2017.01.29 Doucement Chérie

Doucement chérie is French for Slow down or Take it easy —more literally, Go sweetly. In Arabic, it has a lullaby lilt—phonetically, Shwaye, shwaye. In Spanish, cuidate or, tellingly, vaya con Dios. In English we might today say, Breathe!  None of this suggests falling asleep.  How can we remain alert and awake and still go doucement?

I have no friggin’ idea.

Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon and quite intense himself, wrote recently in the New Yorker (Jan 23, 2017) about the nature of heroic intervention in medicine: “Tell Me Where It Hurts?” Heroics is the paradigm for surgeons. They set people free and send them home happy, glowing with health and new life—sometimes but not always.

Gawande became fascinated with the work of primary care medicine. How did it work—this unglamorous, long, hard, slow, attentive work of caring over time? Such physicians, it should be noted, are underpaid and overworked.

Interventionist miracle-medicine is excitingly dramatic, but Gawande discovered that the long slow steadiness of incremental treatment over time had better, if less immediate, results: greater longevity, faster healing, more willingness to trust doctors and seek treatment early, just plain happier. Why? Well, duh (an adverb meaning obviously:)!  It’s the relationship that warms and continues to fuel the well being of both physician and patient. They connect. They talk. They communicate. They are not afraid of each other. They get to know each other. Topics other than medicine are not taboo. Really?? Yes, really!!  This is relational medicine. 

There is theological resonance in Gawande’s wisdom. Theology is my own favorite discipline of thought and soul. I mean really who gets orgasmic over theology? I do! How God is and what God cares about matters to me. It’s my spiritual juice.

I remember a New Testament professor in seminary who once practically screamed at us students, “You want to know God’s agenda?”  (I held my pen poised and ready. Now at last I’d know God’s will.)  "It’s Micah 6:8.”  What? Not even Jesus? Not even New Testament?

“God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Slam bang, that’s it, O mortal. How does one do this and also maintain some kind of slow steady  doucement spirit to the process?  How do you do this and, at the same time, allow for incremental theology, aka primary care spirituality? Hint: you have to be a good juggler.

Here’s some wisdom I keep on my home altar from French Jesuit scientist/theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Please note the three factors that come into play over time— evenly and equally— while we try to live according to Micah 6:8: divine grace, your own good will, and circumstances. No single factor of influence is consistently dominant.

Patient Trust in Ourselves and The Slow Work of God

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
     We are quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
    without delay.
     We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
     something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
And that it may take a Very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually—
      let them grow
let them shape themselves,
  without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time (that is to say, grace and
circumstances acting
on your own good will)
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

2012.11.07 Grace Works

Grace doesn’t always just happen; grace works.

I am happy about the election results—not just that our President and others I voted for won, but because there seems to me to be something much greater and deeper going on.

Our nation split and partisans fought with vicious vigor—and now, thanks to gracious “winners and losers” there appears to be willingness to let go and collaborate, to take a Godde’s eye view. Not to eliminate debate and conflict but to know that there is something more precious at stake than individual concerns: the good of the whole.  

Most people think of grace as an amazing and surprising phenomenon—like out of nowhere. And it can be like that.

But there’s another way in which grace operates and that is deep within a system, like deep tissue massage over time.  This kind of grace pulls for the goal of unity without uniformity, and more acceptance of self AND other.  It’s relational grace.

Grace has a history in America.  It has been embodied in many leaders and followers carried forward by the risky work of reconciliation and compromise. It has always headed in the direction of e pluribus unum and it has always meant enormous transformative, emancipatory change.   

Over all my years I’ve prayed for this kind of unitive healing in our family, blended and in-lawed and multiplying.  Sometimes I tried to make it happen and sometimes I impeded it by my own selfish choices.  Now I see it happening. I thank God AND every single member of this beloved community.  (Maybe my children would say it’s Mom being idealistic again.)  Perhaps it is—still..........

It's a blessed jubilant triumphant time for many—and a vulnerable time, a time to stay alert.  Our Episcopal prayer book has a petition in one of the Compline (night) prayers: "shield the joyous." 

Grace is a religious word. All religions have this theological idea. Grace is at work in religions—ironically, tougher to massage.  

In the words of theologian and scientist Teilhard de Chardin, this grace is “the long slow work of God.”  It calls for patience, honest effort, trust in God, self and neighbor, and  ”accepting the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”

Becoming.