I’ve
recently made personal discoveries that have been monumental. While all
this time I’ve attributed my pre-occupied brain to these discoveries, I
still haven’t seemed to . . . settle. I’m forgetful. I’m slow. I'm not
focused. I'm overwhelmed. I’m finding the simplest of tasks to be
overwhelming and feel more like a spectator in my life whose floating
above looking down when really I’m walking around in slow-motion.
I’ve shared before when I set goals it creates a rhythm I can operate
in. A sort of metronome for life that seems to produce productivity. Well, that rhythm has lost it’s tick
and now the holidays are upon me thus I cautiously approach them. I resent the situation I
find myself in year after year. It’s the strategy game of Christmas
with it’s commercialized, greed-inducing, and sometimes
meaningless-gift-giving requirements. I love to give gifts and to
receive them! But I cringe at the thought of lopping more things
on top of our Mountain of things in a grandiose celebration of self.
Especially when it comes to the impression I'm imparting onto my children
and how it effects their evolving concept of holiday. Giving is a
cherished encounter I've been fortunate to learn about from friends,
where we express honor and appreciation of one another, a sort of
acknowledgment of “I see you”. But instead of seeing a people,
we see lists. Some may easily find themselves slaves to a chore without
ever taking notice as to why they are giving gifts in the first place.
Ridiculous! The reverence of Christmas isn’t readily available to us
anywhere but instead, waits quietly for us in our reflections and
convictions.
I read once that contemplation and revolution
should never be separated (Henri Nouwen). Maybe that’s why my thoughts
can gnaw at me until I act on them, I don’t know. I shamefully admit
that my frequent criticism of the enormous wasted wealth in
the Western world compared to rest of the globe has not prevented me
from being swept away with consumerism. Socially irresponsible
consumerism, that is. How it astonishes me that one night I read about
neighbors in a Nairobi slum sharing coveted shoe polish as an act of
kindness (for when shoe polish is sniffed it offsets hunger pains and is
often used in bottles shared by children and adults) and the very next
day go about my business without any sense of urgency regarding
information I gained the evening prior! In the end of my days, how will I account for this? How do you and I manage to live in one world but have knowledge of another’s whose reality is too painful to comprehend?
There is a way.
There
are many ways in fact. Small steps. Baby steps to change. Scholars have
analyzed this issue- the predicament people encounter when faced with
the enormity of world hunger and still conclude with the notion of -
small steps. Everyone making – small steps.
It's
Christmas - the season of gifts and if you engage in gift giving, below
are some links you can glance at that can revolutionize your giving.
Meanwhile,
here’s a passage that has recently spoken to me. Dark as it may be,
it’s been a poignant charge that's created a liability I can’t seem to
escape.
“The
more we love earthly things, reputation, importance, ease, success and
pleasures, for ourselves, the less we love God. Our identity gets
dissipated among a lot of things that do not have the value we imagine
we see in them, and we are lost in them: we know it obscurely by the way
all these things disappoint us and sicken us once we get what we have
desired. Yet we still bring ourselves to nothing, annihilate our lives
by trying to fulfill them on things that are incapable of doing so. When
we really come to die, at last, we suddenly know how much we have
squandered and thrown away, and we see that we are truly annihilated by
our own sick desires: we were nothing, but everything God gave us we
have also reduced to nothing, and now we are pure death.
(September 3, 1941, Journal of Thomas Merton, 243-44)
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