The world is a lot
There are weeks when the world around us feels extra chaotic. When the news at all levels – local, national, and international – feels confusing and frightening. When even in your own home, family, or life, perhaps, you are feeling unsettled and uncertain about what lies ahead. When (can you relate, Eagles fans?) even your favorite escape of cheering for your team fails to be a happy distraction. This has been one of those weeks.
What are you to do when chaos swirls around you? What are you to do when you’re struggling to find a glimmer of light in the darkness?
Even the tiniest sliver of a moon lights the night
This morning, when the dogs and I headed out for our morning walk it was still dark. Yet, unlike the heavy darkness of the news lately, the darkness of the morning didn’t feel overwhelming. As we made our way through the still sleeping neighborhood, the thinnest sliver of the moon kept catching my eye and making me smile. Somehow, though it was nearly as small as the moon gets in its cycle, it was still there – glowing just enough to dispel the darkness of the winter morning.
A little bit – even 1/60th – is enough
In a recent email from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, author Margaret Feinberg offers a story that she learned from the Talmud. The story says that if someone is suffering and you can take away 1/60th of their pain, that is good. The story is a reminder that God calls each of us to help when we notice pain and suffering in the world around us. This can feel daunting to the point of paralysis sometimes – which is exactly the human reaction that the story is meant to allay. Feinberg goes on to point out how freeing it is to remember that we are only called to take away a tiny portion of the suffering that we witness; that everything does not depend on us.
What does 1/60th look like?
As I walked in the light of the crescent moon this morning, I wondered what I could do to shine my own tiny sliver of light in this world of ours. What could my 1/60th be?
I thought about how I reached over to hold my husband’s hand after he shared some unsettling news with me. I thought about how, instead of heading straight home, I waited in line for the chance to say to our priest, “I loved your sermon. Your sense of humor makes me laugh.” I thought about how a former student and I still share book and podcast recommendations months and months after her time in my course ended – a way to quietly say “I’m thinking of you.” and “You matter.”
A little bit is enough because we’re all working together
Will any of this help provide healing and justice for the upsetting stories I read in the local news? Let alone the news from the mid- or far-west of my country? Let alone the unsettling stories from South America and the Middle East? Admittedly no. But doing my tiny 1/60th does make the immediate world around me a slightly better place, which might, maybe, hopefully, inspire someone else to do their 1/60th too. And this is good.
For the record, though this weekend was not the moment for me, I trust that there will be other moments when my 1/60th will collide and combine with others’ 1/60th -s and together we will create a light to dispel darkness that has more in common with a full moon than a tiny crescent. And that, too, will be good.
The last of Patanjali’s ten philosophical tenets is isvara pranidhana or surrender to a higher power. With practice, this type of surrender reminds you that you are a small but integral part of a sweeping, incomprehensible whole. It reminds you that no matter how infinitesimal you and your impact seem, without you the whole of creation would be incomplete.