| Friday, 5 September 2008 |
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As parents we love our children; their happiness is the most important thing in the world to us, and we want to do everything we can to keep them from pain and harm. It doesn't matter if they're five or thirty five, even grown and out on their own, that desire to protect, the need to help; it never goes away.
You want to protect them with every fibre of your being but sometimes, paradoxically, intervening is the worst thing you can do. It doesn't sound right and it definitely isn't fair, but there it is.
It's hard, really hard during those times when for all your love and concern, there's nothing you can do to stop them from choosing a difficult and painful path. You have to stand back, stay silent, let them go on their own, to strive, experiment, discover, and sometimes falter, because it's their right to make their own choices, and it's the only way they will learn, and grow. Not all their decisions will be right, smart or wise. Like every other human being who's gone before them on their singular life journey, including their parents, they will make mistakes. They'll fall down, they'll stumble and skin their knees, and they'll burn their fingers on the stove you told them not to touch. While you stand there and let them, because you know what, sometimes the only way to learn the lesson is make mistakes, burn your fingers and fall down.
They have to do what they have to do, even if it hurts them, and hurts you more, having to watch, unable to do anything else.
I sometimes wonder if this unanswerable but necessary sorrow, if this is the way God (and I am using this one term to encompass all the various emanations of the Divine Truth as it has expressed itself to humanity through our history. I believe all are valid. Feel free to substitute the name of your choosing) feels when he walks amongst us on this beautiful planet he has given us to shape as we please and sees so many of us stubbornly, willfully hurting ourselves when we refuse to see, refuse to believe, choosing to be selfish and cruel to ourselves and others, because we can and we want to be. What tears does he weep, loving us so much and yet knowing, with a divine, all-encompassing vision and wisdom we can only faintly emulate, but can't even begin to approach, that he must let us be. Yes, he has the power to take away our sorrows and travail, to make it all better, but he knows for our best good, he must not intervene. He has given us the privilege of free will, the incredible gift of creation, the ability to make our own personal worlds and this larger reality we all share what it is, exactly the way it is. If he stepped in, and made it all go away – what would we learn? How would we grow?
We all know there is such a thing as too much, a child pampered, spoiled and sheltered, indulged and given everything they want does not make for a very successful adult. They have earned nothing, they have done nothing, they have learned only a false sense of entitlement; they expect everything and give nothing back.
If we as loving, concerned parents are diligent to not do such a disservice to our own children, then why do we rail at God when he refuses to 'spoil' us?
Sometimes the answer is, and must be 'no'. That does not mean we do not love any less, or desire to help. There are times when acting on that natural inclination is in fact, the worst thing you can do. This is hard to understand, even harder to enact, but realizing when to let go, when the greatest act of love and respect you can bestow upon your children is to not interfere, to do nothing, this is truly the beginning of wisdom.
Knowing it's the right thing to do doesn't make it any easier. But if you truly care, it's the only thing you can do.
When I was a small child I had an extraordinarily vivid and profound dream. At the time I was much too young to understand it fully, but that has changed a little with time and experience.
I dreamt I was walking in a beautiful, lush garden with Jesus. He didn't look like the 'Jesus' I saw in the portrait hanging on the wall of the Sunday School room; he was a clean-shaven young man, with brown curly hair, dressed in contemporary clothing, but I knew he was Jesus. I didn't think there was anything odd about the dichotomy of his appearance, or the fact I was holding his hand and walking through this garden with him. It just was what it was.
We walked quietly through the garden, not talking, enjoying the serenity and beauty of the place, the path we were following meandering past the trees and fantastic flowers until we came to a huge, overgrown stone gate. He opened it up and led me inside this little enclosed area of the garden.
Inside, the ground was grassy, and strewn across this verdant carpet were dozens of what I can only describe as – kids toys. I don't remember what they were called, but they were common in the sixties, a kind of building set, sort of the pre-cursor to the erector set, round connector wheels and sticks and dowels made of painted wood. You stuck them all together and made stuff.
Anyway, there were a whole bunch of these things lying on the grass, like a bunch of kids had been there playing, putting together their fantastical constructions, and then had left them lying on the grass after they'd been called in for dinner. Jesus lit right up as soon as he saw them, pulled me by the hand, urging me to draw close and inspect them with him.
"My children made these!" He said to me excitedly as he got down on his hands and knees and carefully picked up the first one. "Aren't they wonderful!"
I stood by his side and watched him examine this thing, turning it over carefully, reverently, holding it with exquisite care while he looked at it like it was a precious diamond. When he had finished drinking in every detail, smiling and oohing and awing like this was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen, pointing out various things to me about how great it was, he put the first one down, ever so carefully, and picked up the next one. All the time urging me to join him and look at them too.
I wanted to make him happy, I mean, come on, after all, he was Jesus, so I sat down and picked up one of the…things. He was having a good time, and he thought they were really special, but honestly, when I looked at the one I was holding, all I saw was a weird spherical mess, a kind of decrepit collection of wooden dowels stuck together with the round wooden connectors. It didn't even look like anything recognizable; it was a haphazard mishmash, a bizarre jumble of wood.
I tried, I really, really tried to see what he was seeing, to see this crude, bizarre thing as something wonderful, but I couldn't. I just didn't get it, but if he said it was something great, well, I would take his word for it.
We went a little farther into the enclosed glade, still looking at the forest of constructs on the grass of the glade. Then abruptly he stopped, looked down at one in particular, his face suddenly as sorrowful as it had been previously joyful.
It was another one of the many, many wooden thingees we'd already seen, but this one was different. This one was broken. Smashed and splintered, totally ruined as if someone in a fit of anger had stomped on it and deliberately destroyed it.
Tears formed in his eyes; he got down on his hands and knees and gathered all the little broken bits together, cradling them to his chest. He didn't say anything, just sat there and wept, such profound grief and sorrow over this smashed kid's toy, I couldn't comprehend it. I felt so bad, to see him so sad, but it was like he wasn't even aware of me anymore, he was so lost in his sorrow. It was then I realized these 'things' were about more than they seemed, they represented something bigger, more meaningful, but I was only about five or six, and the larger lesson was too complex for me to grasp at the time.
But I never forgot the dream, and with a little more time and life experience, yeah, eventually I got it. Or at least I like to think I have.
However we may grieve him, with our willfulness, pride and selfishness, he never stops loving us. Never doubt this, and remember also, even when we seem inextricably mired in the deepest well of misery of our own making, no matter how it appears, we are neither lost, nor alone. He never leaves us, even if we leave him no choice but to let us go.
Love your children enough to do no less.
A Mother
Phoenix |
posted by The White Dove Partnership @ 23:06  |
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