We clergy frequently don’t practice what we preach. It’s because we’re not sure how such practices may apply to us. Periodically I get lost in my spiritual life and I go back – to be really honest, I am forced to go back to basics and revisit the ABC’s of my profession. In the alphabet at the heart of spirituality, some letters spell trust, and other words spell, ‘let go.’
I experience periodic comeuppances in my spiritual life. I drift for a while and pay my soul little mind. Something happens and I find that I’m far from where I need to be on my journey. I was confronted with this only a few weeks ago. I was forced to listen to my heart. My heart was not happy with me. It told me so in no uncertain terms. I’d not been aware. I stopped listening.
My comeuppance came down this way.
From the first of this year until about April, I had a number of projects in the works. I’d gone for a winter break in Puerto Rico and then to Florida to visit with children and grandchildren. It was good fun, but on returning I was inundated with the work required for a number of my commitments. I was facing publication dates for my columns and a considerable amount of juggling to put together a course I hoped to offer. I love doing this, but now I was to develop the course in a new setting. All this required two things I don’t do well; attention to detail and going about each task in a gentle and organized way. For personalities such as my own, this is a problem.
In addition to being hyper, my mind has many of my boyhood ADD characteristics, which don’t always work well under pressure – namely that I either become hyper focused or completely scattered.
And so, not long ago in the midst of trying frantically to hold my little world together, I got up for breakfast, ready to leave the house to go hear a speaker I’d arranged for my Elders group when I felt pressure in my chest and began feeling faint. My first reaction was not that I’m having a heart attack, but I hoped this wouldn’t interfere with my agenda.
I tried to ignore the symptoms, but they wouldn’t go away.
I felt put upon. Why now, I thought, is my heart giving me a fit at a time when I had so much to do? As the tightness in my chest continued and worsened, I reluctantly told my wife, Jo, I thought something might be wrong and that I needed to go to the ER. And so began a mid course correction in the way I was navigating my corporeal affairs, not to mention my spiritual life. Ironically, I’d gone to the ER at the very time the speaker at my Elder’s group was presenting on how healing is a body-mind connection. Too bad I missed it.
I’m in the emergency room fussing to myself. “Take no thought for the morrow,” the Bible says, “consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor do they spin.” Yeah, sure, that’s good news for lilies. All they have to do is look pretty and smell sweet. I’m a professional, I’m important. I had courses to organize and publishing deadlines to meet. People were depending on me.
Of course all my sputtering and denial eventually, like a summer squall, ran its course, and I slowly began to participate rather than protest the realities of my circumstances.
Warm mists and quietude that feels so soothing often follow spent storms. I was on a gurney with more wires and terminals in me than I’ve seen in computer centers.
The nurse draws blood. I know I have blood, but the poor student nurse can’t find any veins on the first try. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me so I find myself wanting to take care of her. I assure her it’s not her fault and that my veins are notoriously persnickety. Actually they are. The nurses go, the doctor comes in, takes my history and tells me I’ll be there for a while, but that she’d be back to share her findings.
The doctor has a reassuring presence. As she gently inquires about my history, she places her hand on my ankle at the end of the gurney. I react by feeling both vulnerable and cared for. A flood of tenderness wells up within me. It frightens me, not like the fear of illness or death, but the fear of softness, of kindness, the stuff of what the heart is all about. I feel weepy. I keep a stiff upper lift.
In the cubicle Jo sits next to the gurney, reading. We are alone in the room. There’s a curtain pulled for privacy. I see the shoes and sneakers of passersby in the hallway. I try to guess who they are. I’ve lost sense of time and the sweep second hand of the clock on the wall, that minutes before intimidated me because it seemed to hardly move, now didn’t matter. I turned toward Jo, and as if I was seeing her for the first time, I thought, how beautiful she is. Then I thought where have I been for the last thirty-three years? Have I been asleep?
The doctor returned. Again with a gentle smile, she said, “We’ve looked at all the tests, and we are essentially ‘underwhelmed’ by the results; a humorous way of saying, you’re OK.
And then I understood what my overwhelmed heart was trying to tell me all along: stop, let go, be in the present, smell the flowers and get off the treadmill. It’s not all up to you. There’s plenty of love and care out there, just stop, let go, look for it, and let it surround you.
When I was discharged, we went to Ruby Tuesdays for lunch. I ordered the heart smart salmon.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Anne Pilert says
I so appreciated George Merrill’s reflections on his recent “heart tug”. What an excellent reminder for those of us in the senior panic of trying to get it all done and tie it all up in a neat bow. Yes, taking a long slow look at those we love and realizing we need to stop and smell the daffodils will make life a simpler journey and not a marathon. Thank you George!
lin clineburg says
AMEN!