places

 

Place tells who we are, our memories are tied to places we were, where, when, who was there, what happened, was done and said; what cannot be undone; what was unsaid and now forever cannot be said. Memories are themselves places that define us as uniquely as faces and fingerprints. At our deepest we only know ourselves, no one knows us, and no one knows another person. 

Wherever I was, I phoned my mother on her birthday, May 7, the first farthest in my memory, long distance from Ann Arbor, 1962, when she turned fifty. Which at twenty-six I knew was ancient. This morning mama would be a hundred nine. Some earliest memories always surface to be repeated, told again - -

- Clinic. Dr Carmel Roberts' Clinic, late 1937 or early 1938, I was two years old. My mother ate my ice cream cone. Waking from tonsillectomy, my throat sore and scratchy, and my father was standing there waiting, holding a vanilla ice cream cone for me. One lick I was nauseated, and mama ate my ice cream.

- the fork in the road where, turning south, Massalina Drive becomes Linda Avenue to the left and Allen Avenue to the right, inside the car, black 1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe coach, standing on the floor in the back seat, behind my mother. "Mommie, how old are you?" She says, "I'm 29." 

Imagine your mother being 29. It's one of the places I can go.

- Dining Room, evening of Labor Day, September 8, 1941. Five years old, I was a few days from turning six. My mother called me into the dining room and said "Bubba, you're starting school tomorrow: what do you want them to call you?" Surprised, thinking, I decided and said "Not Bubba. How about Tom?" She said, "No, it can't be Tom. When I was in high school I had a boyfriend named Tom, and your daddy still hates him." Most reluctantly, beyond reluctant, I agreed to be called Carroll. 

I was called Carroll, but I was not Carroll, I was never Carroll. It's a sense of the German question "Wie heißen sie?" How are you called? You may call me Johnnie, Johnnie Cash: being a shy boy named Sue was hard, never easy; no easier was going through childhood explaining "Yes, Carroll, it's a last name, my father was named for his uncle John Thomas Carroll, it has two r's and two l's." Regardless, it still always came out Sue. 

- all my growing up years my mother said positive things about me, both to me encouraging me, and to others; unique, she was the only one. 

++++++++++++

My other thoughts this morning were still about the question of theodicy: if God is all powerful and all loving, why is there suffering in the world? I'm still thinking that it's the wrong question, it starts from a human premise about God that doesn't define God as God defines and reveals God's self in human Experience. Fr Richard does a better job than most of us, of understanding God, as Participating. Today's meditation is good. 

ABC&PTL

Thomas Carroll Weller, Jr

  

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

 

 

Week Eighteen: Trauma and Healing

 

Gazing on the Crucified Jesus

 

 

 

Those who “gaze upon” the crucified Jesus (John 19:37) long enough—with contemplative eyes—are always healed at deep levels of pain, unforgiveness, aggression, and victimhood. It demands no theological education at all, just an “inner exchange” by receiving the image within and offering one’s soul back in safe return.

“The crucified Jesus is no stranger” to any part of human history, as Dom Sebastian Moore so wisely put it. [1] The Crucified One offers, at a largely unconscious level, a very compassionate meaning system for history. The mystery of the rejection, suffering, passion, death, and raising up of Jesus is the interpretative key for what history means and where it is all going. Without such cosmic meaning and soul significance, the agonies and tragedies of humanity feel like Shakespeare’s “sound and fury signifying nothing.” The body can live without food easier than the soul can live without such meaning.

Theologian Serene Jones has reflected deeply on trauma and the cross. It is an event that both repels us and draws us near. We don’t fully understand it, but there’s a redeeming reason we are drawn to the image again and again:

The meaning [of the cross] that counts most on a day-to-day basis is the one nestled deep within the beholder’s heart—and hearts are too unwieldy and often unpredictable sites of meaning-making. The cross makes sense in ways that do not make sense. Imprinted on our conscious minds, it animates our unconscious compulsions and drives in ways that escape us. We live within the story but are not always sure quite how. We both know it and don’t know it. . . . Grace is grace. It comes. [2]

If all these human crucifixions are leading to some possible resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively.

This deep gazing upon the mystery of divine and human suffering is found in the prophet Zechariah in a very telling text that became a prophecy for the transformative power of the victims of history. He calls Israel to “Look upon the pierced one and to mourn over him as for an only son,” and “weep for him as for a firstborn child,” and then “from that mourning” (five times repeated) will flow “a spirit of kindness and prayer” (12:10) and “a fountain of water” (13:1, 14:8).

Today this is perhaps what we would call “grief work,” holding the mystery of pain and looking right at it and learning deeply from it, which normally leads to an uncanny and newfound compassion and understanding.

I believe we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified to soften our hearts toward God, and to know that God’s heart has always been softened toward us, even and most especially in our own suffering. This softens us toward ourselves and all others who suffer too—in one great wave of universal mercy.

 

 

[1] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger (Seabury Press: 1977).

[2] Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, 2nd ed. (Westminster John Knox: 2019), 73.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 186, 192.

Image credit: Belinda Rain, Water Drops On Grass (detail), 1972, photograph, California, National Archives.

Image inspiration: Even in and around our sharpest edges the water of life gathers. Soothing, nourishing, healing.