“I’ve gone to church all my life,” the woman said. “I don’t know why these things keep happening to me.” Her shoulders sagged a bit. “I just don’t know how much longer I can keep going on like this.”
I could hear the sense of futility in her voice. But what is there to say at a time like that?
It wasn’t that her problems weren’t real. It was just that they were so normal, so predictable, and, at the same time, so depressing.
The “things that kept happening to her” from one year to the next were, unfortunately, all too common in this day and age: a dip in the pension, the downsizing of the job, the problem in the marriage, the struggle with one of the children, the death in the family, the slowly debilitating effects of the family genetic pattern, the alienation from a beloved sister, once close now far removed in both time and space.
Predictable, of course. Who doesn’t go through such things? But unbearable? It all depends.
Why things happen to us, however religious we think ourselves to be, is one thing. But how we deal with them spiritually when they do happen is completely another. The problem, after all, has nothing to do with who we are. The problem is that life is life. It treats all of us the same way.
Life, everybody’s life, is an excursion from dark to light, from contradiction to hope, from one circumstance and stage to another—all of them meant to stretch us to the fullness of ourselves and to the real meaning of what it is to be fully alive.
As a result, it is the way we deal with the dark and difficult moments that makes all the difference to how they affect us in the long run. And that has more to do with what we think life is meant to be about than it does to the specifics of the present moment. Life, in the end, is really about learning to live it deeply, coming to live it well, beginning to live it as a spiritual experience rather than as a perpetual burden or an eternal Disneyland. Life is not an unacceptable excursion into what are otherwise the routine experiences that come with living it from one end to the other. Life is what takes us, eventually, one step at a time, into God.
It’s easy, of course, to keep a religious checklist and call that a religious life. It is far more difficult to become a spiritual person for whom life is more an adventure in spiritual growth and wisdom than it is a series of setbacks, an endless list of woes. God does not create us to tease our appetites and test our endurance; God creates us to enable us to see the Face of God in every dimension of life. As Catherine of Siena put it, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” It is, however, a matter of coming to see it that way. And that is the gift of monastic spirituality.
Joan Chittister
Searching for Balance,
