Of Lent and Love

Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Christian season of Lent, and Valentine's Day will both be celebrated next week.  The calendar has them falling just a day apart this year with Ash Wednesday on Wednesday and Valentine's Day on Thursday.  While these two days stand for something quite different from one another, I would like to share a brief reflection that might actually help us to see what these two days have in common.Imagine a person buys a beautiful bouquet of flowers for his or her beloved for Valentine's day.  The person receiving the flowers is moved to tears and says, “Your expression of love means SO much to me.  Thank you so much.”  And then imagine the person giving the flowers responds by saying, “Well, it is Valentine's Day you know and I didn't want you to be mad at me if I didn't do something for you today.” Ouch!  The flowers in and of themselves would have been a wonderful gift.  But when the person says, “I just didn't want you to be mad at me,” all of the positive energy of the gift of the flowers disappears.  Why?  Because the giver of the flowers revealed that their giving of the flowers was motivated not by love, but fear.  Giving someone a gift because you are afraid they might be mad otherwise is very different than giving that gift to express genuine love. This is where Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day have something in common.  Our true motives in regard to how we approach each of these days makes all the difference.  Because organized religion has so often encouraged a fear-based approach to getting people to do the right thing, many people approach Ash Wednesday, the season of Lent, and many religious traditions in the  spirit of, “I better do something because I don't want God to be mad at me.”  In matters of love and spirituality, the “why” we do something is as important as the “what” we do.  Rather than approach Lent from a place of fear or guilt, why not approach it from this kind of mindset? “I choose to do certain things in this season of Lent in order to strengthen my connection with God because I am grateful and thankful for for God's love and for all that God has given me.” If you will be celebrating Ash Wednesday and Lent, and if you will be celebrating Valentine's Day next week, I encourage you to do so with a spirit of love and delight.  Give of yourself freely because you truly desire to do so and not because you are worried about what might happen if you do not. A portion of Psalm 51 which will be  read at Ash Wednesday services everywhere says,

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.  Give me the joy of your saving help again...” (Psalm 51:11,13).  

Love in any form, from those on Earth or that of God, indeed renews the spirit within us and when we feel it we, cannot help but express in return that loving spirit with joy and delight.  The expression of heartfelt feelings of love in any form is only authentic and meaningful if the motivation itself is grounded in love, not fear.  When we are clear about the motivation, the “what” we do or give becomes less important and the true expression of gratitude and thanksgiving for that love takes care of itself, both on Valentine's Day and in observing Lent.

Falling Upward

One of the best books I have read in the last five years is Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr.  When I had a chance to be part of the FORMA Annual Conference this past week  in Albuquerque, NM at which Rohr was going to speak, I was naturally excited.  It's not always the case that an great author is also a great speaker, but I am delighted to report that Richard Rohr is both.Rohr is a priest in the Franciscan order who integrates wisdom from spirituality and depth psychology.  He has traveled the world the last forty-two years leading retreats and conferences on wholeness and wellness.  Falling Upward, published in 2011,is a book about the two halves of our lives.  The first half of life, according to Rohr, is characterized by external growth, expansion, and accomplishment.  It the time of life when people finish school, begin careers, begin relationships and families, and most things in one's life are on an upward trajectory.  Rohr talks about the first half of life as being primarily about building and solidifying one's identity and one's ego. In contrast, Rohr describes the second half of life as being primarily about deepening one's identity and about developing one's soul.  In the second half of life, things begin to get more complicated.  Loss becomes more prevalent.  Relationships end through separation or death.  Bad things happen to good people.  Dreams fall short and disappointments occur. We begin to face the finite limits of our lives in the second half of life.  Things begin to fall apart, but the point that Rohr makes is that we have a choice when we face an experience of things falling apart.  We can choose to fall down, or we can choose to fall upward--hence the name for his book. Rohr's book resonates completely with my own experience in life, both personally and professionally.  In my experience, all spiritual growth--all growth of the soul--occurs in response to working through some experience of loss, some experience of facing a problem that cannot be solved by simply working harder (the striving of the ego).  Another way to capture this is to quote one of my favorite sayings:  wisdom is simply healed pain.  Those who face and heal their pain as they move into and through the second half of life become wise.  They are the sages and elders of our lives whose wisdom and council we regularly seek.  Their souls are well developed.  They have a depth and a gravitas that is palpable.  Those who do not face and heal their pain in the second half of life, become constricted, bitter, and cynical.   Rohr captured this difference in his talk this week when he said, “we have a growing population of elderly in our country, but not necessarily a growing population of elders.” The field of personal growth literature is vast.  Much of it is geared toward the first half of life, toward what Rohr would call the growth of the ego.  Most of these books are some version of “Ten Steps To A Better You.”  There is of course nothing wrong with this kind of literature as far as it goes.  But if you are looking for a book that will nurture the growth of your soul, look no farther than Falling Upward by Richard Rohr.  You can read the book an a couple of days, but you will spend the rest of your life integrating and benefiting from its wisdom. Regular readers of this column know that one of my favorite sayings is, “Change is inevitable.  Growth is optional.”  Richard Rohr makes this more specific, by saying, “Falling is inevitable.  Falling upward is optional.”  Rohr says that when we fall upward, what we come to discover is that what is falling away as we get older is the false self, and that what is finally emerging is the true self.  He is clear though, that this is a choice that we have to make.  We make it one day at a time, in community with those we love and trust, and in community with a Higher Power who is always guiding us to discover our true selves.

