person is doing soon after the death of her husband, the answer may be, “She is doing amazingly well. She’s taking care of business.” Painful loss often produces a spurt of energy and clarity that one seldom experiences in the normal routine of life. Adrenaline rushes through our system, which insulates us from the pain and energizes us to endure the stress produced by the loss.

For most of us though that light begins to dim when our energy runs out. The energy required to deal with the immediate need to simply hold on and create some temporary stability is soon depleted. The clarity provided by the immediate tasks soon fades as the fog of unknowing descends upon us. We often find ourselves sleeping much more than we did before. The dark of sleep is much more welcoming than the light of reality that faces us.

This slowing down is very much related to the inability to see where we are going. It is very much like the descending sunset and the emerging dark of night. We find ourselves drawn to the immediacy of the present by the palpable pain of emptiness and fear. We don’t want to look far ahead. We just want to rest in the present. We knew the way forward when the person we lost was still living with us, even if the way was tough. When that person is gone, we have a much harder time deciding where we are going.

Fran was married for fifteen years. Several times during her marriage, her husband physically abused her. Despite the abuse, she stayed with him because she loved him and believed the stability of the marriage was best for her and her children. She learned how to make it through most of the days and years without suffering abuse. She walked on eggshells, but she walked nonetheless. She knew if she avoided certain topics and gave in when he became angry, she would be okay.

However, one night the abuse became so brutal Fran decided she had had enough. She was terrorized by her husband, and she was terrorized by the thought of leaving her husband. But she finally found the courage to leave.

The freedom Fran felt when she left was almost as frightening as the terror of her husband. How could she live? How would she support her children? How could she be a single parent? Darkness descended, and Fran did not know what to do. The energy she had mustered to leave her husband had now evaporated, leaving Fran depressed and exhausted. She felt as if someone had turned out the lights.

Reorienting in the Dark

When the “lights go out” and we are unable to see clearly where we are going, we slow down. We sometimes stop. We try to become reoriented. Because the eyes do not pick up signals that help us know where we are, we often use our other senses. We reach out a hand, feeling our way along. We listen, trying to determine if we hear something that sounds familiar. Our sense of smell stretches up on tiptoe, trying to detect something that can give us a sense of where we are.

I remember hiking in the woods several years ago. Initially I was following trails others had made but eventually began to feel adventurous, wanting to explore unknown areas. I took off through the underbrush, sure I would come across another trail. As the sun started to set, I was hopelessly lost. I began to feel anxiety because I was losing my sight in the dimming light. There was nothing that gave me a clue as to where I was. Then I saw some deer droppings and realized that deer had been on the narrow path I was following. I also listened and heard automobile traffic in the distance. I knew the road went north and determined that I was facing west. My senses helped orient me, and I soon found my way back to the trail and returned to my car.

When it is dark, we slow down and use other senses to find our way. At this time in the journey through change and loss, we begin to understand the struggle of faith reflected in the worship of the unseen God. The apostle Paul told the people of Corinth not to lose heart because people of faith look “not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). When we slow down because what we have seen has disappeared, we gain insight into the power of the unseen to open up the future.

Slowing Down

When we lose someone or some activity, we slow down to a speed that feels safe. Each step is a cautious effort. Someone once told me that he had experienced the loss of his mother as a descending darkness. He said he had to live as if he were driving at night. He could only go as fast as his headlights would allow him to see.

When we have lost someone or something that has helped define who we are, remembering that we are in the dark and our eyes have to adjust can be helpful. It helps to remember that our friends may be offering a flashlight of encouragement to help us see a little farther ahead, but these are their flashlights and not ours. We see the future in the dark as only a vague outline. When driving in the darkness without lights, we have difficulty determining what is ahead of us. The uncertainty of what we see means we move cautiously, in spite of our own desire or the desire of others that we move more quickly.

