How Do You Embrace the Hard Things?

On Avoiding the Hard Things

Do prayers ever piss you off?  Sometimes they piss me off.  In my teens and twenties, I was a wilderness guide, leading group canoe trips.  Depending on the group, often some people would pray for no rain & no hard things.  Even in my teens, I knew this made no sense.  Sometimes I would prod them about these prayers.

“Do you want to trees and animals to die?  They need rain.”

“No,” they would say. “We just don’t want it to rain on us.”

“Oh, so you want it to rain on the other groups I take out this summer, but not your group?”

“No,” they would say.  “God can make it rain on the trees and animals but not the people.”

I realized already as a teen that it required substantial mental (and sometimes theological) gymnastics for people to be able to justify a view of the world in which hard things shouldn’t happen to good people.

Each year, in the fall, after spending several months in the wilderness, I would return to the city and to urban life.  For me, this was a disorienting experience.  In the city, we have literally insulated ourselves from the elements and from the hard things.  I would sit in my house, unable to taste the biting cold, to hear the wind, to feel the darkness enfolding, to see the North Star, or to hear the symphony of creation.  It was always a jarring experience.  Surrounded by people, I felt alone, empty, and completely disoriented.

On the Way we Ride the Wave

This fall, I returned to that same wilderness of the Canadian Shield country.  It feels like coming full circle.  Crossing the paths of my younger self, I am reminded of the wisdom I could only learn by listening to the heartbeat of the wild. Thirty years later, people still try to insulate themselves from the fullness of life.  Thirty years later, I still don’t want to run from the storm.  I don’t want to run from the hard things. Healing is not the absence of the storm. Healing is the way we ride the wave.

Driving alone on the prairies, after going to a funeral of a young man, and thinking about my own chronic illness, I wrote this poem.   Hope you enjoy it.

Nobody Wants the Rain

Everybody wants green scenery

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants food on the table

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants the colourful rainbow

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants water in their bodies

Nobody wants the rain

I went to the prairie,

The Expander of Horizons

To ask about the rain

I stood on the edge of the world

And watched the rain coming all around

And the prairie proclaimed a vision:

Each time the gift of rain was offered,

the people ran in fear

Heart’s fear perverts darkness into evil

Missing the gift of life hidden in the cloud

Let it rain down, let it rain down

Let it rain down on me

Everybody wants green scenery

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants food on the table

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants the colourful rainbow

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants water in their bodies

Nobody wants the rain

I want to the mountain

            The Giver of Wisdom

To ask about the rain

I knelt on ancient rocks

50 billion years awake

and the rocks spoke to me:

The rain shapes and molds us

 and turns us into sand

These rain-shaped rocks

Feed the earth as their dust becomes soil

The mighty mountains are transformed

By but a tiny drop of rain

Let it rain down, let it rain down

Let it rain down on me

Everybody wants green scenery

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants food on the table

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants the colourful rainbow

Nobody wants the rain

Everybody wants water in their bodies

Nobody wants the rain

I want to the ocean

            The Alpha and Omega

To ask about the rain

I sat on the ocean’s edge

As but a tiny grain of sand

And the ocean questioned to me:

            Where is my beginning and

            where is my end?

Ocean’s edge is hard to find

On shore? In sky?  Inside my body?

The ocean’s end is its own beginning

Let it rain down, let it rain down

Let it rain down on me