The Eyes of Our Children Are Upon Us

The best parenting advice my wife and I ever received was not to be so concerned about whether our children were listening to us or not, but to be more concerned with the fact that they were always watching us.  This wisdom is not just for parents; it is for all adults--grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, youth leaders, teachers, coaches, clergy, and all of us who have children in our lives who are watching us.  I was reminded of the wisdom of this advice when I watched the televised confession that Lance Armstrong made to Oprah Winfrey and the world last week. Being an avid biker, as well as an avid student of the human psyche, I was very interested in watching the entire two and a half hours of Armstrong's interview last weekend.  In case you missed the interview, I want to highlight one moment that illustrated so clearly the wisdom I have already mentioned that was shared with us so long ago.  It was two hours into the interview before Lance Armstrong showed vulnerability and emotion.  This occurred when he began to talk about how his lying and deception had begun to affect his thirteen year old son.  It was not the loss of his friends, team mates, or sponsors that caused him to break down in the interview.  Instead, it was when he talked about overhearing his son telling his friends from school that the media was all wrong and that his dad was innocent and had never cheated in any way.  After all of those years of lying it was when he heard his lies being imitated by his son that the seriousness of what he was doing finally became real to him.  He knew then that he needed to tell the truth to his son, and that eventually he would need to do the same with his four other younger children. Armstrong's son was simply doing what all young people do.  They watch the important adults in their lives and believe what they say and do without question.  There are few things more humbling for a parent or any adult than when they see or hear one of their own bad habits being imitated by a child.  For Lance Armstrong, it appears that it was his child that humbled him and did something that all the powerful adults in his life could not do.  It was a child that got him to tell the truth. Children need us to tell the truth.  Children need us to live the truth.  This is their greatest blessing to us and it is our greatest challenge. In their innocence and dependence on us children ask us to align our lives with what we say we believe so they have something to hold onto as they learn to how to live in this complex world.   They unknowingly ask us as well to align our lives with our ideals and core values so they will have a compass to guide them.  They ask us to walk the talk.  And when we get off track and make mistakes--which we inevitably all do at times--they simply ask us to tell the truth, acknowledge our mistakes, and move forward in a renewed way.  This is hopefully what Lance Armstrong is doing, and it is hopefully what all of us who are blessed to have children watching us, are doing on a regular basis.

