God Talk and Tea

What is the cost of being human?

Today I received an email in my inbox entitled “Being Human is Hard.”                                                                                                                                                                

Every time I see or hear those words I still think back to the day of my father’s wake, more than 20 years ago.

On that night, my youngest son chose to express his grief and love by drawing pictures and writing “I love you, Poppy,” on little pieces of paper and placing them around my father’s body as it lay in repose. Crosses, hearts and crooked XXXs and OOOs were lined up with as much importance as the American flag, folded and resting on the casket.

His demonstrations of love brought most of the adults in the funeral parlor to tears, and one elderly on-looker was heard to say, “Oh look, he’s just like a little person.”

With that, my son crawled up on my lap and said stoically, “I don’t like being a little person. It hurts too much.”

I hugged him tightly to myself and whispered in his ear, “I know. It hurts to be a big person, too.”

In an incredibly touching moment he looked up at me and brushed large tears off my cheeks. We understood each other. We shared in the grief. He reminded me of a painful truth – it’s hard to be human.

It’s hard to be human because it hurts to be human, and it hurts for the same reason that it’s a joy – because we love. And it seems the more we love, the more we are open to hurt from loving and the experience may leave us wondering if love is worth it; if the vulnerability that is required of real love isn’t more something to be feared than something to be valued.

There were times in my own life when the pain of losing someone I loved was so overwhelming that I determined I would build walls around my heart so as not to be hurt the next time. But in the midst of the pain, I soon learned something professed by Irish author Enid Starkie: “Unhurt people are not much good in the world.”

The greatest model for us was our own Christ who loved to what others considered excess, who painfully lamented that his love was neither accepted nor returned, crying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!”

It was this bruised and wounded Jesus, rejected, denied and spat upon, who continued to love none-the-less – enough to die for all of us, not just for some of us.

So great a love is difficult to understand, and perhaps more difficult to accept, because it often engenders the fear of expectation – what do I have to give in return?

For Jesus, who brought about and experienced the transformative power of love, the cost of being human was suffering and death – and Resurrection.

Surely, loving requires a sacrifice, but what is the cost to humanity if we are not willing to love?

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash

Mary Clifford Morrell is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

Embracing the sacred gift of intuition

"How did you know that?"  It was a question my sons often asked of me, continually, surprised at how I knew things they had worked hard at hiding from me.

“Moms know everything,” was my pat answer, and, for the most part, when mothers give credence to their intuition, they discover they are aware of more than they, or anyone else, thinks they are.

In addition to intuition, I often found that information just fell into my lap when I most needed it – like the hospital bill that inadvertently came to my home for one of my sons who had been injured while at college. He said he gave the hospital his school address, but the bill came to me none-the-less. I like to attribute it to a guardian angel who is always on her toes!

In reality, all of us are born with an intuitive sense. For some, it is always a powerful sense that can be both a gift and a challenge. For others, the sense gets lost, or the rational mind takes precedence and buries intuition.

Fortunately, for me, my father was a firm believer in the power of intuition and gifts of the soul. He nurtured the tools that would allow me to develop my intuitive sense. Most importantly, he encouraged me to embrace silence, to develop inner calm and focus, and to live in the moment.  

The process has been a fruitful one, but certainly one filled with challenges. High on the list is the tendency of human nature to become lazy, to be critical of oneself and others, and to run from truth when it is difficult to face.

For Thomas Merton, monk, mystic and teacher, the theme of intuition was a thread woven through his spiritual writings. He encouraged the development of intuition as a means for students to come to a fuller awareness of their existence and of their grounding in the being of God.

With the glorious season of fall just around the corner, and the opportunity for reflective walks in the cooler weather, it is the thought of a scientist, Albert Einstein, which comes to mind: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Mary is the author of "Things My Father Taught Me About Love," and "Let Go and Live: Reclaiming your life by releasing your emotional clutter," both available as ebooks on Amazon.com.

 

Is peace the piece that is missing from our hearts?

As children, there is something powerful about the stories told to us by our fathers.

My time with my dad was always filled with family stories, made up stories, Bible stories or ancient myths and they all left an impression on my young heart.

My dad was especially fond of sharing his love of Native Americans, who had a deep spirituality and special relationship with creation born of respect and gratitude.

One of my favorite stories was the Iroquois tale of the Great Peacemaker, the Great Law of Peace and the Peace Tree.

Years later I would learn how instrumental the Iroquois and the Great Law of Peace would be in American history, but, as a child, I was enamored of the image of a great peace hero and the roots of the peace tree reaching out to join all people in unity.

It is no surprise that, as a teen graduating from high school, I chose a Beatitude as the verse that would appear under my yearbook photo: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”

When my youthful, naïve, romantic vision of peacemaking came face-to- face with the actual violence and cruelty that existed in the world, even among Native American tribes, I discovered that peacemaking wasn’t as easy I believed it to be.

What I have come to understand over many years is that peace needs to be cultivated. It is a task that needs to be undertaken interiorly, in our hearts, and exteriorly, through our actions.

For us, as children of God, peace must be something more than simply the absence of war. Peace must flow from our relationships – with God, with creation, and with others.

Years ago, during an annual conference for Catholic school teachers and catechists, I gave a workshop entitled, “Is Peace the Piece that is Missing?”

During the presentation I offered a few questions for reflection: How many of you have spoken about peace to your students in the last week; given a homework assignment relating to peace; offered prayers for peace with your class; undertaken some action for peace with your class; have a peace bulletin board; have the word peace visible somewhere in your classroom?

The most provocative question, apparently, was, “How many of you know, without a doubt, where you stand on the issue of peace and the need for war?”

The answers were not encouraging. One teacher walked out.

She had lost a brother in the Twin Towers attack and was very angry with me and the ideas I was sharing regarding the way of peace.

Two years later, a woman stopped me at the same annual conference and asked if I had given a peace workshop a few years prior. When I acknowledged that I had, she said, “I am the woman who walked out. It took me a long time, more than a year, but I finally got it.” Then she hugged me.

Servant of God Dorothy Day once said, “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”

For many, that personal challenge is very difficult because, sometimes, the most troubling reality is the one we come face-to-face with in our own hearts.

So, how are we to take up the great task of peacemaking?

I am encouraged always by prayer and, again, by the words of Dorothy Day: “We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Mary Morrell is the author of “Let Go and Live,” and “Things My Father Taught Me About Love,” both available as ebooks on Amazon.