Lent, Day 3: Fighting Longsuffering
It took me a long time to figure out the phrase to put on my day three Lenten Stone, and I’m still not sure I got it right. However, seeing as how our current troubles seem unlikely to go away anytime soon, I decided to experiment with “trying to let go of fighting the long suffering”.
“Long suffering: having or showing patience in spite of troubles, especially those caused by other people.”
The past couple of days, I’ve been full of fight: boiling over with it, in fact. I think it’s been brewing for a long time, but anger tends to be a paralyzing emotion for me, so I tend to manage it quickly and quietly. Especially yesterday, I uncharacteristically embraced the anger and let it have the heyday it had been vying for. I embraced the anger as well as practiced embracing the longsuffering–which, for that particular day, meant gripping that stone in my palm like I could squeeze water from it.
Spending most of the day with my kids on our weekly co-op nature walk, it dawned on me how much of my current life calling is to a practice of longsuffering. Already at a heightened state of emotional overstimulation (inside and out), it was particularly difficult yesterday to cope with the constant interruption (yet somehow constant lack of listening), and constant demand (yet somehow constant lack of responsiveness) from my young children. Each time they inappropriately interrupted my voice, then utterly ignored my words, I gripped that stone like a vise and the redirected rage allowed my voice to remain calm and patient.
My hand ached by the end of the day.
I have been wasting so much energy fighting against the practice of longsuffering. Shrugging it off like an unwanted garment has not eliminated the “troubles, especially those caused by other people,” but only left me with less strategies for handling them.
I think maybe there are a variety of ways to fight against the things that are not right with the world; that with thoughtful discernment, your body can help you understand which type is required for which situation. Yesterday, I felt the need to really engage, in visceral ways, the appropriate anger that is my response to not-rightness. So I squeezed things tightly, screamed out loud, did angry-yoga (which is to say, full of opportunities for intense resistance accompanied by truly barbaric noises), and expressed to safe people things I was feeling (out loud and without censoring).
It’s a helpful kind of fighting, but maybe too aggressive and exhausting to put on every day. Perhaps it’s long suffering that is the everyday garment of fighting. When I think of the word, I picture all the marginalized people (represented by the dear faces of minorities in my close community) for whom long suffering could hardly be considered a choice. For if the choice is between that “--or death,” (whatever kind of “death” is being faced) is it really a choice? We humans are surrounded by the evidence of a human history–past and present–full of gorgeous examples of the power and purpose of resistance through long suffering. I decided yesterday that if I’m willing to submit to the patient, long-game-revolution of long suffering, I am in very good company.
There’s an image that keeps surfacing for me these days as I contemplate my work in the world this year: a tender shoot rising from a cracked sidewalk. Sometimes even emerging from the tiniest of fissures, seeds somehow lodge in impossible places; from that dark, hard environment, they eventually emerge victorious, the life they had been holding dormant proving unstoppable. The root pressure that a tiny plant can muster is enough to widen cracks, reshape rock, and break open even the most unforgiving materials. (Did you know Tupac Shakur wrote a poem about a rose doing this? I just discovered that, myself.)
On day three of Lent, I worked on letting go of fighting long suffering and instead, taking up the long suffering fight. This morning, hoping to move on to the next internal battle, I took a couple of hammers (it required two) and smashed yesterday’s stone to bits. I think I will keep this one nearby in the coming days to remind me that even when my current troubles feel impossible to break through, this longsuffering battle will result in new life piercing through darkness up into the light. It’s going to take a while, but I believe in the power of the tiny seed, and I believe that it will prevail.
Can I extend an invitation to you, reader? Will you join me in a little project meant to celebrate the beauty of long suffering together?
Even if you don’t think of yourself as an artist, find whatever materials bring you joy (pencils, paper, soil, ceramic, music, air clay, paint, wood, stone, cloth, yarn, string, camera, words) and consider working through Lent on an original creation that is your representation of the concept “The Seed Will Prevail.”
You don’t have to be anything or anyone but a fellow human in order to join in this particular revolution. Consider involving your neighborhood, your whole family, your co-workers, your cousin across the country or world: whoever you are suffering-long with.
If you promise to do the creative work, I promise to find a place and time for us to gather and enjoy each other’s art during Holy Week: April 14-19. Just have your work done by April 11. If you want to participate, send me an email at lauraellenfissel@gmail.com so I know who is coming to the party.
“May it be
The wee little WE
Who you drop into concrete chinks.
WE who
With the might
Of the unassuming seed
Split ourselves open
In the smallest of spaces,
And with the beautiful violence of budding
Break the unbreakable. ”
