I enjoyed your essay very much, RM, and I see the message as a real gift for many people who may be suffering, feeling oppressed and trapped between a wish to be seen as good and a wish to feel better. It's a service you have done. I hear kindness.
Tiffany, no wonder you are strong. But it must have hurt so much. It has taken 56 years for me to forgive my Nmother. And the last 8 I've lived with her. (For the first 7, I howled.) I relate. One day I hope she loses her hold on your imagination and your heart and you'll ultimately be bored by her displays. This was a sad place, and there was no detouring the grief, but that's where I got to.
Adrift, hope you don't mind if I wander waaay off from a starting thought from your post because it reminded me of something I've been needing to say in general:
I often feel graced when people offer prayer, quote scripture (much of it inspiring and one verse...was it a proverb that Write posted somewhere recently?...I don't recall the words but I do recall the feeling, the deep beauty).
I'd like to also mention I am not Christian, we have Jewish members (Doc G too), and perhaps Quaker or Baptist or Muslim or secular or Buddhist or Hindu or ethical humanist or agnostic or Bah'ai who have not brought it up, or someone may have a transcendent faith that's never been written anywhere but in a redwood tree. I love language, so I just tend to notice when people use their vocabulary of the sacred. Or as their descriptor of what is good. I assume just that we are all one people, one family.
I try and fail to remember there are soooooo many different kinds of people....so many millions....it's easy for me to forget when I get on an enthusiastic roll about my own church. I apologize. I've overdone that. I think my own auto-assumptions about what's the best way to show approval or praise or ... even good intentions... can still be exclusionary.
Sometimes this issue is hard for me. I can't speak for anyone else, but there is so much violence and pain in the name of who's "right" or what vocabulary is proper for expressing the holy...I feel a yearning to share the most expansive and inclusive spirit possible. Even if that might mean witnessing in ... I don't know how to express it... just remembering there are others aroudn me. That's all.
I'm back to world peace.
I hope I've expressed this in a considerate, non-combative way because I don't want to go quiet again!
Hops
