My father said it 10,000 times when he prayed over our dinner, “Father, give us the right use of our minds.” Somehow, mental health was as important to Dad as daily bread. As a smart teen-ager, I tossed his prayer and many other things he said into the regions of outer darkness, another vain repetition unheard by God and without significance for anything I cared about then.
I’ll be sixty-two in a few months, and Dad’s plea means more as I observe the suffocating results of a society living life, or some poor imitation of it, never knowing quite who they are or afraid to reveal themselves as they truly are. Fears of being known, as the image of the ideal person has become almost god-like, lead men and women, and now even our adolescent children, to pretend to be something we are not. We create personas – false identities that dictate our behavior, one for this crowd, another for that, yet another to protect us from the difficult reality around us. A thousand kinds of stress and insecurity fine-tune our natural ability to create the image of the self we wish we were, and ultimately, the false-self that destroys us.
We learn early it is not safe to be us.
Our era is further complicated by relational idiocy where few of us are talking about things we really care about. Little wonder that is. Think about your own home, your own life. Do you have time or even a place for real conversation unless some kind of emergency forces it? Television, social media, twitter’s and tweets, social expectations, sports and other entertainment, say nothing about long work days and our kids’ fast-track schedules, all demanding that we live in a world of noise no human can endure. Our sorrows cannot find expression, our creative energy is spent, joy left us ages ago, and our inner resources are long past renewing themselves. What’s left is a fair amount of anger, angst, and avarice, and with it disappointments we noticed in others but never expected to find within ourselves.
If you’ve already made a resolution for the New Year, forget it. Go find a couple rocking chairs and dedicate a little corner of your world to the life-changing virtue of conversation. “The quiet” can be jolting. When external noise first goes away those freaky inner voices, our demented little instructors that whisper and scream our lies and half-truths at us, start their torment again. That’s the big thing most of us cannot stand and why we run to find more noise, which is why you need two rocking chairs, not one, where a spouse or a friend and you can actually talk and make the lies of our existence bow to what is good and true, where the beauty of who you are can be rediscovered and restored. Manufacturers still make remotes and iEverything with off buttons. It takes strength of spirit to make our fingers do what our minds will not.
Sorrow and loss have a way of opening our hearts, our minds, and finally our mouths to express what we think and feel, and ultimately, to reveal who we are to each other and to God. To that end, sorrow can be an ally. In the presence of a caring spouse or friend it is the GPS that locates us and gives us a mapping system to understand who we are. If you’re like me, you resist every bit of pain that comes your way, and you are self-wired to keep the hamster cage of your mind spinning, spinning, spinning. Even so, I would not trade what I have learned in the hard times or the friends that lift me up when I am down.
No one escapes this life without enduring enormous grief. What we all need at the gate of the New Year is deep rest, the rest that comes in the presence of a kind and truthful friend. We cannot do sorrow alone, nor can we restore what was lost in our humanity in isolation or silence. How unfortunate that so many people arrive at the end not having been alive in the deep, deep ways men and women were created to live.
Eighteen months ago we laid my father’s 91 year old body in a grave in a little country church-yard in Pennsylvania. Until the very end, Dad was completely alert, reading, thinking, in control of his mind, kind and gracious to everyone. He slept the last five hours in this world snoring to the delight of his seven children gathered around his bed. Who knew the contented snores of a good father would bring joy and comfort, with sorrow, as a final celebration of a man whose prayer of a life-time for a sound mind would be answered to his very last breath?
Wes Yoder is author of Bond of Brothers – Connecting with Other Men beyond Work, Weather and Sports and lives in Franklin, Tennessee
www.BondofBrothers.net
© Copyright 2012 Wes Yoder. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
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Maybe we’re trying to pray together before we learn how to talk with each other ….and while we are in our little impersonal groups we try to be present with God without being present with each other. But being with Him in Spirit and Truth is impossible if we are not with each other in the same way.
Wes Yoder 