The Key ...,

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FACING LIFE

Sooner or later, everyone arrives at a point where life seems to have become too big to cope with. life is never really too much for us, but it can seem to be. When this happens, we have to get life back in focus. We have lost our perspective, but it can be regained.

I don't know how it is with you, but it took me a long time to realize that at least some of these problems were of my own making. For instance, I thought that it was my duty to try to solve other people's problems, arbitrate their disputes, and show them how to live their lives. I was hurt when they rejected my unsolicited advice. I finally learned that you cannot help people unless they really need help, are willing to be helped, want you to help them, and ask you to help them. Even then, you can only help them to help themselves.

I caused myself a lot of unnecessary grief by trying to be "unselfish," to think of everybody else first, myself last, and to try to please everybody, But you can't please everybody. You can knock yourself out doing this and that and the other thing to please "your cousins and your sisters and your aunts," and you find out that they are not really affected one way or the other. "Please everybody, nobody's pleased; please yourself, at least you're pleased!" Charity (love) begins at home, and enlightened self-interest is a basic endowment of human nature. You can save yourself a lot of grief by admitting the futility of trying to please everybody, or of trying to please somebody who just can't be pleased.

A surprising number of people believe that other people can hurt their feelings. They won't believe you when you tell them that it just isn't so--that no one can hurt you unless you let them! If irresponsible or unreasonable criticism causes you unhappiness, that is at least partly your own fault. We all say, "I don't care what people say," but the tragic thing is that we do care, and pretending we don't makes things worse. What to do?

Practice turning a deaf ear to the person who irritates or upsets you; make up your mind that you are not going to let yourself pay any attention to what "he" or "she" says, and mean it. This you won't believe until you try it. If you refuse at least to try it, some suspicious and cynical soul (like me, for instance) might suspect that perhaps you've got so in the habit of having your feelings hurt that you'd be bored otherwise.

ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is the only real source of tranquillity, serenity, peace. It is also known as "Surrender," "Bowing to the Inevitable," "Joining 'em." It can be acquired if you have an urgent desire to help yourself and are willing to ask God to help you.

Luckily, for us, the perfect formula for acceptance, simple and practical as a can-opener, is ready at hand, waiting for us to use it as hundreds of thousands before us have. Written by Reinhold Niebuhr, it is know far and wide as "The Serenity Prayer."

Here it is:

"God grant me the
Serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can; and
Wisdom to know the difference."

You simply ask God to give you the ability to take people and things as they are, if you cannot change them. We can very seldom change people, though we can change ourselves. We ask God, further, to enable us to convince ourselves that we would not have things otherwise, even if we could. Only God is powerful enough to control all things, and He seems to prefer to make some things come out right without changing them.

In practice: face up to the problem that is driving you wild, and say, "Is there anything I can do about it right now, today?" If there is, do it! Don't put if off another minute. If there is nothing we can do about it today, accept it and forget it.

You don't get over a twenty-foot wall by banging your head against it--you just get a headache. If you sit down in the shade of the wall and say, "Maybe I'm better off on this side, after all," you may be sure that God will make things turn out better for you and for everyone else. This ability of His to make things work out for the best is known as Divine Providence, or "The Kindness of God."

THE KINDNESS OF GOD

Diving Providence is that quality of God's action by which He brings good out of evil, or by which He permits us to do evil so that He may eventually bring good out of it. The Kindness of God is the best answer to the age-old complaint, "Why does God let them get away with it?"

We are all aware that people just don't act the way they should. Some are mean, arrogant, selfish, vicious, ungrateful, and malicious all the time. Even the very best (are you listening?) are mean, arrogant, etc., part of the time.

Why doesn't God do something about it; He could, all right; but, strange to say, that would ruin everything. He created us with free will, that is, the power of choosing to do good or to do evil. He realized very well that some people would abuse free will, but He gave it to us anyway, because without it we'd be robots. His plan is to reward us with Heaven, but you don't reward a machine for doing well--it can't do otherwise. No free will, no reward.

