Faith And Collective Trauma 16

Life hasn't been easy for me, Gentle Reader. But it could have been much worse. I have undergone the bitter divorce of my parents, the full range of child abuse, all opportunities for higher education snatched from me largely because of the former and the latter, underemployment, poverty, sometimes extreme poverty, police harassment in my youth and middle age, social exclusion, homelessness, have never known what it is to have a life-partner or a family of my own, hundreds and hundreds of deaths of people dear to me and in my work of care giving, religious cult abuse, a breakdown of my mental and emotional health, stigmatization, more poverty and underemployment, abandonment by my family and friends, and a lot of vicious dog attacks, I have been stalked and harassed, my life has been threatened and endangered. Well, boohoo. I have never really gone hungry, have mostly enjoyed fairly good health, and even when homeless, have always had a roof over my head. And one other thing. I don't complain a lot. I know people who have had it very well compared to me: lovely careers, university, high incomes, homes, cars, families, good health, and they have never really gone without, and you know what? Some of those people are miserable. And they are delicate. They haven't had their ass kicked. They have coasted on white or middle class entitlement and privilege and have never had to do without anything. And they complain. Relentlessly complain. I think a lot of them have never really learned to love. It's always about what they can get or extract out of life, knocking off their bucket lists, and whinging and complaining about their favourite restaurant suddenly serving frozen vegetables or a wine vintage they don't approve of. I don't know well a lot of people like that because, really, why would any of them want to be seen with someone like me? I live in a subsidized apartment and work at an occupation full of built-in stigma. I really own nothing much outside of my books, paintings and art supplies, my computer and a few modest household appliances and utensils: a small laptop computer, a landline phone, no TV or cell or smart phone, no microwave, no stereo, a couple of radios and a CD player (gifts), with mostly secondhand CD's a small portable electric fan, a few items of clothing (mostly secondhand or found), furniture that is well-past its best-before date, a tooth bush, and almost nothing else. I wake up early every morning and I feel, not deprived, nor cheated by life. I feel blessed. Every single morning. Because life has not been for me a cakewalk, because I have known much sorrow, rejection, abandonment, and danger, I treat life not as an entitlement, but as a gift. I know that even though I have suffered some, many have had it far worse than I. I also follow a Saviour who has also suffered and this is why God is so real to me: not because he has protected me from suffering. He has not. But because he too has suffered, and he suffers with me and in me and for me as he does for every last one of you entitled ungrateful losers. I could not imagine a God who did not know intimately through his own experience what it is like to be a suffering and broken human being. Life has become for me a gift and every day I step outside to enjoy the wonder of nature, his creation, and the beauty of other people, even spoiled little gods like some of my privileged Gentle Reader. I have friends again. Many. And I appreciate each one as a gift, perhaps because I know how easy it is to lose friends, just as I am aware from my own contacts with death, how easily and quickly this gift of life could be snatched from me. I have never stopped loving, and all the crap that has happened in my life has but served to teach me to love more. And that is the secret, I have found, to a happy and meaningful life: love, joy and gratitude, and these also are gifts that are always being offered us for the taking. If we will but only, in exchange for such precious bestowments, will respond by rejecting selfish and self-interested fear and by offering nothing less than our very selves, souls, lives and beings. The words of St. Francis of Assisi: It is in giving that we receive, it is in loving that we are loved, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."