W.E. Krill, Jr. M.S.P.C.

This past week was a bit of vacation for Anne and I, as we spent some time with her mother before taking a couple of days of quiet in the woodsof Pennsylvania to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary.

The time with my mother-in-law was very good, but also so very sad, as she is suffering in her twilight years with dementia. Her short term memory is increasingly impaired, and her mid and long term memory is is also showing signs of decomposition. This results in her needing constant attention in answering her questions over and over again, and reassuring her that we have things in control.

Joyously, she still has complete recognition of those she loves. I was a bit anxious and apprehensive about entertaining her for the day as we took her out to have her hair done, do some shopping, and out to eat. Her sense of humor is also still quite intact, and our evening mea lat an Italian eatery that has waitresses and waiters who sing an opera aria every fifteen minutes tickled all of our humors. The food was great, but Mom could not recall what she had for dinner by th etime we got to the car to drive home.

Each place we went, the hairdresser, later the make up lady at the Boscov's who took the time to help Mom with some makeup to compliment her new hair cut, the wait staff at the restaurant, and the owner of the bead shop all caught on rather quickly to what was going on with Mom, and demonstrated extraordinary kindness. As we went to each stop, I was expecting that sooner or later one of the people serving us would look askance or be derogatory in some way, and it just did not happen. Everyone who served my mother-in-law that day showed remarkable gentleness and care.

A day that I had been somewhat anxious about was changed by the kindness of strangers and the continuing and inimitable charm and humor of mymother-in-law. It must be a kind of 'karma', because Mom spent her career in helping foster parents and foster children with great kindness and firm skill for many years. As we drove through town after our dinner, she asked me: 'Did you know I worked in this town once?' I affirmed, stating that I too, once worked with her in the same agency.

 She repeated often that she was having a delightful time, but likely forgot that we even visited by the next morning. No matter, for a day she was joyous and content; Anne and I had the chance to honor her mother, and I had my faith renewed in the kindness of strangers.

Well, here is what I have done/do to treat my own depression: change my thinking (challenge all negaitve thought), change my behaviors (DO healthy things, even when I don't feel like it), focus on balance in all things regarding health: eating, sleeping, exercise, prayer and meditation/contemplation (especially meditation/contemplation), and having good doses of relaxation and fun. Track my symptoms and behavioral 'tells' so I can be forewarned and know balance is off. Finding the right med(s) at the right dose is key to using all the former tools. Meds won't cure you, they just help you get out of the 'hole' and stay out of the 'hole'. I imagine my depression as a sleeping dragon in that hole; my job is to keep him sleeping, because if he wakes, there is hell to pay. I WILL NOT go back into that hole, no way, no how. I do, however, go back and take a peek at it once in a while so I don't get complacent. I treat my depression like a disease that will progress and could kill me if I do not aggressively treat it daily. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, and got tired of the dragon stealing so much from my life. Finding and committing to passions is a productive tool.

While actively depressed, I used to speak to others a good bit about being depressed. Once I 'got it' and found the way through the tangle to get to work on saving myself (with God's help), I stopped talking about being depressed and started to talk about how NOT to be depressed (became an advocate for healing, in other words). And that is my 'insulin'...just like a diabetic who needs to stay aware of their sugar levels multiple times daily, I check my sleeping dragon several times a day, and do the WORK inside my head and with my behavios to to stay healthy.

There are still days where I can feel the dragon stirring; hear him breathing and smell his dank breath. But I no longer live in fear of him.

I used to be pissed at God and wonder why He allowed the dragon to harrass ME (and almost drag me down into the hole forever)...and now I know: so that I could witness to others about how to put their own dragon to sleep and have a productive and happy life.

When I first got married, I thought I had made a committment to Anne. Ten years later, I thought marriage was a committment to God. Twenty years later, I thought  marriage was a committment to myself. Thirty years on, I now know that marriage is a committment to all three.

I sure cannot tell you much about women or even one woman (Anne). Women (including Anne) still baffle me to a great degree. Once I gave up trying to understand Anne, that is when I began to really know her.

