"Waiting Without Hope"

Cassandra Howe
April 11, 2010

At the age of seven, I stand in my sister’s room, admiring her porcelain moon sculpture. I pick it up, and immediately drop it. To my horror, this beautiful sculpture shatters all over the floor. I want to hide the accident, so I start pushing all the broken pieces under her bed, crying. The door opens and my mother walks in. She kneels down. She holds me. She holds my tears.
In that moment, I was not just surrounded by shards of pottery- my whole insides felt broken. I felt horrible about my sister’s sculpture, and even worse that I could not present something pretty to give in return. All I could do was sit there, in silence and in fear.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you. Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong reason. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong reason. And yet there is faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.

T.S. Eliot’s words scare me. I cling so tightly to that which I think I know- to the faith and hope and love. Sometimes I hold so tightly I don’t see what is happening right in front of me. What I hope for gets in the way of what is. I am not alone. In a culture that emphasizes happiness and perfection, we sometimes lose touch with what is true.
In the face of the unknown, we are taught to be brave. We clean up our tears with tissues. We know fear not as a friend, but as an enemy. As we turn from our fear, we turn from the tenderness that connects us with other living beings. But when we wait in the places that frighten, we invite in the exiled and unheard- within ourselves and others. It is our journey towards our fear, not away from it, that brings us closer to ourselves, others, and the holy.
Seminary, being a chaplain, and just being a friend have made me more familiar with the discomfort of sitting with another’s pain. Even though it is more familiar, it is no more easy. As someone who defined her worth by her ability to make people happy, it has been a struggle to learn, instead, to invite people towards their pain.

As a kid, I was the nice girl who turned her homework in on time, who never spoke out of turn, and who always gave “100%.” I loved my teachers and loved to please them with my hard work. I was so focused on being good, however, I felt that many people didn’t really know me. What they did know was my kindness and my smile.
But the truth is, part of my smile existed out of fear. If I stopped smiling, who would I be? Would my friends still like me? Would I? I remember one time telling my childhood best friend my feelings were hurt. The group teasing, that she ignited, had just gone too far. I smiled as I told her. I wanted her to feel my pain and I wanted to save her from my pain at the same time.
In the mostly white and middle class suburb in which I grew up, it was expected that you pretend happiness, if you weren’t really. I am glad to say that most of my childhood memories are truly happy. Family camping trips to the Washington coast. Family dinners with friends with jam sessions of harp and drum that carried us into the night. Of course it wasn’t all happy, but it is what my family valued and what I remember the best.
Happiness was the most valued, then grief, and only rarely did anger reach the dinner table. Dinner was one of the only times we had as a whole family- not something to disturb with uncomfortable emotions. Sometimes there was conflict- like what time we were starting dinner- or when my parents had different ideas around whose side of the family we were spending more time with. In these times, we focused on fixing the problem- not tending to the feelings involved. Feelings. The very thing we avoided is now a pillar of my career.

When I went to seminary, one of my classmates encouraged me to start a meditation practice. I decided to try it. Within a short while, my timid once or twice a week meditation became a nightly ritual.
Meditation has taught me self-understanding and compassion. I remember my first few times lying on the floor in a dimly lit room. For the first time in my life, I was giving time to just feel. My thoughts would come and go, some taking hold of my mind more than others. I learned to listen to the feelings surrounding the thoughts. I became more aware of the movement of my emotions, how they flowed in and around my body.
Bodhichitta is something I learned through the writings of Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun. Bodi means- completely open, awake, enlightened. Chitta means mind, heart, or attitude. Bodichitta- the open, awakening heart. Pema Chodron emphasizes the tender quality of bodhichitta. It is as vulnerable and tender as an open wound (4 Chodron). When we meditate, we cultivate our bodhichitta.
What I love about bodhichitta is the importance it places on our wounds. Instead of making us failures, our hurt, pain and sorrow can awaken our tender heart. This past winter, I was sitting in an unusually long meditation cycle. At a certain point, I started to feel angry. Very angry. I followed this anger, inviting it to travel all around my body.            Memories and words of a painful experience I had had a month prior, surfaced. The feeling was so intense, I didn’t know what to do. I thought about trying to push it along, in hopes of returning to my more peaceful state. Instead, I kept seeking my anger, finding its color, its vibration, its pace. Tears came and kept coming- silently flowing down my cheeks. Afterwards, I felt an integration in myself I had not felt for weeks.
We train in bodhichitta when we open ourselves to the present moment. This does not always guarantee comfortable emotions. Pema writes, “In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human.” (26 Chodron).
We think of meditation as an individual endeavor. This is true in one sense, but what we practice is sinking deeper into the tender places of our own hearts that connect us with all human beings.