Many Kinds of Help

My colleague, Edith Braeger, and I were recently co-facilitating a Living Compass Parent Wellness group at nearby church.  Our group of eleven met for six weeks and as always happens in a Living Compass group, there was a great deal of honest and heartfelt sharing about the full range of joys and concerns that life and parenting brings.As Edith and I were there as the facilitators of the group, we started each session with a short lesson related to parenting wellness. and opened things up for a group discussion.  With this group, as with every Living Compass group, we found ourselves over time speaking less and the group members talking more.  Each week, as trust began to build in the group, the parents turned more and more to each other for help.  One mother risked sharing with the group that she yells at her kids way too much.  She ventured to ask the group if others also had struggled with that.  Another parent immediately responded,  “All I know is that when I lose it with my kids, that's more about me than about my kids.  It means I'm stressed out and not doing well myself.”  Apparently that honest reply was just what this mother needed to hear as she immediately stopped talking about how poorly behaved kids were and, shifting focus, spent the next few minutes talking about how stressed she was at work because  she hated her boss  and yet  she couldn't afford to quit her job.  The group listened with compassion and then offered some advice on how to mange her boss.  She was greatly relieved and thanked the group for their support. Living Compass groups are not therapy groups.  They are made up of people just like you and me who get stressed and out of balance sometimes.  While all the groups have trained facilitators, most of the best advice in these groups comes from the wisdom of the other participants..  It always seems that some other person has just the right piece of wisdom, based on their own life experience, that is just what the other person needs to hear at that moment  There is a collective wisdom in the group that each person takes turns benefitting from. I was thinking about all of this when I learned that Pauline Phillips, better known by her pen name Abigail Van Buren, died this week at the age of ninety-four.  Her column,    Dear Abby, with a regualr readership of over 110 million begun in 1956 and  ran for over 40 years.  She regularly dispensed advice about parenting, marriage, difficult relatives, and the problems of everyday life.  Like the parents in the Living Compass group that I mentioned above that were providing compassionate, helpful support to one another, Abigail Van Buren had no professional training.  What she had was a warm, caring heart, and a collection of wisdom that simply came from life experience. The term “professional help” is often used when a person is struggling with a life issue, as in “maybe it's time to seek professional help.”   As a licensed therapist who has been honored to offer such help to people for over thirty years, I of course, am a strong proponent of seeking professional help when needed and believe that there should be no shame or stigma in seeking such help.  Yet, in the spirit of what I see in Living Compass groups, and in the help provided through the Dear Abby column, I am reminded that most of the help that we provide to one another is of the “unprofessional” kind.   This is the sharing of the kind of empathy, wisdom and life lessons that friends, neighbors, family members, colleagues, 12-step groups, etc. offer to each other every day. The world has changed a great deal since Abigail Van Buren started writing her Dear Abby column in 1956.  Our world has become more technical, more professional, and more complex.   In honor of Abigail Van Buren's passing away, it's good for all of us to pause and remember though, that wise words spoken with compassion and humor never go out of style. In honor of “Dear Abby” we can all strive to be better listeners to others concerns and, if asked, share empathic advise based on our own life lessons and wisdom. I close with some compassionate and humorous words, taken from a Swedish toast,  that Van Buren said were important for guiding her life. May these words be her parting wisdom to us all. "Fear less; hope more. Eat less; chew more. 

Talk less; say more. Hate less; love more."

An Attitude of Playfulness

Above is a photo with a quote that was posted on our Living Compass Facebook page a few days ago. We use our Facebook page regularly to share inspiring quotes and wisdom that are aligned with our Living Compass approach to being well with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. We usually get good responses to what we post, but the response to this particular photo and quote has been exceptional. Many of our Living Compass friends "shared" it with their friends on Facebook and as a result thousands of people have now seen this post. Furthermore, we are able to see that dozens of "friends of friends" have continued to share it and so, on and on it goes. Obviously, this photo and quote struck a cord with folks! So the question this begs of course, is why did this one post get so much interest? I think the reason this post on Facebook moved so many people is that most of us have more than enough "seriousness" in our lives and what we indeed desire and need is more playfulness. I can certainly relate to that, and most of the people I talk with everyday express this sentiment as well. Growing older is inevitable. Being playful as we grow older is a choice. A few people I spoke with responded to the photo with comments such as, "I wish had the time or money to go on a beach vacation like that, but that's not going to happen anytime soon." For these people, the photo might have, unfortunately, have actually created more stress and seriousness rather than playfulness!

Perhaps it would be helpful if we expanded our understanding of playfulness to include much more than merely going on a vacation. I believe that playfulness is not primarily something we do, but is rather an attitude, an outlook on life that we choose. In many situations and endeavors, we can choose to bring either a very serious or a very playful energy and outlook to the situation. I know for myself, the attitude I bring to any conversation has a direct impact on all those around me. If I am grumpy and serious, the conversation we will both feel tense and constricted, and I'll grow older a lot faster! If I decide instead to start the conversation with humor and good will, the conversation will be lighter and expansive and we will feel that way as well.

Mother Theresa once wrote that people should not worry about whether they are doing many great, heroic acts of love in their lives, but rather they should focus on doing all the little things they do in life with great love.

This seems to work regarding the importance of play, too. Let's not just wait for the big, special vacation to play. Let's find a way to bring playfulness into all of the little things we do each day. Of course, some things we do and some situations we encounter can only be very serious. Most of time though, there is room for us to bring a greater spirit of playfulness into our lives and into our relationships. Think for a moment about people that energize you when you are around them. I would guess that they are people who have a good balance of playfulness and seriousness in their lives and in their interactions with you.

The good feeling we get from the photo of the couple playing in the waves reminds us how important it is to take time to be playful. Being playful in the breaking ocean waves comes pretty easily for most of us. We will most likely have to work a little harder though to keep a playful attitude in the midst of the waves of stress that break fairly regularly in our daily lives. Life is indeed quite serious at times, but it's also presents more opportunities to be playful than we perhaps realize. So whether or not you are going to be heading to a beach anytime soon, remember that deciding to be playful is as much an attitude as it is an activity.

What are your thoughts about why this photo and quote received such a positive response on our Facebook page? Email us your thoughts and also thoughts about having a playful attitude in general. Or better yet, "like" our Living Compass Facebook page and share your thoughts there!