In the Bible, we hear about a man and woman 'knowing' each other. When we were kids we used to snicker at that phrase, because we thought it meant 'sex'. While indeed is does mean to know sexually, it also means something far, far deeper. It really means to know the other person at the deepset level possible, like no one on earth knows them.

Often, we hide that deep part of ourselves from our spouse, becasue we fear being really known. If our partner really knew us, we fear, they would reject us.  If we are lucky, the years that go by in our marriage teach us to hide less and be more open to our partner knowing us, and we knowing them. I really don't believe that it is possible to gain these things until you are well into the journey of marrriage, twenty, thirty years, even more. I do know that there is much more for Anne and I to know about each other, and that is exciting.

Perhaps the one thing that God has taught me recently about being married is the value of yielding to my partner. It's right there, in First Corinthians, that word submit. We may get hung up on that word, but if we substitue the word 'yield' (which I believe Paul would have no objection to), Paul's true meaning comes through. Try it, married folks.

There is much in life that is convoluted, and much of that convolution frustrates and even infuriates me. Dealing with large systems is one of these. Large systems, like insurance agencies, hospitals, social service agencies and churches often seem to take eons to sort out questions, complaints, or even access to services.

Who has not been shuttled from one person to the next, only to be brought back to the original person who you had contact with in the first place? Or worse yet, when no one seems to know the answer to a question that certainly has an answer?

Convolution can be an unintended effect of a large, cumbersome organizations, or a individual's confused mind, or be an intentional technique to fog, fudge, or lie about the issue at hand. Sometimes people in counseling will intentionally convolute in order to avoid areas of healing that they know they should be addressing, but find too painful to address. That is my cue to become more gentle in my approach, or give the person being counseled a bit more time or space to get comfortable in approaching the issue.

Life, even when lived in balance, is often a convoluted maze that can get confusing and remain a tangled mess for a time. How we get to 'be' where we find ourselves in each moment is a reflection of the long and twisted path we have traveled thus far. It is hindsight that is needed to examine and understand the false starts, wrong roads, and blessings along the way of our convoluted life. It is in turning back once in while; in tracing the history of both (what seemed at the time) stupid and meaningful convolutions that we might find that many we thought were stupid are now meaningful, and those we thought meaningful are really stupid.

    Webster’s defines ‘discernment’ like this: “The quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure.”  The process of spiritual discernment is work; it may not be as much of the case that what God is communicating is obscure rather than our inherent limitations and laziness in understanding God’s desires for us.

    We can often see the hand of God in hindsight, maybe years or decades later once we have gathered some important experiences and wisdom. The art of discernment, though, is to pay attention to what is being asked of us in the here-and-now. Since most of us crave intimacy, but want it only on our own terms, it is not a mystery as to why we may avoid working at discerning what God wants from us. Like the small child who knows the directive to pick up their toys is coming, we often do everything in our power to avoid the directive. Or, like the child who is angry and hurt, pushing away the loving and comforting arms of the parent.

    Spiritual discernment does take courage and the ability to ‘hold on to yourself’ emotionally. It means making yourself available to listen God, and this may include listening to a variety of people in our life, since God often speaks through those around us. Grasping and comprehending requires a good bit of grappling and analysis on our part. And that is work. And yes, I am lazy.

    So how do we know that the conclusion we arrive at is a result of spiritual discernment and not just our own imaginings? Spiritual discernment usually results in discovering an uncomfortable truth: being called and not wanting to be called, intense unexplained enthusiasm, willingness to face great odds and tremendous work, feeling an internal compulsion that is not readily of our character, and, not in the least, some kind of suffering. This may be that we give up time or money, turn over our own will, put ourselves our there for ridicule, or find that we have made huge errors in relationship that we must address with our own self confrontation and growth.

    Don’t fear discernment; if you engage in it, you will grow in ways that will enable you to carry out the conclusion, and you will be not walking alone.

    Years ago (OK, decades ago) I discovered a truth that has become something fundamental to me: “No risk, no gain”.  Every good idea, every good venture, every good relationship in life involves a degree of risk. I’m not talking about foolish risk or unnecessary risk, but the kind of risk that in the same moment is anxiety producing and exciting.

