Living with What Is

This is a 5 am post.  I got tired of trying to sleep and made some coffee and decided that this will be a day to take a nap.  Living with what is.

At 3 o clock I was aware of my husband's form getting slowly out of bed and carefully walking to the bathroom.  He carries a little flashlight.  He is old and cannot hear me and tries hard not to disturb me. I watch him and love him remembering the vital man he used to be .  Much has changed in the last few years.  It is what it is.

Yesterday I spoke to a young woman who was bemoaning the fact that she is a single mother.  And her daughter wants to be with her father when she is with her and with her when she is with her father.  She is two years old.  She sometimes has tantrums and it is hard for everyone.  I  know that when  you are a  parent, you watch your children suffer because  of your own life choices.  What I know to be true is that at some point you make peace with how it is.

I know that facing and accepting reality is part of the spiritual journey.  And so we keep moving on and seeing things that we do not like but are the reality - our aging and  mistakes  just being some  of them.

There is another part of what is - and that is the evil that is part of humanity.  Last night I watched a frontline show about how the creators of facebook idealistically only recognized how facebook "connected" people.  They did not want to see that it could be used for nefarious purposes to divide humanity, present lies as truth and create chaos. .  As I watched the show, I thought they did not take "sin" into account.

And then there was the man who constructed a dozen  bombs last week and the shooter who brought death and destruction to a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  We are shocked and dismayed again as we face what is - people whose world view is distorted by prejudice and hate.  Over and over again we see it in history and the present.  We live with the reality of  the possibility of violence in every place that people can gather - churches, shopping malls, schools, movie theatres, restaurants, clubs.

There is no answer to any of this - it just is.  We may not like it - it just is.

I want to have some profound ending to this post, but I don't.  When I spoke to the young Mother today, I did mention the serenity prayer.  There is a reason that it continues to speak to all of us.  I especially like the end of it - about "accepting hardships as the pathway to peace."  And that is what I know to be true - the more accepting I am of reality - the more peace and even joy I experience.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.