We may as well accept the fact that "its a sinful world!" We don't have to remind God of that; indeed, no one ever suffered more from it than He Himself did when He was on earth. The big difference is that He accepted the injustice and did not rebel against it. It was through that very acceptance that He was to save us. Everything that was done to Him was permitted by His Father for our salvation. For His part, He accepted it as the will of His Father. "Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me; but not My will, but Thine be done."

Do you claim to be the victim of a greater injustice than He? Or more important that He? You'd gladly escape your unbearable situation, but cannot. He could have, but did not! "Is the disciple above the Master?"

The Providence of God turned the most horrible injustice of all time into the greatest blessing of all time. Divine Providence is still turning evil into good, if the victim of injustice accepts his lot, even as Christ accepted His. When you bow to the inevitable and accept injustice, you are not ignoring it or excusing it or explaining it away. You are simply accepting the indirect or permissive Will of God.

God does not will evil or condone injustice; He merely permits, even while He works the marvel by which it results in good. So if we find ourselves in an apparently hopeless situation, with every avenue of escape blocked, we must not rebel. Instead, we must realize that God has His reasons, in His infinite goodness and wisdom, for permitting it. And so we accept it, saying "Thy Will be done!" Immediately the load drops from our shoulders, and the assurance that all will be well brings peace to our soul.

Look back over your life. Honestly, now, can't you see how the loving Hand of God has brought a happy ending to many events that seemed to be unmitigated tragedies at the time? "Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?"

SUFFERING

No, it's not too difficult when you know how. God has provided us with the perfect means to eliminate self=will and free ourselves from the slavery of our insatiable desires. It is suffering--the perfect tool to cut us down to proper size. Instead of going the limit to dodge pain, we had better start using it. Pain is the only instrument sharp enough to prune away the excesses of our wayward will and to fashion it into a reasonable facsimile of God's Will; which is to say into the shape of a cross.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to bear is loneliness or aloneness. What to do when circumstances force us into a solitary existence? First, if you are fortunate enough to have a variety of interests, physical or mental, you must make a real effort to develop them. Failing that, you can search out and help the less fortunate. If you are not up to that, you are thrown back on the conscious cultivation of your five senses and intellectual powers. At the very least, you can tell God every morning that you hold yourself available for use as His instrument, if only by praying Him to bless everyone whom you meet.

If these alternatives don't work, there is only one thing left; plain, simple, rock-bottom acceptance. Stop pitying yourself, stop rebelling, throw in the sponge, and surrender to the obvious fact that since God allows it and you can't escape it, it must be best for you and for everyone. Pray for the faith to believe it and to accept it.

"LORD, SAVE US..."

God is infinitely wise: He knows what is best for us. He loves us with an infinite love; He wants what is best for us. He is infinitely powerful; He can achieve it for us. We, on the other hand, are ignorant, weak, and wayward. Yet in weakness lies our strength. Are we licked, beat, flattened, hopeless? Fine! It is only when we admit our utter helplessness that we can be sure of God's help.

In praying, we must remember that "Father knows best." Suppose, for instance, I think I am about to lose my job? Should I pray? What should I pray for? God may have ordained that if I do not pray, He will let nature take its course and I will lose my job; if I do ask Him to save my job, He will. However, with greater faith I may pray, "Dear God, do what is best for all concerned." In turn, He may permit me to lose my job, only to get a better one. I have nothing to lose by leaving it up to Him. After all, He can't possibly do a worse job of running my life than I have myself!

We are all inclined to make the mistake of thinking that the few minutes we spend in actually talking to God are all that count. In reality, the attitude of mind we maintain throughout the day is every bit as important. If you place yourself in God's hands in the morning, and throughout the day you hold yourself ready to accept His will as it is made known through the circumstances of your daily life, your attitude of acceptance becomes a constant prayer.

To cultivate this attitude, to remind yourself how to live with yourself, start today to recite every day the serenity prayer.

THE SERENITY PRAYER

God grant me the
SERENITY to accept the things I cannot change;

COURAGE to change the things I can;
and
WISDOM to know the difference--

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is; not as I would have
it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His
Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely
happy with Him
forever in the next. Amen.