    The risk of a career move, the risk of getting married (and having children), the risk of writing a book without assurance that it will get published or that anyone will subsequently want to read it, the risk of traveling out of the country on a long and tedious trip. Life is full of both good and bad risks.

    When I was younger, I used to think that the way to mitigate risk was to be ultra-prepared and have gobs of courage. While being well prepared and having courage are indeed key elements of managing risk, there still needs to be a tolerance of, well, the risk. As I have gotten older, I have tended to take less of these good risks than I used to.

    But then along came an insistent and annoying idea. At first I thought it was an idea that came out of my musings with a friend, but then he began to speak more seriously about the idea, and then so did I, and the next thing you know, we go and decide that the idea is in fact not our own, but an idea from God. Now, if it had been me alone, I might have passed off the idea as just an interesting fantasy, but when the idea kept coming up between my friend and myself, over and over, for more than a year, it became clear it was not just my whacky idea.

    This forced me to reconsider what I thought was my nice, neat concept of risk. Once you throw God into the mix, it changes things. Boy, does it change things. There is that whole Abraham and Isaac thing that brings faith into the concept of risk. And so now this idea that my friend and I share is moving forward into something that looks like it will be real. And while we are very excited about it, it’s really scary as well, because it involves some financial and reputation risk.

    But courage is no longer an issue, because of God’s involvement. Faith makes courage moot.

Funny how one thing can lead to another. Recently, my son hit a deer with the family car, which led to having a rental car while ours was being repaired. The car had satelite radio, which is pretty cool. The sound system in the car was of really fine quality as well. A song came on by Cat Stevens, a singer from the seventies. I like Cat, and Anne likes him even more. I had known that Cat Stevens had converted to Islam and changed his name years ago, but decided to try to do bit of research on him to see what he had been doing since then.

I love learning. I beleive I got the love of learning from my parents. My Mom was interested in so many things, and our family seemed to gravitate towards 'documentaries' on TV. I recall especially the 'National Geographic Specials' and being, well, special. My Dad told me countless times: 'Never miss a chance to learn something, even if it does not interest you much; you never know when you might use what you have learned.' My college years taught me to do research, soemthing I came to love to do. Those skills have helped me so much with my book-writing. I still do research on a wide variety of things when I get my curiosity up.

And that's how I came to go looking for Cat Stevens, who is now called 'Yusuf'. For many years he did not perform, but did begin to make a difference for the world through his work in the area of peace. He eventually returned to music, producing a children's album of Islamic songs, and then later picked up a guitar again and began to write and perform new music. His latest album is called: 'Roadsinger'. You can hear the themes of peace and Islam in the work, and you can hear the old Cat as well. It was like rediscovering and old friend.  I purchased and downloaded the album and gave it to Anne as a gift.

And so my love of learning and Yusuf's peaceful music came together and produced a gift for my best friend.  She smiled. You never know when something you have learned will become valuable.

    Many folks talk about the downfall of culture in America, citing many aspects of this genuine issue. My theory is that one of the biggest issues is ‘Entitlement Attitude‘.  It is a prevalent aspect of our culture, and it often goes so unchallenged as to be now an expected (and accepted) aspect of culture. It is perhaps the core of what is known outside of the USA as the ‘ugly American’.

    From celebrities who feel entitled to expose their immoral lifestyles and glorify them in the media, to music idols that feel entitled to trash hotel rooms, to the average Joe who feels they can beat the heck out of the rental car just because they rented it, or the teen who feels entitled to damage the property of a church retreat center, Entitlement Attitude is truly ‘ugly’.

    The Entitlement Attitude does not stay contained, like a virus, it morphs into other things. Like parents who, having overindulged their child to the point of turning them into spoiled Princes and Princesses, will step up to defend their child and make excuses for them even when the child is clearly in the wrong. Instead of making the child face the situation and be responsible, they turn the accusations towards others, or simply buy off the problem. Gone are the days when if a child did something wrong at the neighbor’s house down the block, their parent knew about it and was waiting to correct the child before the child even arrived home. And, the parent would back up the adult who made the complaint, not make excuses for the kid. And then march the kid back to the neighbor's house to post an apology.

