The Wheel Keeps Turning

Greetings Pilgrims,
 
A recent daily meditation from Episcopal priest and educator Alice Updike Scannell (found via Richard Rohr of course :)) spoke to me, as they often do, and made me think of the number of serious health issues many Pilgrim families are facing so I thought I would share it. The full meditation is here, but these paragraphs were especially poignant for me:
 
Attending to our spirituality is an essential skill for radical resilience. The kinds of challenges and adversities in life that demand radical resilience usually cause pain and suffering. We cannot handle pain and suffering without spiritual support. Much of that spiritual support will come from people—some from those we know and some from strangers who offer a kind word or come forward to help when we need it. We might also find spiritual support through our religious traditions, …[or other practices].
 
However, not all religions or spiritual belief systems are helpful for radical resilience….. The kind of spirituality that serves as a radical resilience skill respects the dignity of every human being; understands that all beings, the environment, and the universe are interconnected; views the Higher Power as loving; and holds honesty, self-awareness, compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation, openness, acceptance, and healing as core values.  
 
…..Our childhood understanding of spirituality is usually not adequate when we experience the kind of adversity that changes our life forever. When we search for the meaning in what has happened to us, and we search for an understanding of who we are when we can’t do what we used to do, or be who we used to be, then we need spiritual resources that go deeper….  
 
Yet even when we have a strong sense of spirituality and relationship with the sacred, we can experience anguish, doubt, despair, misery, and darkness. James Hollis calls these experiences “swampland visitations”...Encounters with these [painful] experiences in the spiritual framework of resilience ultimately lead to enlargement, not diminishment. “If truth be told, we wish we didn’t have to grow,” writes Hollis, “but life is asking more of us than that.” [2]
 
I can’t and don’t believe in a punishing God, and it’s hard to believe in an all powerful God when we see and experience hurt happening near and far in our world. Scannell’s words remind me of how to allow for a God in my heart that flows in around all of this. A God that teaches us to widen our gaze to see what is good, how we are together, and where we have opportunities to lighten each other's burdens. 
 
Much love,
 
Felix