Tag Archives: 23rd Psalm

What We Run From Pursues Us

Last month I attended a hospice event featuring David Kessler, a leading educator and author specializing in grief work.  He shared one of his guiding principles: “What we run from pursues us.  What we face transforms us.”  

It resonated with a comment I recently read in The Tears of Things by Fr. Richard Rohr: “Remember, if you do not transform your pain and egoic anger, you will always transmit it in another form.  This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities.”[i]

Rohr gave an example of this in a recent YouTube interview with Oprah Winfrey. Over the years, he has done a great deal of work with men’s groups.  Early on, he learned many of them had fathers who were often angry.  Midway through the retreat and when a sense of mutual trust had been established, Rohr would tell the men that the source of such anger is often unexpressed sorrow.  If we don’t express the sorrow, it builds up and becomes anger.  When the men at his retreat heard this, their feelings towards their fathers often shifted from resentment to compassion.

Sometimes we need to be in the right environment – like a retreat center or in the presence of a caring person — to let the pain surface.

When I was at Hospice of Santa Barbara, we obtained funding to initiate a community spiritual care program.  Believing there is a great deal of hidden pain and grief in nursing homes and retirement communities, we offered weekly visits from our staff to several nearby facilities.  One of our counselors was asked by the social services director at one facility to visit a new resident who had become reclusive since moving in.  He went for the first visit and was politely received.  She told him her adult children had wanted her to make the move from the East Coast so she would be closer to them. She appreciated their intent, but moving cross-country meant she had to leave her long-time community and friends.  After an hour of cordial conversation, he offered to come back the next week for a second visit, which she accepted. 

During the next visit, she talked more openly about her sense of dislocation and loss. 

He came back the next week, and after some brief conversation, she began weeping, then sobbing. Then, he said, emotion came out so strongly that she was physically shaking; he had rarely seen someone break down so intensely.  Eventually she became calm and composed. Their time was up, and she thanked him for the visit. 

When he returned the next week, she suggested instead of staying in her apartment she show him the nearby rose gardens.

When we can face and bear the pain that pursues us, we find not only a sense of release and relief but also greater awareness of the blessings around us.

I’m reminded of the last verse of the 23rd Psalm.  After alluding to times when the writer needed rest and renewal, as well having passed through the “valley of the shadow of death,” the imagery shifts to a sense of gratitude: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…” Years ago I read a commentary on the Psalm by Rabbi Harold Kushner.  He posed the question: What does it mean that goodness and mercy follow me?  Aren’t they with me all the time?  They are, he says, but we are often too distracted and are running out ahead of them. But when we take time to stop and be present with our life, they can catch up with us and come sit in our lap.

[i] Rohr, The Tears of Things, pg.6

Lead Image: Outdoor labyrinth, La Casa de Maria          

Do You Have a Portable Paradise?

         I recently gave a sermon focusing on the famous verse from Psalm 23 in which the writer compares God to a shepherd who “… makes me lie down in green pastures…leads me beside still waters…(and) restores my soul.” 

The next day, a parishioner sent me this poet by Trinidadian writer, Roger Robinson:

“A Portable Paradise”

“And if I speak of Paradise,


then I’m speaking of my grandmother


who told me to carry it always


on my person, concealed, so


no one else would know but me.


That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.


And if life puts you under pressure,


trace its ridges in your pocket,


smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,


hum its anthem under your breath.


And if your stresses are sustained and daily,


get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,


hostel or hovel – find a lamp


and empty your paradise onto a desk:


your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.


Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope


of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.”

We seem to have inherited a strong imprint of such places from our hunting and gathering ancestors. If we live in a desert climate, “green pastures” and “still waters” give us a sense of safety and hope; if we live on a Caribbean island, it may be “white sands, green hills and fresh fish.”  Such places speak to us of life, rest, and restoration.

This past week, I asked friends where they go when they want to have such an experience.  Some say it’s a quiet place in their backyard.  Others say it’s a specific beach, park, or trail.  Many people will name places in Hawaii or the Sierras.  

We can carry such places with us in our imaginations.  As the poet says, such a place can become our own “portable paradise.”  We can go there in times of anxiety and uncertainty, when we are facing an important decision, or when we simply want to remember who we are.

Hospice counselors I know encourage their clients to identify and carry such “safe places” with them so they can imagine being there when feeling worn down by grief. One bilingual counselor told me that some of her Latino clients have never been to places like Hawaii or the Sierras, nor could they identify a safe place from personal experience.  She would encourage them to choose a color that might work, and they often chose blue.

For more than a decade, we’ve spent time every summer in the town of McCloud at the foot of Mt. Shasta.  There’s an old 9-hole golf course there at the edge of the pine forest.  I’ve played it many times by myself in the late afternoon and early evening when it’s just the course, the creek, the mountain, the deer, and me.  During COVID, if I was having a hard time sleeping, I’d play a round in my imagination. I would see myself preparing for and executing each shot, then walking patiently to the next one.  I didn’t keep score, and often fell asleep before finishing the round.

Calling such places to mind is like tasting delicious food – we can take our time, savoring each aspect of the image as it speaks to us.  Our egos may get impatient, nagging us about the urgent things we need to do.  But we can tell our busy minds we’ll be right back after a break.  When we take time to let our imagination become a servant to our soul, we can find those “paradise places” within that bring us back to life.

Top image: “Picnic in Paradise,” by Steve Barton; Lower image, “Deer Finding Lost Ball,” McCloud Golf Club