Groundhog Day… Six More Weeks of Self Loathing

It’s been a whole two days back out here on my own and for all of the strength, grace and maturity with which I’ve been handling this, (those are the words of others, not my own) the fear, anxiety, self-doubt and beating-up-of-myself ambushed me this morning the moment the dogs began scratching at my bedside. I try to fend it off with faith and power that say this journey will work itself out. “God has not let me down yet, I doubt He’ll start now,” is what I usually say. But to walk that talk is difficult, especially on days like today.

Yes, we live in a society that values what we do and how much we produce. If we’re not doing something, we’re not worth anything and if we’re not worth anything, we might as well not exist. That’s the line of it. And at times, I buy that. As someone who prides myself on accomplishment and has a tendency to think my worth or how much people approve of me is tied up in what I do, it’s damn hard to sit here in my house knowing that at this moment, I am not “earning” anything and I question that so-called strength, grace, and maturity and wonder if I am just kidding myself and should take my lumps and crawl back to the I.T. landscape and get lost in it.

But then I come across nuggets like this out of a book given to me by my father this Christmas: “Faith is finally to stand in nothingness, with nothing to prove and nothing to protect, knowing itself in an ever-alive charity that urges us to surrender, to let go, to give away, to hand over, to forgive, to walk across, to take no offense, to trust another, to lose oneself – while being quite sure that we are going to find ourselves afterward."

"A consumer-oriented, functional and materialistic age finds faith almost impossible. We want religion, but we surely do not want faith. Because if faith is nothing, the faithful person is a nobody. In our shallow culture, trust is called naiveté."

"Forgiveness always looks like being soft and conceding to the enemy – even speaking the truth will not win you any votes or look patriotic on the evening news. Faith is nothing in this age and culture. Faith always has been nothing.” – Richard Rohr