From
Acceptance to Transcendence
There
was a man who had a very bad stutter. He had never spoken a straight
sentence. One day he found himself on a bus without any money. Stuck
for a way to get out of his predicament he decided to exaggerate his
stutter when the conductor came along, in the hope that he would pass
him by in exasperation. As the conductor came towards him he practiced
his stutter. However, when he faced the conductor he said "I
have no money," without any impediment, much to his own amazement.
For the first time in his life he had accepted his stutter and the
acceptance had freed him from it.
In
everybody there is a desire to change. There is a desire to set aside
the less perfect for the more perfect; to rise after a fall; to better
one's financial situation; to improve one's health; to overcome one's
faults. The usual maneuver that we make is to hide the fault from
sight or to try to remove it altogether. Wisdom is not in denial but
in acceptance. Change does not come by hiding or denying a problem,
rather, it comes through it's acceptance.
In
the area of physical health people come to see this fairly easily.
Though they often deny and delay, people do realize that you must
accept that you have a symptom and expose it to a physician if you
want curative action. On the psychological and spiritual level people
are less wise. They hide their fears and insecurities with all sorts
of defense mechanisms and neurotic behavior. The whole objective seems
to be to deny reality and hope that what is unpleasant will go away.
On
the spiritual level most people, in practice, use religion as a way
of trying to avoid reality. They pray for their problems to be taken
away and that their kingdoms may come. Prayer becomes a way for avoidance
of reality - and hence avoidance of God - rather than acceptance of
reality and of the God who is ever present and being revealed in that
reality.
The
words and example of the Christ of Scripture, however, give us a different
message. He tells us, "Blessed are those who mourn, they shall
have joy." Painful losses do happen: they must be accepted and
worked through if we are to live joyfully again. In his own life he
met all sorts of painful situations and ultimately he had to meet
a cruel death. Humanly he shrunk from these horrible events yet he
faced them with acceptance. "Father, would that this chalice
- of suffering and death - could pass from me; but not my will but
yours be done." In accepting the will of his Heavenly Father
he was able eventually to transcend the limits of his humanity and
rise from the dead.
In
the post resurrection Gospel stories we see Mary Magdalene and the
disciples caught up in their sense of grief and failure. Because they
want the facts of the case to be other than what they actually are,
they cannot recognize the resurrected Jesus. The Magdalene can only
assume that the body has been stolen and that the man she meets on
the way is the gardener. It is only when the disciple can eventually
accept that the historical Jesus, and that their former type of relationship
with him is dead, that they can accept the risen Lord and the new
form of relationship with him.
Resurrection
comes or us in the graceful acceptance of reality and not in it's
denial. I saw this recently in a young man whose mother had remarried
when he was six years old. He had spent fourteen years of his life
angrily fighting this intrusion into the relationship with his mother
which he felt should be exclusively his after the death of his father.
It was only after those years that he could accept that his step-father
was an OK guy and that his mother had legitimate needs that he should
allow her to fulfill. In this acceptance resurrection happened for
him.
Prayer
that is aimed at changing or denying reality only frustrates us and
keeps us entangled in the very mess that we wish to transcend. Meditation,
on the other hand, is prayer with an open heart and it disposes us
to an open life-giving answer.
