I have come to hate that word [cope], because to cope with something you have to separate yourself from it. You make it your antagonist, your enemy. Like management, coping is a taming word, sometimes even a warfare word. Wild, untamed emotions are full of life-spirit, vibrant with the energy of being. They don't have to be acted out, but neither do they need to be tamed. They are part of our inner wilderness; they can be just what they are. God save me from coping. God help me join, not separate. Help me be with and in, not apart from. Show me the way to savoring, not controlling. Dear God, hear my prayer: make me forever copeless.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Lectio Divina - One hundred and fifteen
I have come to hate that word [cope], because to cope with something you have to separate yourself from it. You make it your antagonist, your enemy. Like management, coping is a taming word, sometimes even a warfare word. Wild, untamed emotions are full of life-spirit, vibrant with the energy of being. They don't have to be acted out, but neither do they need to be tamed. They are part of our inner wilderness; they can be just what they are. God save me from coping. God help me join, not separate. Help me be with and in, not apart from. Show me the way to savoring, not controlling. Dear God, hear my prayer: make me forever copeless.
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So often we live at war with our wild emotions. We think we need to master them, crush them, remove them. But if we live with them, feeling them fully without necessarily acting on them, they bring us life. Our inner wilderness is full of joy and terror and exuberance. We often misguidedly seek this aliveness in things outside of ourselves. I am spending a lot of time in the woods lately, looking for a wildness that I find deep within myself.
Loving God, help me to live in my inner wilderness, aroar with the sounds of the wild beasts within.
"Show me the way to savoring, not controlling" ......show me how to accept what is rather than resist it or deny it. Show me how to bring my whole self to life, not just parts of it so that I can be truly engaged with it, with God and with others - so that I can be transformed by these encounters.
Thanks again , Lindsay, for sharing your words of wisdom.
I remember the countless times that I prayed, "God, help me cope." I considered coping, like managing, to be a very good thing.
What a different season of life this is. I'm done with taming. Indeed, show me the way to savor, not control.
("Aroar" may be my new favorite word!)
Dear God, hear my prayer: make me forever accepting, and grateful.
It is true that the more I struggle with the addictive parts of myself, the more addicted I become. There is such poignancy, though, to the act of simply accepting the thing about myself that I most resist. God, help me to find my way through.
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