Loving kindness and robust health

New Year’s has come and gone with little fanfare. There were no resolutions or the usual stock taking that happens when the calendar begins again. Perhaps it is due to my recent pilgrimage to Turkey and the feeling that it marked a beginning or an ending of something much larger than the coming year.

My post pilgrimage contentment has been tested with my nagging illness and the colliding responsibilities of a busy newspaper work schedule plus back-to-back Sunday Fellowship services. On my way out the door to a contract newspaper meeting this morning, and the Fellowship collaborative service on depression not figured out, I lamented that I couldn’t get everything done in the precise manner that I would like.

My husband, Stephen, reminded me that I could hold onto the post-pilgrimage peace. And instead of becoming impatient with him for asking me to do something that was not possible, I managed to answer with a certain degree of grace and honesty, that I was not anxious, but rather sad. It was a bit magical to realize that a moment of vulnerability could be a connecting point for me, rather than feeling isolated and unsupported.

When I returned home at noon, he was just returning from the grocery store with Mediterranean olives and cucumbers. “I’m planning on having Turkish antipasto with dinner,” he said.

We did manage to watch a documentary early on New Year’s Eve on Louise Hay, a New Age healer who believes that affirmations can heal all sort of illness, including cancer, and we tease each other, as we are both now hacking away with coughs and head colds, that “we are the picture of robust health, getting healthier every day.”

Some 10 hours later, with the service completed, and neither one of us having the energy for anything but a bowl of soup for dinner, I realize that it’s not so much that I can’t get my work done as I would like, but that it takes me longer than I think that it should. Plus, I seem to need to get finished with one responsibility before tackling the next.

So while I don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions, my wish and perhaps my New Year’s affirmation comes from tomorrow's chalice lighting text from Buddhist nun Pema Chodron who writes:

“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.

“In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean —you name it— to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one's whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one's heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.”

May it be so.