The thing that keeps playing in my mind is my friend’s statement that she deserves to be happy, and that this marriage is not making me happy. Her announcement of the marriage ending deeply saddened me because she and her husband were good together, and they were in love at one time; but she has always restlessly sought happiness, and so has he.
Ironically, we all seem burdened with two human traits that make it difficult to survive: on the one hand we bury our great disappointments with life – especially with the frailty and flaws of our fellow humans and even more so with those humans who are supposed to love us – and on the other we have this unreasonable expectation and hope that somehow it will be all different with a different person. It does seem to be on the one hand, a refusal to engage with the flaws, and on the other, a denial of the universality of love’s frailty. That is, human love. Is it any wonder that so many people scoff at the good news preached about God’s love, when they have nothing to gauge that by?
As Vietnamese bishop Francis Thuan learned, during his 16 years of imprisonment (nine of it in solitary confinement) on trumped up charges, struggling against no matter how inhumane, unfair and injudicious the treatment at other’s hands, only ends up making the knots tighter and the imprisonment more despicable.
The only real way to freedom is through Jesus Christ: “When every former security fell away that I felt I must concentrate all my life on the one thing necessary, on what is solely important.”
And his prescription is the same as Pope John Paul’s: “Let every moment of our life be, the first moment, the last moment, the only moment.” That is, we must deal with the moment, and not the outcome of other’s actions.
Or as Dr Phil might have put it, is your reaction (to this imprisonment of the soul, of the body, of the mind, of the heart) “working for you?”
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