Gratitude Adjustment

I wrote this eight years ago while I was studying for Ministry, and never finished or published it. So what the hell...I've finished it, and am publishing it now:

For years I've dreamed that one day I could get myself into a position to do nothing but read, reflect, and write. That one day I'd manage to slough off, just for a year or two, the endless rounds of work and getting and spending and the thousands of distractions that conspire to yank you out of purposefully exploring an inner life. I thought if I could manage that somehow, all the stuff I've done and all the roles I've played (on stages and off) over the years would somehow coalesce and resolve into something like an integrated self. And once coalesced, like the colours of the rainbow, it might become a white light to see more clearly with.

You are both you, and not you.

And somehow I have actually carved out a little island of time, a year or two at best, before returning to a working life again. Those close to me know that getting here has not been easy. I chucked my good job like a bad suit of clothes, cannonballed into the lake of under-employment, and dog-paddled for 18 months doing part-time teaching, voice-overs, some preaching and some acting. Then I got on a plane, and here I am, half a planet away from my much-beloved wife and daughters and my good Australian friends.

I'm free, b*tchez!!!!

So how's that working out?

Being alone and with only just enough money to subsist on has been a tough adjustment, I'll admit. But the abundance we become used to in the western, middle-class life comes at a cost, impoverishes parts of ourselves that not even Heineken can reach. So there's this big empty psychic space where work, people, chores and media once occupied, as well as the role-playing these required.

Though there is much in the way of assignments, reading, and service-writing that I'm called to do as part of my training, to my utter surprise, what has flooded into that newly emptied psychic reservoir is gratitude. 

No joke. 

I feel  heart-achingly thankful for everything and everyone I've ever known in my one, finite, inconsequential, little human life, and this feeling comes with an intensity that is sometimes hard to know what to do with.

It's not that the experience is a slide-show type list of people and places and events and things. It's more like how parched land receives the torrents of spring; all at once it comes, and the earth softens and yields and gulps it in.

You don't miss yo water, til yo well runs dry...

In this flood, so much rushes past, I wouldn't know where to begin making a list, for fear I'd overlook someone or something, or that a list might seem to imply a prioritizing. Nor do I want to gush or wallow in these good vibes here, but to reflect on how much of the way we mostly live impoverishes our spirit, and makes us less than fully human.

Vacations, holidays, sabbaticals are meant to function as psychic pressure valves, to release the inner tensions created by the differentials between our 'full-spectrum' humanity and the narrow channels which the workaday life conspires to pound them through. I met a ministry student here, who, after 20-odd years of working as an accounts officer for a large firm, felt that somehow this was not entirely fulfilling.

Ya think?

Over those years, her involvement witth her church community kept alive the dim but persistent vision of horizons far grander than the next promotion, or monthly productivity targets, or what she could buy with the money she'd earned. It seems that much of the lure of 'retail therapy' is the acceptable, consumerist version of  getting hammered at the weekends or popping Zoloft to get through the cramped prison of your days. Keeps the economy chugging along too, so there are endless incentives for burning up the charge card, and thereby making enslavement to drudgery more necessary.

I remember daydreaming in grade school on a sunny spring day, thinking how much I wished I was outside in the open air, wandering through trees alive with bird-song. One day, I thought, I'll be grown up and be able to do just that. But I found, as most do, that the journey we call 'life' is a process of swapping one crib for another. From the school desk, to the office carel, to the gated retirement community, to the grave. And all we work to accomplish is merely to determine how well-appointed each crib will be.

Some folks thrive on the treadmill, though, and good for them. Some thrive on the treadmill while dreaming of not being on it. Not so good for them, perhaps. Some renegades, like Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, thrive on silence, cunning, and exile from all that. 

Which of these am I now that I am a Minister? I have no less a sense of work as a grind. I too grind on, daydreaming of golden days ahead that I probably won't know what to do with myself in. I love too many people and things in this prison too much to want to run away from it. 

So I conclude that I am, yes, grateful for the grind. It connects me to people. It keeps my days in order. It bears me up when I flag. The grind is the grit this little oyster is grateful for. Not so much for the pearls themselves, as for the broad parameters which make me as free as one in this world can be, rather than lost in it.

So thank you, God.