Wilderness Journey
Five years
ago, when Brendan was in kindergarten, we were staying in Jackie Grimmett’s old
house on Eureka Street while she was in India, and Brendan told me one morning
that he felt sick. He held his stomach, he moaned and groaned on the sofa. I
had my suspicions, the dramatic illness looked all too familiar – I can
remember doing the same thing at age five (and age 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 25,
36 and 44 . . . but not age 45 naturally, because now, I have worked all my
issues out and behave perfectly all of the time – thanks to my overweening
pride).
Anyway, I asked Brendan, “Sick,
what do you mean you feel sick?” and he groaned and said, “Ohhhhhh, like when
the tomato comes out of your mouth.” This was a reference to the summer before
when Rachel had eaten fresh tomatoes and I was driving too fast on these
country roads and well, you can imagine what happened.
“Okay then,
I guess you’ll have to stay home from school today,” I said. And Brendan
stopped his pathetic writhing and lay still.
I took
Rachel to school and as I came back into the house, I did so very quietly. I
suspected that Brendan’s illness was faked - only because so many of my own illnesses were faked when I was a child
– and oh, what great offense I used to take whenever my mother would say, “Are
you really sick? You aren’t, by any chance, faking are you?”
“How dare
you accuse me of such a thing,” I used to say self-righteously and then I would
get even more pitifully weak and helpless. Surely now she wouldn’t dare try to
confront me with the truth.
It is kind
of a no win situation, being a parent, or have you noticed? You are damned if
you do and damned if you don’t. The first crazy assumption is that you, just by
virtue of being there, are responsible for everything in the world that happens
. . . and it is all your responsibility. So if you ask the rest of the family
for help, they act like aggrieved martyrs. If you just do things yourself, then
you are resented as an overfunctioning caretaker. Either way, it’s a servant
role and you just do your best at the moment. Just like all forms of authentic
service (which is ministry) there are no kudos attached to it. It is just
something we do, and in service, you do what needs to be done. Hopefully, you
also learn something about yourself in the process, and come to be closer to
God by relying less on trying to get people to like you. We all know that’s
deadly – a parent can’t be trying to get people to like her – that will mean
she can’t do what needs to be done at the moment, which so often the rest of
the family does not like at all.
I figured
that what needed to be done here was to let Brendan know that it is best to be
honest – best not to lie – no matter how much fun lying can be. And let’s face
it, lying is fun – it gives us power over other people because it keeps them in
the dark and keeps them guessing. They don’t know what we really mean and they
are at a distinct disadvantage then. If there were not some reward in it, we
would be dead on honest with one another all the time – and in the adult world,
there is very little of such honesty. No wonder children learn to lie, they are
imitating us of course. We teach them unconsciously that it is a rite of
passage.
But I didn’t
want to teach Brendan this – at least not that morning. So I figured my role as
a mother meant finding a way towards some honest communication.
As I walked
towards the house, I heard the soft sound of bedsprings in motion. Hmmmm. Yes,
as I quietly opened the door, I could hear a voice singing with great delight
in rhythm with the bedsprings. I walked softly, (when I was a child we used to
say, walked like an Indian in the forest – but that’s probably politically
incorrect now) up the stairs and there I saw Brendan jumping up and down on the
bed singing at the top of his lungs in front of the TV set tuned into the
cartoon network. Some of you know that I don’t have television, so cable is
like forbidden fruit to my children – it is twice as sweet.
“Hi
Brendan, what are you doing?” I asked.
Ooooops,
the gig was up. Brendan whirled round and I smiled.
“You know I
used to do the same thing when I was your age,” I said. “Why did you want to
stay home from school?”
He grinned
sheepishly. I was also smiling and inside I was even laughing at the wonderful
humor of catching my child doing what I had done and seeing it clearly.
“There was
a marathon, a whole day of Ed, Ed and Eddie on the cartoon network,” he said.
“I didn’t want to miss it.”
Have you ever
seen “Ed, Ed and Eddie”? It is awful, just awful.
But when I
was a child, and I used to fake sick to stay home from school, I had something
just as awful that fascinated me: the soaps. Both my parents were gone from the
house all day, so when I got to stay home from school, I could taste this
forbidden fruit – the soap operas – with no adults around to stop me. I would
indulge in these programs until I truly was sick.
And the
worst part is that the world begins to resemble these programs if we are not
very watchful. Our minds get filled with these negative ideas, horrible moods,
suspicions of one another, criticisms, judgements, intrigues. And just like in
the soaps, we can always find some villain to blame for our own bad judgments,
nasty moods,
withering criticisms
and suspicions.
Even worse,
we can take great delight in indulging in this fantasy world – and we don’t
think of it as a fantasy world at all, we actually come to think it is real.
Just because a thought enters our mind, we feed it, we nurture it, we give it
lots of attention and we call it real. You can see when you are trying to have
a conversation with someone and they are caught in their own world – nothing
you say or do can penetrate the fog of their negative thinking. And their eyes are
usually quite foggy as well, clouded over and not actually looking at what is
really going on. They have a projection running on the inner screen and it is
coloring the way they see the world.
Guess what?
We all do this. Every day we do this. The fog of fantasy we create from all
these thoughts, and words and deeds is really pretty thick. In Paul’s letters,
he refers to this as “the world.” It is indeed a world of our own making – a
soap opera world of suspicion, competition, intrigue, envy, criticism and
complaint.
That is why
Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days – to get away from all that in order
to try to see clearly.
And we are
invited in Lent to begin to try to see through this fog as well.
We are
invited to test ourselves just a little bit, by fasting from something that is
an ingrained habit. We all have habits of resentment – try giving up one this
Lent.
What if you
gave up (or at least tried to give up) your favorite negative thoughts about
the person you love to hate at this moment? Or what if you gave up complaining
about your spouse? Or what if you gave up thinking about the situation that you
resent the very most?
You might
begin to see and think differently – a larger picture might come into view –
you might find that something inside actually changes?
Of course,
it doesn’t hurt to give up the outward things: watching TV or drinking alcohol
or caffeine or eating sugar. All these things tend to make reality a bit hazy
as well. So trying to do without them can really serve our spiritual growth in
Lent. And most of all, give up thinking that you are going to do anything
perfectly – or that you should. Lent’s wilderness is for our growth and for our
good, not for trying to build a picture of ourselves as perfect. Failing in
these disciplines is really good for us – if we are honest with ourselves –
because authentic humility is what draws us closer to God. If you take up a
discipline in Lent that you know you will accomplish perfectly, you are
probably not being true to the places where sin really gets to you. Take on a
discipline that confronts your own sin. Remember Jesus asks us to confront our
own sins, not to make lists of other people’s sins. So if you find yourself
going over a list of someone’s faults, or the many ways they have offended your
pride, trying giving that up for Lent. Thinking we’ve done it perfectly just
leads to spiritual pride, and that pushes God away more strongly than anything.
Wilderness
– let’s go there. Let’s be simple, and vulnerable, and real with ourselves this
Lent. And let it be done in secret – this is just between you and God. You
don’t have to go about wildly confessing your sins to one another. What you see
in secret about yourself God already knows and the fruit of humility is also
the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
The Rev. Edie Bird
First Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2007
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