Humility

I spent much of my life putting up a very strong front. I couldn't handle being vulnerable.   I had great difficulty accepting help.  I know many people who've done the same thing.

This morning's church service was  good in so many ways.  The theme for this month has been has been on targeting five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust,  all based on the Pixar film "Inside Out."

Today we dealt with anger.  As I looked around I saw a couple of friends who I know have anger issues about what's happening in their lives.  

 We get in trouble when we refuse to accept reality.  It makes us feel angry and impotent. 

Below is a parable taken from one of David Seaman's books.  It describes me in my younger life.  

DON'T TAKE ME TO THE HOSPITAL - PLEASE!

The scene didn't make sense.  There he lay in the street bleeding; the hit and run driver gone.  He needed medical help immediately.  Yet, he kept pleading. "Don't take me to the hospital, please"

Surprised, everyone asked, "Why?"

Pleadingly he answered, "Because I am on the staff at the hospital.  It would be embarrassing for them to see me like this.  They have never seen me bleeding and dirty.  ...I am a mess."

But the hospital is for people like you.   Can't we call an ambulance?"

"No, please don't...the admissions clerk would be upset...she always gets upset if anyone from admittance doesn't have all the details she needs to fill our her records.  I didn't see who hit me, and I don't even know the make of the car or license number.  - Just pull me over to the curb.  

With this he tried to crawl to the gutter while everyone left him alone. Maybe he is still there.

Are you good at binding up other peoples wounds but angry and secretive about your own?  Over the last few years I've finally been able to evidence some humility and ask for help.  And it has changed my life immeasurably.

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Redemption

 

This summer  I've been rewatching some of my favorite movies.  My favorite genre is redemption films.  Perhaps my favorite redemption movie ever is "Life as a House."  It's not a religious film.  It's R rated. The house is a metaphor for all of the wounded characters.  Each one of them is a mess and, as the old ramshackle house is torn down and the new one is rebuilt, so are the lives of the people.  Each one receives healing, even the one who dies. 

When I was still working I used this powerful film as a discussion starter several times.  It tends to make folks react emotionally.  I'm not an emotional person.  I'm a left-brain, pragmatic, analytical robot. 

But when I watched the movie a few days ago, sitting all alone on my couch,  I experienced a big surprise.  Toward the end something strange happened.  I began to cry, to sob actually.  

A few years ago a friend told me this story.  In the year 2000, her daughter, who lived in Santa Monica, California, was helping to get a library started in her children's school.  They had no building and no books.  

She learned that the house that had been built for a movie there had recently been disassembled and stored.  She asked that it be donated for the library and reassembled at the school.  This was the house from "Life as a House".  Later that year the movie premiered in a little theater in Santa Monica.  The proceeds were donated to the library.  So that particular house isn't just a metaphor.  It will live on forever in the hearts and minds of the children who read the books they discover inside.

This, in its self, is both remarkable and healing.  

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Check out my new book "Florida, A Love Story" on Amazon. 

Home

 I had a nice surprise earlier in the week.  My husband David's brother-in-law called to tell me how much he enjoyed my new book, Florida, A Love Story.  This was especially exciting to me because he's a retired professor and somewhat of a historian.  Long retired, he still enjoys leading classes on Shakespeare and other lofty subjects in his retirement community.

 At some point, when we were discussing story telling, he brought up Toni Morrison.  This surprised me.  We then had a discussion about her work.   He told me he'd read everything she'd ever done and asked if I'd read the novel she'd written in 2012 titled Home.  I had not.  I'd never even heard of it.  But I ordered it from Amazon while we were still on the phone.  

Home is about a black man returning home from the Korean war in the 1950s, Morrison describes Frank as a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America minded with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man. 

In this painful, scathing novel Morrison, as usual, doesn't preach.  She just tells Frank's story.  Early on, when Frank is on a train he sees a woman and her husband who has obviously been beaten.  Frank asks a waiter what happened.  The waiter explained that the man got off the train to buy a cup of coffee and the proprietor and others had physically thrown him out of the restaurant.  

The abused couple whispers to each other, she softly, pleadingly, he with urgency.  He will beat her when they get home, thought Frank...What was intolerable was the witness of a woman, a wife, who not only saw it, but had dared to try to rescue - rescue! - him.  

I've been thinking about this passage for two days. 

I told David's brother-in-law about how some Florida schools want to ban Toni Morrison's books Beloved and The Bluest Eye.  We agreed that neither of us was surprised.  Morrison told  a truth many of us don't want to hear.    

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