I love the story of the two wolves warring inside of us.
I especially love the second ending that people hadn’t heard
before, where we have to feed both the black and the white wolf(check out the longer ending here: https://danherr.com/2015/05/27/two-wolves-the-real-cherokee-story/ ). When I was growing up, for
example, it was the established understanding that we shouldn’t show anger or
cry in public, for that was a sign of weakness.
Our comic book heros didn’t cry, the Lone Ranger or Zorro never shed a
tear. Instead they triumphed and rode
off into the sunset, satisfied with a job well done and another case of justice
made right.
A lot of the cowboy westerns by people like Max Brand and Zane Gray and
Louis L’Amour would have a brave individual fighting to make things fair
through perseverance, cleverness and knowing the difference between right and
wrong. But this was a lop-sided view of
the world. The image of men who could
take a pounding and rise up to still prevail against the guy with the scar and
the black hat was unrealistic to say the least.
Men did their best to live up to these high expectations. They stuffed their anger down, they pretended
everything was fine. They denied to
themselves how they were feeling. They
learned that it was more important to show folks a calm demeanor than to be
real. They embraced the phrase, ‘boys
will be boys’, and bottled up all the negative energies they had. Women didn’t do much better. We were supposed to bottle up emotions and
never get angry either. We grew up with
a double standard. Nice girls don’t get
noisy or demanding or angry or asking for justice. Nice girls keep their legs together, dress
modestly and stay at home dreaming of the prince who will ride into their
lives, sweep them off their feet and plunk them into the castle of their dreams
where they would live happily ever after.
Women needed rescuing and they couldn’t make decisions and the only
emotion they were supposed to show was gratitude for being rescued by their
strong man. So no wonder the greatest
pain that most people struggle with is one you would least expect.
Last weekend at the workshop I was at, we talked about spiritual pain,
and how there were four kinds. The loss
of meaning, the loss of hope, the loss of relationship and the loss of
forgiveness. The one that was most
prevalent in dying people was lack of forgiveness. Veterans from the military, the modern tough
cowboys of our society, were 73% more likely to be struggling with forgiveness
than meaning, hope or relationship.
Forgiveness was broken down to four different issues: forgiveness of
myself, forgiveness of others, forgiveness of God and forgiveness of multiple
groups. Guess who vets struggled the
most with? Forgiveness of themselves.
Guess which was the hardest to forgive? God. 83% of people who were
mostly angry at God failed to find peace and the strength to forgive God.
What is forgiveness? It is not going up to someone who abused you in the
past, pasting on a cheesy grin and saying “I forgive you and Jesus loves you”.
No, that is shallow and not terribly believable. Instead my course taught that forgiveness is
a voluntary letting go of the desire for revenge. It does not say that the harmful actions were
inconsequential or unimportant or even appropriate, but that we are not going
to dwell on those harmful actions any more.
It is saying that I don’t want to live my life full of thoughts of
resentment and envy any more. It
recognizes that anger is, as the Buddha taught, a hot coal that I pick up to
throw at someone else but it burns my own fingers first.
Jesus said that we cannot serve two masters. We cannot fill our minds with negative angry
thoughts and holy ones. We cannot spend
our time thinking about grudges and hurts and resentments and God as well. We cannot be both full of judgement or
inflexible condemnation and Christian love.
It is one or the other. Jesus
taught that when we are feeling negative emotions, it can help to go for a walk
in nature, thinking about birds or flowers or fields of grass. Another practise is to write down a list of
things we are grateful for. In fact this
is a very effective tool for healing our resentments. It’s why we celebrate Thanksgiving. And it is a powerful form of prayer.
But there are times when feeding the white wolf is not enough. We need strength and resiliency. There are times when, like Jesus, we need to
have the courage to name oppression and abuse for what it is. We know that it isn’t easy, and it couldn’t
have been easy for Jesus to start heading to Jerusalem where he would speak
against the injustices he saw around him, the abuse of power, the attempts to
control vulnerable people, to exploit the poor and the lonely. We saw plenty of that this week with the coverage
at the senate hearings. Regardless of
who we found more credible, there is a troubling sense of conflict over what
should be a priority in our world, unbiased, fair, level-headed justice. Trustworthy people that will make wise
choices not based on who is in power or what their personal beliefs or biases
are, but for the highest good of the whole community.
The God view. Seek first the
community of God. Even a practice of
gratitude as the psychology experts recommend should take back seat to the work
of looking for and creating the community of God, one that does not fear the
future or what other people might think or say.
A community that seeks to heal one another and work for justice and
equity for all. A community of radical
hospitality, radical generosity and radical forgiveness. That is the kind of dream worth making great
sacrifices for, that takes God-given strength and courage to work towards. That takes radical acts of thanksgiving and
forgiveness and uses it to benefit all the world, not just humans. Thanks be to God that we are not alone in
this journey.
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