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O'Malley's Best
Sending the 72 Disciples
Maybe you didn't notice. but that discourse by Jesus is a homily in praise of imprudence. "Go out and preach a message you don't really understand, and heal with powers you're certain you don't have, but don't take anything that might make the going easier!" That contradicts everything your Mom taught you. "Where are your rubbers? Take an umbrella. I don't care if the other kids laugh at you!" It surely flies in the face of the cautious Puritan ethic. And it defies common sense. Like jumping out of a plane without checking to see if you have a parachute. "Let go", says Jesus. "I'll catch you."
Right.
Problem is, so little of what we carefully squirrel away into our packs to help us face life will be useful. In the last four months in hospitals, I've found precious little from my three exhausting and humiliating years studying philosophy and four years at theology that made the task God sent me any easier. Nor did the math or physics that are the last subjects cut in a school budget crunch. Once you've got the basics, all the rest is improvisation.
But what are the basics? Reading about Miss Celie rising with dignity to challenges in The Color Purple helped, I think, feeding off her indomitable spirit. Seeing "The Elephant Man". Living awhile with Job. Arthur. Lear. The hours in my life I've spent trying to be open to God. Pondering the lives of my friend Bill Jenks who was paralyzed from the neck down for 40 years and my cousin Judy, a so-intelligent woman trapped within a cerebral palsied body. Extermination camp survivors.
What could they have brought with them in anticipation of those shocks?
Nothing but themselves. All they'd accumulated of "heart" and "soul." Hope. Doggedness. Trust. The only defenses are surrenders--when you feel on a trek across Antarctica, and, behind, you see nothing but miles and miles of grey ice, and ahead of you miles and miles of the same.
That's when your truly kind friends, like Job's comforters, give you well-intended bumper-sticker answers like, "Let go, and let God," and "You just have to work harder." But you know that! It's having the courage to deny all you feel, and believe it, and forget what you thought you could do. That's what I now suspect "self-denial" really means: denying what you were sure were your limits. Remembering to factor in what clinging resolutely to God can do. Changing "I can't" to "I'll try."
[I'm exhausted. That's the best I could do with two fingers. Bill]
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