Moving forward in the dark is deceptive and often confusing. Sometimes we think we see clearly, and other times we are certain we don’t see anything at all. When my wife Deborah and I first started dating, we were both in free fall. Deborah was adjusting to being single after a divorce that ended a twenty-five-year marriage. I was adjusting to single life after losing my wife to death, my career to a job change, and my home of twenty years. When Deborah and I first began to date, we saw clearly and the passion was palpable. We saw clearly by the burning passion. Then one of us would become scared, and the night of uncertainty would envelop us and we would back away from the relationship. This occurred a couple of times over a three-year period. Eventually the darkness of fear and uncertainty gave way to more consistent light, and we decided to move ahead together. We began to make plans for further down the road rather than simply on the impulse of the moment. We began to wake up not only to our present feelings and fears but also to the dreams and hopes that light the path into the future.

Back Roads

I became aware that my journey of living through loss was more frequently traveled on the back roads of life. As I sorted through the emotional rubble of my life, I could not deal with the intensity of interstates and major highways. As I traveled to work from my home or to my mother’s home five hundred miles away, I would choose the roads less traveled. Something drew me to the slower, less confusing route.

I then read a book that helped me understand what I was doing. Milan Kundera, in his book Immortality, talks of the differences between highways and roads. He suggests that highways are intended to get us from point A to point B as quickly as possible. The space between point A and point B is of little positive value. It is simply space to be passed through quickly.

Roads, on the other hand, value the space and are part of the landscape. They are designed to be traversed on foot or driven slowly. He said that before roads disappeared from the landscape they disappeared from the soul. Humans seem determined to live life always looking for it when they arrive rather than seeing the road as their life.⁴

Living with the losses of my life slowed me down and opened me to the life that is the journey rather than the life that is a destination. Kundera spoke to the deep desire I had discovered to slow down and to allow life to be lived in me. I had spent much of my life traveling from point A to point B and was living at such furious speed that I failed to notice life along the road. As I traveled the back roads of my soul, I slowly discovered rich insights into living life more fully, experiences that occur to us and that, whether we want them to happen or not, can be gifts of life to us. I realized that loss is the one of the fundamental things in life you can count on and that through loss you can discover your life.

Change and Loss

Loss is the one constant in life because change is the nature of life. Change is the one incontrovertible truth about reality. If something is alive, it is changing. And if something is changing, something is dying. I have realized that loss opens up the future in ways nothing else can. Loss makes new life possible.

This is a very difficult perspective to sell in our society, which believes that winning is everything. One of the worst things a person can be called is a loser. Our culture is enchanted with the winners, the celebrities, the people “on top.” We are simultaneously cruel and callous toward those who were on top and then fell.

The message of this book—that we lose our way to new life—is not easy to sell. However, it is a word of truth and hope for those ordinary people who live life in its fullness. It makes sense to those who have experienced what life delivers to all—the experience of losing something that is core to who we see ourselves to be.

Mantra

I discovered how much hope this understanding offers when I was invited to speak at a national gathering. I was asked to share my spiritual journey in eight minutes. Accepting the challenge, I boiled down my life and realized that I could sum up my spiritual journey in the following mantra:

To live is to love. To love is to lose. To lose is to live.

In looking back at my life, I see that love creates life. What we love makes us who we are. If we love words, we become someone who lives with words. If we love baseball, we will spend time playing or watching it because it makes us feel alive. What we love gives us life.

We may love ourselves at a particular time in our lives. We may have loved high school. We may have loved that dress. We may have loved being a mother who nursed her baby. If we love our children, we become the type of person who is a parent to the children, and we shape our lives according to what the love of a child demands of us. If we love our job, we become a person shaped by that job. We love created things, and in loving we create ourselves.

Because we love what is not permanent, we are guaranteed to lose. Because we love what constantly changes, we will eventually lose what we know as we know it. That much is assured. We may love our job, but eventually we will lose that job—because we lose our love for what we are doing or someone more qualified may be hired or because we retire or we die doing our job. At some point, we will lose what we love; what makes us know that we are alive will disappear. To love is to lose.

The guarantee that we will lose holds true for our faith as well. Faith is a human construct. We create an understanding of our lives in relationship to God. We use symbols and language to create that understanding. These symbols, while shaped by divine power and history, are constructs of the human mind. The way we construct meaning in our lives through the symbols of our faith will change. Therefore, when we are faced with a crisis that results in losing whatever we have come to count on, the way we imagine God can also change and we may lose our faith. The object of our love is a construct of the human heart and mind. Since we constructed it, we can lose it.