    Entitlement is basically classism and imagined specialness: ‘I am more privileged than you, I am more special than you, and the common rules of civility and consequence do not apply to me’. It means: ‘I can be as late as I want to meetings, I do not have to meet the requirements that are expected or that all other people have to do, but still expect the reward, certificate, grade, raise, promotion, or degree.’

    Many things can serve to enhance and encourage the Entitlement Attitude, like a bunch of letters after your name, social status, political positions, and of course, perhaps the biggest one of all: money. But these do not have to create Entitlement Attitude. That's why one of my daily prayers is:  'Lord, keep me humble, forever in Your sight.'

    As a believer, I understand that I am entitled to nothing in this life. Nothing. Everything I have ever had, have now, or ever will have, including possessions, education, opportunities, money, relationships, love, and especially forgiveness are all gifts from God. And so for me,  the antitheses of the Entitlement Attitude is the Grateful Attitude. And perhaps one of the most important things that I am grateful for is that I know that I am not entitled. And knowing that is key in loving my neighbor as myself.

Each year that passes causes me to crave the start of Spring ever more. This morning on my way to the car, I was intensely delighted to see many crocus and miniature iris had come up, overnight, between the stones of my front  walkway. In the warm morning breeze, it felt as if I had been reborn.

This past end of winter season has been a tough one. First the passing of an old hero of mine, my father-in-law, and the very next day, the discovery of the passing of a young hero of mine. The deaths were two punctuation marks of a winter that seemed longer, grayer, colder, and snowier than those I have remembered of the past.

Perhaps that is a not too surprising aspect of getting older: the Winters are harder, and the Springs are more welcome. As a child, I loved each season as well as the other. Fall delighted with Halloween and cool crisp and sunny days, Winter held the promise of days of sledding and ‘good packing snow’, while the virtues of summer to a boy hardly need articulating.

But this Spring, in this year, during this Lent, seems for me to be weightier and so much more welcomed than those in recent memory. The contrast of the sadness and distress I have felt in the aftermaths of the deaths of these two men whom I loved, as well as the recent world events of so much destruction and human pain and loss, with the onset of Spring is stark in its simplicity and beauty. On the one hand, death. On the other, life. That those tiny flowers today in my front yard can remind me that life always prevails over death, despite the apparent frailty of life is a miracle.

‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’  ~Psalm 30:5

Our culture has such a shallow view of what beauty is. This view of beauty is strongly influenced by marketing, Madison Avenue whims of style, television, and a culture that glorifies youth. Not that a person should ignore their appearance or health, or that there is anything inherently ugly about youth. In fact, a well dressed, healthy young person is often a beautiful thing to see. But beauty goes far beyond this.

There is a Navaho Blessing Way prayer that speaks about ‘walking in beauty’.  When you read the prayer, it may seem quite odd, because our culture is different from the Navaho in many important ways. Those who follow the spiritual path of Navaho and other Native people will tell you that all of life becomes a spiritual expression. Indeed, nothing that we can see or experience is other than spiritual. And when the world is approached in this way, all is beautiful.

I think that there is a fundamental opportunity that we are given as we grow older, and opportunity to walk into our aging process with either bitterness and desperation or with sublime beauty and serenity. Some may call this ‘aging gracefully’, but I think that it is way more than that; is something deeply spiritual. It is a singular experience that you at first only have glimpses of, but once glimpsed, you begin to crave more of the same, to live it, to walk in it constantly.

I sometimes look at the love of my life, or my sons, or my other family members, or even just a toddler that catches my eye at church, and see incredible, breathtaking  beauty. There is a kind of positive vibration, or rightness that is able to be seen when we look with our spiritual eyes that cannot be felt or seen if we are not allowing ourselves to feel and see it. This kind of beauty strikes you to the core, and the power of it at once stirs great joy, creates great calm, and even brings you to a kind of sadness.

It’s not only the Navaho that speak of this, it can also be seen in Buddhism, Zen, Yoga, and Christianity. It must certainly be the experience of Paul, once he awoke to the truth and began to see the world through the eyes of the perfect love. Open your eyes, and walk in beauty.

http://talking-feather.com/2009/12/24/walking-in-beauty-a-navajo-prayer/