GIVING OF OURSELVES WITHOUT RESENTMENT

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“When you carry someone’s cross, don’t send him or her the bill!”

This is one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The challenge of being an adult, one who helps carry life for others, is to give ourselves over in love, duty, and service without resentment. Those last words are key: Real love is not simply a matter of giving ourselves over in service and duty (mostly we have to do this anyway, whether we want to or not) it’sa question of giving ourselves over without being resentful…

Only when we stop seeing duty as an unfair burden that we haven’t chosen can we love and serve others without resentment and without making others feel guilty because of what it’s costing us…

If we are sensitive and good-hearted, love will frequently become duty, demanding circumstance, and an invitation to sacrifice ourselves for someone or something else. Always there will be someone or something making demands on our freedom and opportunity: children who need us, an aging parent who has only us, family obligations, a spouse with an illness, a crisis at our workplace, a tsunami in Asia, a war we don’t want, a church that needs volunteers, and obligations of every kind that come from being sensitive to the demands of God, family, church, country, morality, and the poor.

The world is not divided up between those who are burdened by duty and those who are free of it.

Anyone who is sensitive and good is burdened by duty. The world is divided up rather between those who are burdened with duty and are resentful about it and those who are burdened with duty and are not resentful about it.

That’s the greatest struggle we have in love. We’re good people mostly, but, like the Older brother of the prodigal son, all too often we nurse resentment, even as we do all the right things. That leaves us outside the house of love, hearing the music, but unable to dance, bitter about life’s unfairness. We need, at some point, to say: “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

If we say that and mean them, we will taste for the first time ever, real freedom.

Ronald Rolhesier
The Passion and the Cross

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND - MERTON

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Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind. Every Christian is a part of my own body, because we are members of Christ. What I do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me.

Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Thomas Merton
No Man Is An Island

COURAGE IS HEARTBREAK

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Human beings are constantly trying to take courageous paths in their lives: in their marriages, in their relationships, in their work and with themselves. But the human way is to hope that there's a way to take that courageous step—without having one's heart broken. And it's my contention that there is no sincere path a human being can take without breaking his or her heart. 

There is no marriage, no matter how happy, that won't at times find you wanting and break your heart. In raising a family, there is no way to be a good mother or father without a child breaking that parental heart. In a good job, a good vocation, if we are sincere about our contribution, our work will always find us wanting at times. In an individual life, if we are sincere about examining our own integrity, we should, if we are really serious, at times, be existentially disappointed with ourselves. 

So it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, "Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?" 

David Whyte