We become who we are by what we love. When we lose what we love, we lose part of who we are. If our spouse walks out on us after twenty years of marriage, we will no longer be the person we were. Sometimes we have become so shaped by the way love was expressed for our partner that we lose a significant part of ourselves. Our sadness and pain is therefore as much for the loss of ourselves as it is for the loss of the other.

To live is to love. To love is to lose. But to lose is to live. If we lose one part of our life, we become open to another part. If we love having young children at home, when they grow up and leave home the empty space created by their leaving opens the door to love something else—like the freedom to travel or to visit with adults without interruption. When something disappears, it opens the space for something else.

Loss opens new space with regard to faith as well. When the way we understood God as a child no longer helps us navigate the swirling waters of adult life, we sometimes give up faith all together. For those who continue to immerse themselves in the stories and rituals of faith, new insights into the character of the Divine can emerge. When I lost confidence in the words that had been my life, I was driven into a wilderness of silence. But it was there that I realized how limited my experience of God was. I had understood God to be word. In the midst of the empty desert of silence and despair, I discovered that God is also silence—God is not only what fills space, but God is also the space that is filled. Emptiness creates space for new and expanding life.

When my granddaughter was four years old, her baby teeth began to fall out and she smiled her toothless smile. She was scared when the first one fell out, but her fear eased when she put it under her pillow and received money from the tooth fairy. Now she is proud—new teeth are coming in. She is excited about the new teeth. Her fear faded as she grew in the confidence that new teeth would replace the ones that were lost. Had she not lost those teeth, there would have been no room for new teeth. To lose is to live.

How do we learn to live with loss? How do we find the courage to embrace the empty space that creates room for new life?

Growing through Grieving

Living well through loss involvess learning how to grieve. Grieving teaches us to live again in the absence of someone or something significant. Grieving isn’t just a time of unbearable emptiness and tears but a whole process of becoming a new person shaped by the memory of what is lost, not defined by it.

Grieving enables us to become a person who has experienced a divorce, not a divorced person. It enables us to become a person who has lost a partner, not a widow. It enables us to become a person who has experienced the loss of a job, not a loser. Grieving enables us to know ourselves as persons who lose something when change occurs, not as people who are losers.

Therefore grieving is a process that takes time. It is not an easy process if the loss for which you grieve represented a defining reality in your life. The amount of time grieving takes is related to the depth of the loss. When a young man loses an important basketball game, he will go through this process relatively quickly. The process helps him attend to the pain of the loss and become free of that pain, so it won’t define how he plays the next game. He will be shaped by the loss but not controlled by it. A woman whose husband dies the year before he is due to retire will take longer to find the new life through this process of grieving and growing. Her identity and self-understanding have developed over a number of years, and the losses will be more complex and multidimensional.

The process of grieving involves pain because it is a birthing process, a stretching and tearing that opens the way for a new spirit to emerge. It requires the knitting together of painful and pleasant memories to discover a new way of understanding ourselves.

As I worked on this process in my own life, I did a great deal of reading and study of spirituality and growth. I came to realize that the process of grieving loss, of learning to live in the absence of someone or something significant, parallels what many religions call a spiritual pilgrimage. To grow spiritually isn’t simply the practice of reading about the good ideas of others; it is about the way we process the changes in our lives, about the way we travel from death to life as we move from what is lost to what is yet to love. Spiritual growth is about living through a breaking, stretching, aching, remaking process of letting go of that which is gone and taking on a life formed in response to what is becoming.

Those who practice spiritual disciplines know that emptiness and loss are the womb for rebirth. They discipline themselves to create silence—space empty of words—in which their hearing is sharpened to hear more. In the closing of their eyes to the bright light of sight, they see what can only be seen in the dark. In the fasting from food, they experience the nourishment that comes from a hungry body. When they give alms, they learn that true wealth comes from an empty space in the wallet. When they offer hospitality, they discover the gifts of strangers who now have space in the empty chair at the table. Spiritual growth is about loss and emptiness. It is the result of space that is created when what we have trusted to hold us is not present.

