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Updated
I’ve been working my way through Elizabeth Foss’s Above All, this Lent. This is how this journal/book is described on Amazon:
It’s filled with tools to help you discover which areas need greater care and tending, and is meant to inspire and motivate you to become your absolute truest self, so that come Easter, you can flourish as God intended.
The past few days have been about discovering why we hold on to hurt and why it is so difficult to forgive.
Longtime readers might remember that I have confessed on this blog that it’s hard for me to let go of things. I have always been this way since I was a little girl. As I pondered these things this week, I had an epiphany moment.
I have an almost photographic memory of tragic and hurtful things. I can remember the Kennedy Assassination and how it affected my family with surprising clarity considering I was just 4 years old at the time. I can remember hurtful and scary things my grandma said to me, like screaming a racial slur against my father and threatening to throw me out of the house with him – I was 12. I also remember things like my pet cat Shadow being hit by a car and things like that. It’s not that I don’t remember good things too – I do, but even Mr. Pete is surprised about how many negative things I remember so clearly.
What I think I learned about myself this week is that I don’t remember these things with a refusal to forgive – because I do forgive. I think I remember it as a way to protect. For some reason, I am wired to remember the tragedies and hurt as a way of learning to cope and strategize against further injury. In other words, see the signs because I have seen them before, put up the proper protections, and then live through whatever challenge is in front of me.
In some ways, maybe this has been an asset. For example, losing my cat at age 10, prepared me in some ways to lose my grandma when I was 18. Remembering that grief helped me later on when my grandfather died ten years later, and then when I lost my baby in 2002 and my mom in 2009. My ability to deal with grief got better with each loss because I had already learned the coping mechanisms that work the best for me. And so it is with other losses, like not having the full use of my knee, or a child moving out of state.
And now I’m going through the loss of being a church flutist after 20 years! That was such a big part of my identity. The music was something I used to connect with the liturgy and with my church community. In a way, it was how I prayed. Now it’s over and very reminiscent of how I felt decades ago when I was let go from a job – shocked and lost. But interestingly, not hopeless. Because I know that it gets better. Maybe different, but God has a plan and I’m just content – truly content – to see what that will be.
As I went through my workbook last night and searched my conscience, I’m pretty sure there is no hate or vengeance there. That is not because I am so virtuous, but because those things require a lot of energy to sustain them and I just don’t have that kind of energy to give. Maybe what I need to learn is letting go of the hurt that comes with the memories. I don’t know, but it will be interesting to keep reading the scriptures and studying this book for the next six weeks.
How is your first week of Lent going? Have you had any revelations during your journey so far?
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