When life gets hard, it's natural to feel the urge to run. Avoiding sorrow, grief, confrontation may seem like the best, if not the easiest response. But there is a dirty little secret that we must face when we choose to look the other way.
Denial is addictive.
Addiction of any kind invariably numbs us to pain, anger, confusion, and distress. Unfortunately, it also prevents us from fully feeling satisfaction and joy. Perhaps most disturbing, it dulls our minds making healing and truth-seeking more difficult, if not impossible.
The world has been ripe for denial this past year. The pandemic is only one of many social and cultural issues that demand our full attention. Now is not the time to feel only vaguely.
Now is the time to stay open.
Jesus did not avoid the suffering of the Garden. He returned to pray again and again, asking God to help him bear the burden that was to come.
We are approaching a tipping point. The coming days and weeks will invite us to put into action the lessons we have learned from the long days of isolation.
We can remain in denial, allowing ourselves to slip back into familiar habits and patterns of behavior.
Or we can enter fully into the mess with our hearts and minds open. By using our creativity, our intellect, our strength, and our faith, together we can seek out new ways to heal and grow.
Joy and sorrow both strike us at the core. Stay open to both.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke
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