Death and Rebirth

In my childhood home, words were sovereign. They were fed to me with my mother’s milk. I learned to relish them and to trust them. As I learned to speak, my parents constantly reminded me how to speak correctly. They taught me that there are words that build up and words that tear down. If I used words that tore down (telling my brother he was “stupid,” for instance), I paid a high price. If I used words that my mother felt demeaned the human enterprise (like “damn” or “hell”), I was required to go pick my own switch and roll up my pant legs. I became a student, and spoken and printed words fed my mind. I became a singer, and poetic words dressed in notes became my soul’s food.

After the series of deaths and losses that invaded my life over a decade ago, however, words died for me. They lost their power. I lost my voice. I realized that words are like dust—cast to the wind and scattered, seldom having the lasting effect one desires.

The result was my inability to read or write. I lost the focus necessary to follow a sentence across the page and hold its meaning in my mind. I tried writing but could not develop any confidence in it.

When I spoke in public, I felt tentative—stumbling and qualifying. I came to realize that the mind in chaos has a hard time taking words into itself and ordering them into any sense. Because my mind couldn’t process the way it was accustomed to, I discovered I was much more in touch with my body and my soul. My heart was also confused, and I couldn’t stay in relationships very well. I realized these losses had effectively driven me out of my mind and into my body, out of my heart and into my soul.

After several years of struggle, I was surprised by a realization that freed me to put these words down on a page and send them out to others in a book. One crisp fall day, I was hiking in the forest that has become my playground and sat on a bench looking at what I call the broccoli tree. (It looks like a hundred-foot stalk of broccoli.) As the last of the late-autumn leaves drifted to the ground, I had a deep sense of sadness. I realized the words I had spoken most of my life were much like the fallen leaves. My words had fallen from my lips and turned brown. The smell of decay was in the air. Most of the words by which I had made my living had long ago disintegrated. They were not remembered, nor were they framed and put on a wall.

As I pondered this process, I settled into a deep sense of contentment. Yes, the leaves fall and die. Yes, the words fall on people’s ears and die. The decaying leaves become the humus that nourishes the tree and becomes the fertile home for the gestation of new seedlings. Maybe that is what words do—they are not to live forever. They are simply designed to fall and die and silently and perpetually fertilize the new life that emerges from the earth.

As I came to this understanding, I was released from my block and decided I could write again. Then as I was relaxing in the crisp fall sun, an acorn fell and struck me right on top of my head. All the fluttering, descending leaves had spoken so gently and then suddenly, one hard little acorn dropped from nowhere and made its point. Only a few words make an impact. The rest do their work of decay and death, becoming humus for the nurturing of new life.

This book is intended to be both brown leaves and hard acorns. It is a result of the journey from trust and confidence in the life I had been given, the collapse of that life, and the emergence of new life and understanding.

In this book you will be invited to explore ten dimensions of reality we experience as we learn to embrace the new and leave the old. You will be encouraged to explore your suffering and open yourself to rebirth as the gift that comes to those who pay attention to their lives and who have the courage and patience to discover the gifts that are a part of losing, loving, and living.

As the ten dimensions of experience common to loss are identified, you are invited to recognize them in your own journey, to attend to your feelings and your thoughts as you experience them. I encourage you to slow down and explore the gifts that come through these experiences. (“A Discovery Journal” at the end of this book will help you write your way through your loss and into new life.) I believe that when you work your way through your loss in this way, you will find new parts of yourself and new resources for living a rich and vital life in the future.

In this book we will also identify persons who might be companions for your journey. When Jesus came face-to-face with his own death, he took some friends to the garden with him when he prayed. He knew that the journey through suffering and death to new life is not one that should be taken alone. As you explore your loss and hope for new life, you will want to seek out friends who can walk with you. You need several. No one person can be all things to you. Sometimes you need intimate friends; sometimes you need strangers. I have discovered that the presence of multiple companions helps us to live these experiences more fully and to discover new parts of ourselves that we might miss were we to walk alone. When you walk with others through these experiences, you can help them grow in spirit and life if you attend to some of these ways of being present with them.

Welcome to the journey. Welcome to the pilgrimage. Welcome to the discovery of life.