Category Archives: Life

Hypocrisy

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I’m considering beginning every blog post with “As I get older. . .”, because there is glaring truth in the wisdom that comes from age and life experience.

So…as I get older, I am becoming less and less tolerant of peoples’ BS. Maybe my BS is meter is just sharpening over time, but I feel smoke coming out of my ears as I watch people spew blatant lies and warped perceptions.

Perhaps what irks me the most is the hypocrisy of religion. There is nothing more hypocritical to me than a people who claim to be “Christian” but can’t seem to remember a single thing about Jesus’ life and teachings. Our beautifully humble new Pope, Pope Francis, has spent the first part of his papacy laying the ground work for how a true leader of the church models the behavior of a true Christian. He has shed the pomp and circumstance and grandeur of past Popes. His first actions have been going “to the back of the line” so-to-speak, to reach his hand to God’s most forgotten and marginalized.  And for this, he has been criticized. Huh?

Have you seen Jesus? Have you read any part of the New Testament? Do you remember the story of Jesus going into the temple and overturning tables at the hypocrisy and misuse of that sacred space for profit and personal gain? Have you heard the story of the Good Samaratin, the prostitute, the leper, the tax collector??? Any of these stories of Jesus NOT turning his back on ANYONE ring a bell? Is there somewhere in the Bible where it says that Jesus died for everyone…except….?

I struggle every day to be more like Jesus. To be more like Mother Mary. In the smallest of ways I have to say to myself, “If I am going to claim to be a Christian. And I am going to claim to love and follow Jesus then I have to step into that commitment with both feet.” The most extreme example is with the death penalty. If I claim to be a Christian, which means I believe that Jesus died for everyone’s sins, then I have to believe that I do NOT have the right to kill ANYONE. Does it mean that there are circumstances where I would WANT to kill someone? Of course. But I don’t have the right to do it. Nor do I have the right to “hire” the government to do it. I just don’t. I believe in the depth of my soul that when we inject a killer to kill him, we become the very thing we despise. Punto.

I have to believe. . .

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Every day I interact with young people who are struggling to get through another obstacle life has thrown in their path. These are young men and women, some still boys and girls, whom I’ve come to call my children because they are; spiritually, emotionally and universally. I read their brilliant prose on FB where they brazenly lay out the raw, brutal reality of lost childhoods, broken promises, painful mistakes they’ve made that are cut into the story that is their life, unable to be shaken by a joint or a rum and coke or a college degree. And every day, with every story, every cry for help, I am helpless. Maybe not completely, but sometimes when my heart is breaking a little too much too often, helpless is how it feels. I help where I can with support, guidance and love, and resources where I have them. But I know the truth is that ALL of the work is theirs. It’s that way for all of us, but somehow witnessing young people experience the journey of life in such profound ways feels more difficult than anything I have personally ever had to endure. Recognizing that they have to find their own strength, their own courage, their own fight (yet again) to pick themselves up and walk out of the darkness of their surroundings and experiences, I am pained by the acknowledgement that I cannot go get them and carry them out. If I do that, I get in the way of whatever lesson it is they are trying to put behind them. Whatever healing is meant to happen. And so I sit, with all of my friends and fellow ‘parents’ who are able to see the Light in all of our children. We sit together, at the opening of that proverbial cave, with candles. Encouraging, guiding, willing them to get up and keep moving. If they could only see us. If they only knew how enormously valuable they are to us. I have to believe they can do it. I have to believe they will. My heart needs to believe it.

February 28, 1996

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I try to teach my teenage son that every experience is an opportunity to learn and grow. . .

The part I leave out right now, is that sometimes the pain of that growth is so debilitating that your heart is begging for another way to “learn the lesson”.

Seventeen years ago today when my dad died suddenly at 56, it felt like someone took a knife to my heart and twisted it. I had a conversation with him on the phone at 9:30pm on a Tuesday, and Wednesday morning at 8:30am my brother called me to tell me he died. That was it. That was the end of the book. I didn’t get a do-over, I didn’t get a warning. Just over.

My dad died when I was 30 years old, and it threw me for a loop. The kids I work with experience a much greater agony at 2, at 9, at 14. I’ve heard children tell stories of holding their best friend in their arms while they bled out on the street, or watching their father gunned down in front of their home. I remember the gamut of emotions that followed my loss. I can’t even imagine the emotions that follow in acts of senseless violence. And people wonder why children kill. When I meet a 14 year old killer I don’t look at them as “an adult monster”, I want to know what happened to them in 14 years to give them the pain of a 40 year old.  Because only in recognizing the brokenness, can we find healing.

My son will never know his Pop-pop, and God-willing, he will never know violence up close and personal. But he will benefit from all that I learned from my dad. Most importantly, he will benefit from the lesson I learned from his passing:

Love the people you have in your life, so if and when it’s time for you to depart from one another, you can more easily get to that place of peace where you say, “We had a great life together.”

I had a great life with my dad.

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Reflection is Good. . .

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Reflection is a good thing. It presents the opportunity to look back at choices we’ve made in the last year, decade…or decadeS as life tumbles on. If you’ve lived a colorful life, the reflections can sometimes be blurry (years 19-23 for me) or painful or empowering. Reflection, as we get older, is remembering a life well lived, in the mud of self-discovery and the pride of embracing what the universe has brought our way. It’s reading a great book of which we are the sole author, protagonist and antagonist.

Sometimes reflections blend years together, like periods of time defined by a pattern of experiences instead of contained within the months of January through December. Those “19-23” years for me were a period of self-indulgence. I spent 31 years being defined by the title of someone’s partner or someone’s mom, a crutch I didn’t realize I had created, until becoming an empty-nester with no choice but to stand in the world alone and decide once and for all who I want to be in the world.

This transition of decades, my reflections have focused on how far I have come in my life. The choices I have made to stand in the shadow of another’s Light. To diminish my power to make room for other’s. To sacrifice what I need to satisfy the needs of someone else. They have all been decisions I own and made from a place of love, my own insecurities, or my own constitution that drives me to want to make everyone happy.

What I have learned along the way is that not everyone respects others’ time or life. Not everyone is self-aware enough to recognize the impact of their actions. I’ve nearly burned out trying to be everywhere and everything for everyone. Thinking the “single mom” challenges would make me look weak if I couldn’t juggle it all, I sat at basketball games working on my laptop, as a colleague called wondering how I could leave the office when “things needed to be done”.  I have come home from exhausting my energies supporting other peoples’ challenges and needs to realize I had nothing left for my own child. We all have days when we’re not at our best and can bring unnecessary stress to the people we care about. I am most difficult to be around when ignoring my instincts screaming that life is out of balance…my signal that change needs to happen. I have weathered some of the most consistently difficult, unaware people in my personal and professional life. Along the way I have realized that none of them are responsible for my life, none of them have to own my decisions, and none of them can stop me.

The experiences of my tumultuous years have helped me let go of things I no longer need. Things that no longer feed me in a positive way. We can get stuck in places and relationships that don’t serve us, trying to prove a point, trying to be something we are not meant to be. I am improving at letting go, with love and appreciation, but just letting go. No wallowing. No hesitating. No time for that.

As I reflect another decade mastered, I stand tall. I stand comfortable alone in the world and comfortable in the powerful tribe I have built along the way. I welcome a new phase of life, excited about what lies ahead. I reflect with a heart full of love.

Reflection is good. It can help uncover our Purpose.