Sabbath Messages | Sabbath Message: July 3, 2004
Good Sabbath
July 3, 2004 Pain is like the sudden touch of frost that makes the flowering bud's exquisite color. It is tough to take because of its intensity and seeming everlasting duration, but when accompanied by growing perspective, its intensity is understood and appreciated.
Those who have worked very hard for their success understand this; those who haven't, can't. You also expand in self-respect and when the pain ends, appreciation and perspective begin.
We best appreciate when the pain is personal or that of a friend, rather than an Iraqi family's, a former enemy, or someone we find easy to insult.
As I read through the NYTimes wonderful collection of Lincoln's life, and re-read the terrible names he was called, the now revered "father" of the Republican party--rejected at first by the party until his funeral train ride and the emotional outburst of America--converted their name calling to sudden realization that he could propel their party; love of a President became the criteria, though seldom met. We have suffered a dearth of noble leaders; we are brutal when we should be listening; we are too busy to listen when it is easier to react and invent propaganda.
The Reagan week-long memorial showcased love rather than history, for we honor the dead with no constraint. Pain is 9/10th memory and confusion as to why we need suffer; it is the constant repetition of "why me" until perspective defines it as mortal accompaniment of life itself. We live, we feel pain--our own and others. We learn compassion instead of passion, for one ignites understanding, the other builds on emotional reaction or intense hatred when we think that only we can understand what's happening and what truth is.
I wish you well, this Sabbath, as my body searches for mending, so I can write again with comfort and absence of pain.
sandy
