feeling my pain...

I realized this morning when I got up, that no one (in spite of Bill Clinton's testimony to the contrary) can "feel my pain". My pains--the nagging twinges from my left wrist where the tendon never healed properly from breaking my arm a few years ago, the ache in the top of my foot from where I wore sandals to walk the dog and bruised my foot, the occasional weakness in my lower back, the burning from where the poison ivy on my forearm is almost gone--nobody can feel that but me. We can sympathize when someone has a pain or hurt that we imagine is like one we had at some point, but we really can't feel another's pain. Pain can only be felt from the inside out.

Which got me to pondering the fact that the physical metaphor applies to ideas, thoughts, convictions, opinions, beliefs and confusions as well. Just as we can't get inside another person's body, we can't be inside their brains or hearts either.

All of which has caused me to wonder if I don't need to transform the way I listen to and am present with people I disagree with. After all, it seems clear to me right now, I can't adequately imagine what is going on in their minds. So, Tea Party members and Right Wing Republicans and atheists and radical Muslims and fundamentalist Christians have stuff sloshing around in their gray cells and their emotions that I cannot ever understand fully. Perhaps I have to lighten up with them and practice listening for clues about how their minds work differently from mine.

To batter the metaphor into unconsciousness: I seldom have headaches. So when someone tells me they have one, the best I can usually do is remember eating homemade ice cream at my Grandmother's house on hot summer days until my head hurt. As debilitating as the is to my memory of it, there is no way that memory even begins to touch the reality of another's headache.

In the same way, I've been pondering this hot morning that virtually cries out for homemade ice cream (peach was my favorite) that the mind and feelings of the priest who left St. James' in New Haven--and the Episcopal Church while he was leaving things--is far beyond my ken. I can't even imagine, not for the briefest moment, the thought process and obvious pain that led him to that decision and action.

So (just to let you know this is going 'somewhere'...anywhere!) it might just be I have no right to judge him in any way. All I can do is be present to the fall-out of his actions for the two Sundays I will celebrate and be with that broken and wounded congregation. Besides, most of my reactions and thoughts about him are without any standing in fact since I can't 'feel his pain' or 'think his thoughts'.

Gosh, I hate giving up judging other people with whom I disagree!

I've started calling the TEA PARTY the ME PARTY since it seems, in my mind, all they supposedly advocate and stand for comes back to a remarkably self-centered view of the world. I saw a picture of one of the TP folks who had a homemade sign on his trifold hat--one of those hats like they wore in the Revolutionary War...the kind we all imagine Paul Revere wearing. The sign said: LISTEN TO ME! My initial reaction was to think, "why in the hell should we?" Democracy, after all, can't function is everyone is ego-centered. Democracy, when it works well, 'listens to All of us' but no one more carefully than anyone else.

And the man I saw during rush hour last week, standing in front of the Cheshire Town Hall with a sign that said, "FACE IT, OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST!!!" I wanted to pull my car over and yell at him, "No he's not, you idiot! He is at best a moderate Democrat...."

But I realize I have no idea what that man feels or thinks and why he's come down in a place I find so far-fetched it would be laughable if it wasn't terrifying. Perhaps I need to listen to him for a while and "willingly suspend my beliefs" (sorry for mangling your words S. T. Coleridge...) long enough to simply be present to his thoughts rather than rejecting them and considering him a lunatic.

That won't be nearly as much fun, but maybe...just maybe...the beginning step of finding ways to live together in the world without insulting, rejecting or killing each other is to be willing to 'be present' in as full a way as possible, to 'the Other', whatever that means in the moment.

I have to ponder so more, but I know the Mastery Foundation I work with has this as an almost creedal statement, "Connection before Content". That has something to do with being able to 'bracket' our opinions, feelings, etc. long enough to find a relationship with the Other in the room.

This is going to take a lot of time in the sun beside my withered up Castor Oil Tree--but it might be time well spent.

We'll see....