Suffering as Grace

It’s been a while since I've written anything, and that has been a source of anguish for me because I am truly trying my best right now to show up for all of my peops — my parents (who by the grace of God are doing well other than their TV regularly being on the fritz), loved ones and friends who reciprocate in kind, my small band of readers here, the young people in my care, and…me.

I’m really trying to be there for myself right now.

A couple of weeks ago, an autoimmune eye condition I was diagnosed with in 2009 flared up, casting a veil over my right eye and making it extremely photosensitive.

I should have known it was lurking around the bend because all the signs were there. I experienced a couple of unusually bad migraines, and food was not falling into my stomach with grace.

Diseases like this are mysterious. When I was first diagnosed, I was paranoid about everything I ingested or touched and wondered — Is this why?

My doctors could identify no cause or trigger other than stress, but I was in my 20s, that forthright age of wanting to know and control everything.

Something I’m really grateful for, which having this condition taught me, is that when your body sends a distress signal, you need to stop and slow down against all conditioning. It took me years of missing the signal to figure this out.

This is surrendering. It’s very different from giving up, which surrendering gets conflated with in our toxic, hyper-masculine culture. Surrendering is accompanied with presence – witnessing, noticing, considering – whereas giving up is not.

During my seasons of acceptance and surrender, I used my inward breath to create space within the inner sanctum of my chest to welcome in healing.

Healing looked like my mother, father, and sister, and the food we made together. The times we played, worked, and loved each other. It looked my dearest friends coming over for tea and sitting in the garden with me.

What I envisioned, I took as a signal to do in real life, and these passing thoughts became an engine of healing, not just for my eyes, but for whatever parts of my soul they were redirected my awareness toward.

I honored my food by being present with my plate and off the phone. Surrendering also meant leaving work at various thresholds where I could pick it up later, rather than invite it inside.

When I was first diagnosed with this mysterious eye thing, I stayed angry for years. I blamed everything for predisposing me to a high cortisol level, including a stressful childhood growing up in a business family where rest and peace were unheard of, especially during the holiday season when we were at our busiest.

I felt trapped by my fear of a disease that had a will of its own, damaging perhaps one of the most delicate parts of my body.

This fomenting rage only exacerbated my condition, and it reared its head often, hobbling me whenever I was in pursuit of a big goal, be it grad school or a new project that required intense focus.

I treated it as an enemy and it became one.

As time marched on though, and I became intimately familiar with the slightest of sensations I felt in these orbs of light, joy, hope, and fury embedded in my skull, I began to see my condition differently.

I accepted that it likely wasn’t going anywhere — that it would appear from time to time, and the only thing I could do was stop when it did and give it care.

Perhaps most importantly, I realized that my condition was a part of me, not something alien, separate, or external. It was part of my wholly unique makeup.

My life was speaking to me, as Parker J. Palmer would say.

Fifteen years ago, I never thought I would arrive at a place in my life where I was grateful to have this problem, but I am.

It forces me to stop, to shut everything down, and to lie flat so that I can squeeze drops from bottles into my head eggs.

I lie there, ten minutes or more sometimes, staring at the heavens looking back at me as a ceiling fan, liquid clouds swirling my vision, my breath slowing, my meditation sometimes turning to sleep.

I am most delighted, ecstatic, and fully immersed in grace when life surprises me.

And I’m so surprised and proud that I’ve reached this place where I know for certain that suffering truly is grace — an opportunity to grow into challenges and realize their divine usefulness, their intentions for us.