Anne Lamott, an excerpt from Stitches
My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering.
Sometimes we feel like we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.
It would be great if we could shop, sleep, or date our way out of this. Sometimes, we think we can, but it feels that way only for a while. To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another’s suffering where that person can see us. To be honest, that sucks. It’s the worst, even if you are the mother of God.
Mary didm’t say, “Oh, he’ll be back in a couple of days.” She didn’t know this. She stood with her son in the deep unknowing as he died.
”Yet no matter what happens to us - to our children, to our town, to our world - we feel it is still a gift to be human and to have a human life, as long as we ignore the commercials and advertisements and the static that the world beams at us, and understand that we and our children are goin to get knocked around, sometimes so cruelly that it will take our breath away.
Life can be wild, hard, and sweet, but it can also be wild, hard, and cruel.
The bad news is that after the suffering, we wait at the empty tomb for a while, the body of our beloved gone, grieving an unsurvivable loss.
It’s a terrible system.
But the good news is that then there is new life.
Wildflowers bloom again.
From Anne Lamott’s Stitches, which is everything I needed to hear today.
