I believe we make our choice based on our beliefs about life itself. If we believe that life is meaningless, we're more likely to allow our emotional darkness and pain to make us bitter. If we believe that life is meaningful, we're more likely to find reasons to keep going through our darkness and pain, confident that we can grow from this experience and that life still has love and joy ahead of us.
Often in my own life, I have gone through dark periods of bitterness. My husband struggles with diabetes and the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from finding the body of a friend who committed suicide. Our son, our fourth child, died of a cancerous brain tumor at the age of forty. My daughter recently had a bout with breast cancer. We have relatives and grand-children coping with autism, the C.H.A.R.G.E syndrome, dyslexia, ADHD, and various mental illnesses. We watch members of our family with differing sexual orientations facing tremendous odds as they try to build meaningful lives in a society that chooses too often to hate, reject, and deride. I understand how so often bitterness leads all people to tears and an overwhelming desire to give up and shut down!
My husband and I have kept going on for our children and our family. We know that if we "let our lights go out," so many others who love us and depend on us will fall into darkness. That's the reason so many of us struggle on: life has meaning because we are surrounded by people whom we love and who love us. In spite of tragedy, this world is impregnated with love! So we've found that one of the best reasons to believe that life has meaning is to believe that a good and loving God created a world overflowing with goodness and love. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen described this so beautifully:
"Why then did God create a world? God created the world for something like the same reason that we find it hard to keep a secret! Good things are hard to keep. The rose is good and tells its secret in perfume. The sun is good and tells its secret in light and heat. Man is good and tells the secret of his goodness in the language of thought. But God is infinitely Good and therefore infinitely Loving.... God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His Love - and telling it was creation. Love overflowed. Eternity moved and said to time: 'Begin.' Omnipotence moved and said to nothingness: 'Be.' Light moved and said to Darkness: 'Be Light.' Out from the fingertips of God there tumbled planets and worlds."
Every one of us is good, created in God's Image, created wrapped in and suffused with God's powerful, creative Love. Whatever happens to us or to those we love, we have to remember that our goodness and creative love can flow into every situation in our lives. No person, no situation, no circumstance, has the power to destroy us! Our good God has begun something beautiful for this world when He created each of us, and He yearns to bring us to completion so that our lives are triumphant songs and dances of love.
Recently I told a dear friend this as he tried to find life's meaning while staying in a Psychiatric Treatment Center, clinically depressed, highly anxious, not eating, weak, suicidal, terrified because his mind had fallen into an abyss of darkness. He's agnostic. So I told him the short message. "You," I said to him, "have eternal worth." No matter how he translated this to something he understood, he got the message: he knows he counts for something, his life's accomplishments count for something. He is precious. His life is meant to bless the world. Love and joy still wait for him. And he is strong. All of us have strength we never know that we possess until we have to call upon that strength and creep up out of the dank hole that life threw us into.
And life threw us and our dear ones into that dank hole, not God. God is the One Who empowers us to make that climb up and out!
I know a young man who was so deeply addicted to alcohol and drugs that on three separate occasions he almost died. Today he has a wife and three young children who depend on his love and guidance, who give his life meaning. What turned his life around? Belief in a loving, guiding Higher Power.
I gave the same message of divine love to a young bisexual relative weeping in my arms after she read some hateful literature. "God loves you," I said. "And be patient with the Church. If you believe that the Eucharist is Jesus, do not let anyone crush your spirit so that you choose to leave your spiritual home." I hope she heard me. Fr. James Martin, S.J., Editor at Large of "America" magazine, has that same message:
"Overall the invitation is for both the institutional Church and the L.G.B.T. community to step onto a bridge of mutual 'respect, compassion, and sensitivity.' (quote from 'The Catechism of the Catholic Church.' )
"Some of this may be hard to hear for the L.G.B.T. community. It is hard to step onto that bridge. And some of this may be challenging for bishops to hear. Because neither lane on this bridge is smooth....But to trust in that bridge is to trust that eventually people will be able to cross back and forth easily, and that the hierarchy and the L.G.B.T. community will be able to encounter one another, accompany one another, and love one another. It is to trust that God desires unity.....
"I would like to say something specifically to the L.G.B.T. community. In difficult times you might ask: What keeps the bridge standing? What keeps it from collapsing on the sharp rocks? What keeps you from plunging into the dangerous waters below? The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is supporting the Church and is supporting you.
"For you are beloved children of God who, by virtue of your baptism, have as much right to be in the Church as the pope, your local bishop, or me....
"...you are not alone. Millions of your Catholic brothers and sisters accompany you, as do your bishops, as we journey imperfectly together on this bridge."
A brave black woman I know has such a deep and fierce faith that the Eucharist is Jesus that the Eucharist was the bridge between herself and a priest whose words could have made her bitter. Many years ago, she moved from the Mid-West to Buffalo, and tried to join her neighborhood Church. The priest met her at the door.
"You can't come here," he told her. "This is a German Church. You have to go to the store-front Church downtown."
"Tell me, Father," she replied, "when you hold up the Host, Who do you believe that is?"
"Why, it's Jesus," he said.
"I believe that the Host is Jesus, too. So every morning I'm coming to this Church, and you will give me Jesus."
Of course, this woman went, as a child, to a school founded by St. Katharine Drexel, who every morning cupped each child's face in her hands and said "You are special. You are precious. God loves you."
She kept going to that Church. She kept being fed by her rightful spiritual banquet, the Eucharist, Jesus Himself keeping her strong. And, before he died, the priest apologized to her, and they reconciled.
When life is dark, overwhelming, filled with painful losses, and we want to give up and grow bitter, we need to remember who has held us, who has supported us, who has told us by their words and actions, their kisses and hugs, that we are beautiful, precious, special, that if our light grows dark, their lives will be filled with darkness. We need to remember that we are unique and precious sons and daughters of God. God yearns to bring our lives into total fullness, blossoming, endurance, creativity, and power. His love fills us to overflowing and spills over into every situation in our lives. What God has started in our lives, He promises to finish. And God always keeps His promises! "Strong is His Love for us; He is faithful forever."
I close with these powerful words, written by Josh Shipp, which inspired me to write this post:
"You either get bitter or you get better. It's that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate. It belongs to you."