Month: March 2015

Resilience is the ability to respond creatively to stressful, pressure packed, anxiety-producing situations. A resilient person rather than be deformed or destroyed is able to engage those conditions in healthy, redemptive ways which brings about wholeness. We can respond to situations two ways: fight or flight. Fight is equal to attacking and flight is withdrawal: mental, physical and emotional. The article references St. Paul from Scripture. Paul gives us a third way to handle life disrupting situations: “In nothing be anxious, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:6-7)
– Just pull yourself into a spiritual “cocoon” and let God protect you from the adversity. It’s a mode to be in to engage all aspects of life. We don’t need a certain set of tools to use because there is a deeper reality out of which all of life can be lived. React to others spontaneously and joyously from this inward center.
– The following are the rhythms which St. Paul uses and suggests that we use them too. 1. Rhythm of Prayer, Supplication, Thanksgiving, Requesting (making yourself available to others), and Centeredness in God. The rhythms of life are to point us and nurture us in centeredness of God, in the context of God’s shalom – in which all human wholeness is experienced. They are not a method but a mode of being in God.
What spiritual practices or rhythms help anchor your being in God or your higher power? What makes you resilient?

This thought and resource is from a magazine called Weavings: A journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Volume XXVIII, Number 2, “Resilience” (pgs. 31-14)

Anger is a human emotion that we all experience in our life.    We all have it – some good or bad, productive or violent.  Even our intense anger is not bad.  I have lived most of my life with anger.  Anger towards men and woman who did not treat me with respect and who took their anger out on me.  See there is a fine line between good anger and bad anger.  When we have gone through a trauma we get angry and we are hurt then we tend to take it out on others. Recently, I read a passage from Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, whose book is about his thoughts and his psychology on being in a concentration camp.   The men in the concentration camp were finally liberated as the war had ended (Page 89).  As a diver who comes out of the deep sea, the men from the concentration camp must come out slowly or they will endanger themselves.  So the men who are finally liberated from mental pressure can suffer moral and spiritual health. They become instigators and justify their own behavior by their own terrible experiences. I’m not saying I am a bad person or have taken my own ager out on others to this extent. Sometimes we do lash out at others in our rage.  Road rage comes to mind here.  I always wonder what’s going on with someone when I experience that.  I say a prayer for them.  I say a prayer for myself that I survived the rage of another unhurt.  Because I am unhurt.  As the men in the concentration camp, I can be guided back out of my anger, slowly. I need to be “guided back to the common place of truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” (Page 90) It has been a slow journey to heal myself and get over my anger towards others.  I have stumbled yet I have gotten back up.  My anger is now channeled positively through prayer or other actions.  There is a verse in the book of Malachi from the bible, where God is telling us to stay clear or we will see the rath of him.  This just means he is void of anything to do with destruction.  The irony is that the last verses are about the messenger who is coming to save us.  Doesn’t sound like we are being destroyed but saved from our own anger and destruction.  Listen to the Lord.  Let go of your anger.