Learning how to sit with myself has helped me to sit with others. Just like seminary, Clinical Pastoral Education- known as CPE- is one of the steps in becoming a minister. CPE is a way for chaplains and ministers to gain more experience in pastoral care in educational setting. It is often hospital or military based. It is grounded in an action- reflection model of education. Student chaplains do pastoral visits and bring their experiences back for review and reflection with their peers and supervisor.
Now in my third unit of CPE at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, I feel I am just starting to get a grasp at what pastoral care really means. A large chunk of it revolves around two words: being with. Being with. I realize this is not just training for ministry- it is training for life. While it sounds easy- we see kids do this quite gracefully in their play with others- it is not.
Earlier in my time at Children’s, there was a patient on my floor- a teenage boy struggling with Anorexia. He had been in the hospital for a few weeks, with firm restrictions on where he was allowed to walk (mostly in his room and down the hall- no further). After we had been talking a while, he said, “I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes!” “It’s ok,” I said.
Later that day, I was telling a friend about a hardship I was facing. “It’s ok,” she said. And I thought to myself, “no! It’s not ok!” But it was obvious she didn’t want to hear. I thought about my conversation with the teenage boy. I had so badly wanted the patient to feel better, I wasn’t able to be with him in his pain.
Being with. In a culture that values people by what they contribute, we are not taught to simply be. In the pastoral care department, we say, “Why do something when you can sit there!” In the world outside of pastoral care, we want to make people feel better, turn their frown into a smile. Our language is full of expressions that show our drive to get over our uncomfortable emotions:
Don’t worry, be happy
Look on the bright side
What else is out there? Just shout them out.

What about, “I’m fine.”
Keep a stiff upper lip (told to my friend after her mother died).
Smile, It can’t be that bad
God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle
When one door closes, another door opens
Come on, it only takes 3 muscles to smile, but 40 muscles to frown.
A song my friend learned in Mormon Sunday School, "If you chance to see a frown, do not let it stay, quickly turn it upside down and smile that frown away!  No one likes a frowny face, change it to a smile!  make the world a better place by smiling all the while!"
keep a positive attitude
that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. 
Chill.
Suck it up. 
Other people have it worse than you.
They are in a better place now. (after someone dies)

Last winter a very close relative died. Uncle Sandy had been diagnosed with Lymphoma in May. He fought it throughout the summer, and finally, at the end of October, the doctors concluded that chemo was no longer of any use. It was now a waiting game before the cancer cell count got too high for his body to handle.
In the middle of December, I was waiting for my flight to depart from Cincinnati to Seattle. I was going home for Christmas. My cell phone rang. It was my cousin. “It’s all over,” he said. Sandy had died.
While Sandy’s family lives in Boston, and I was headed to Seattle, I was relieved to be going home to family. I got home late, and it was the next night that the four of us finally had the chance to sit down and be together.
We sat around the table looking at pictures of Uncle Sandy through our teary eyes. After a while, my Dad suggested we go around and share any memories of Sandy, or how he has touched our lives. I don’t think any of us were ready for this type of tidy reflection, because we never got around to his request. One of us said, “I can’t do that yet.” Those few words opened something in us and together we wept. It was a healing time for my family.
Towards the end of my week at home, I noticed my grief changing. I was less absorbed by the reality of my uncle’s death. Part of me grieved the increasing levity of my sadness. I did not want to stop thinking about Sandy as I had been. I did not want to return to the fast-paced life I normally led. I wanted to stay in the tenderness of my weeping heart.  

I said to my soul, be still. Be still with oneself and one’s eternal longing. Brokenness opens us in ways unknown in the midst of comfort, contentment, and strength. In the midst of grief and turmoil, we feel lost- to ourselves and others, with nothing to hold onto. It is in these times of the trembling unknown where we can open to ourselves in a different way.
I reach under the bed and pull back the bits of pottery I had tried to hide. I pick up a piece and cradle it in my hand. Cradle it like I would a newborn. Let us hold these broken pieces of ourselves with reverence and awe. We come from these pieces. We come from our tears.

Chodron, Pema. The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Shambhala Publications: Boston, 2001.