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Our culture, of course, is overloaded with data. It’s wanting in meaning. It tempts us to indifference and unhealthy detachment. We don’t really want to pursue even our evil thoughts or our good thoughts to find out where they could lead. We get shortchanged. The ancient monks spoke of the temptation of … indifference, not caring, as being tempted to look outside of one’s cell to see if the other monks were up to anything. Our modern day equivalent may be turning on CNN. But the temptation is the same. And the result is also the same, not caring, indifference. The holy realist is aware of this and knows all too well that temptation to indifference, but he or she resists, asserting that life does have meaning, life is worth caring about, and how we live it matters. ...

Holy realism knows that life is worth living in any season. It counters that silly T-shirt I sometimes see: “Life is a bitch and then you die.” Holy realism knows that life is both gift and struggle, and then we die, each one of us. And we can’t begin to imagine the good things that God has in store for us then.
--Kathleen Norris

Being real about darkness and struggle
When my niece Christina was a toddler, her mother worked as a stockbroker and financial planner. My brother, Christina’s father, would drive her to day care in the morning and her mother would pick her up after work. And every day she brought Christina an orange, peeled so that the child could eat it on the way home. One day Christina was busying herself by playing Mommy’s office on the front porch … of our house in Honolulu. And I asked her what her mother did at work. Without hesitation and with a conviction that I relish to this day, she looked up at me and said, “She makes oranges.”

And that is what God does, I think, making oranges and wind and the ocean and green leaves and everything else that constitutes our earthly home. As we come to know this God who gives us so much, a God of limitless compassion, we can find great mercy even in the midst of lamentation. And … that marvelous phrase that ‘the world is new every morning,’ that comes in the middle of a lamentation. It comes after great lament, in fact.
--Kathleen Norris

Most of us arrive at a sense of self … only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage--“a transformative journey to a scared center” full of hardship, darkness and peril.

In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost --challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for the true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now--in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep in our hearts.

But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-- every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy--but it is the part of the story left untold. When we escape the darkness and stumble into light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights that we spent cowering in fear.

The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light. But I want to tell the truth as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were few elders who were willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all that they had known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought that I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.
--Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, (Somerset, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 1999) 17-19.

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