To use medical terms, there are two kinds of adverse circumstances; acute and chronic. Acute adverse circumstances are, for example, losing your job or having pneumonia. With a bit of skill and patience you will leave them behind. Chronic adverse circumstances are, as an example, long-term unemployment, ongoing physical disability or caring for an elderly or disabled relative.
The difference between adverse circumstances and adversity itself is that circumstances are outward, while adversity is the experience of those circumstances. Coping with major types of adversity -especially the longer-term ones- might require a visit to your doctor and discussing antidepressent therapy, which can be very helpful. Also, a counselor should be considered, as well. Large muscle movement, in other words, exercise, is a completely natural aspect of coping with adversity.
There are a lot of strategies, both outer and inner, to help deal with adversity. When you're in the midst of hard times it's very hard to keep a postive perspective, and you must constantly make an effort to do so, but not on your own. Consult God, your mind and soul, your priest, your doctor, and a therapist. The first three are something you should always do, and don't be shy about looking at the last two options, as well, depending on the severity of the experience.
We Americans are famous for our impatience. We want instant gratification. We want solutions to our problems not just today, but yesterday! But life isn't like that, and so frustration, anger, and depression often ensues.
Learning to make a friend of adversity in its various aspects ranges from little tricks to deal with your immediate feelings to longer-term points of view which make addressing adversity easier and more effective. An important aspect of adversity is that you can use it to fast-track your spiritual life.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) said, “There is a way that everything can be turned into good.” But in order to do that, you have to stop, look, and listen- sort of like the advice I was given when as a small child I was taught how to safely cross a street.
You may be some place quite ordinary and feelings of distress begin to well up within you like a fountain, filling you with sadness and anxiety. As well, suddenly you can notice have a deep longing arise, desiring the problem or quandry to be over and done with. Right then, stop where you are. Don't move on, look inside yourself and listen to what your thoughts and feelings are saying.
Stop what you're doing for a moment (if it's safe to do so), because otherwise you will probably interrupt your self-examination. Stop and focus your attention directly on the feeling itself. Recognize that it really doesn't exist anywhere except in your head. Then, look not at the problem but on the feeling of longing for a solution, which is really an appeal for help. Turn that longing into a prayer, simple straight from your heart, whether in your own words or wordlessly lifting the feelings themselves up to God.
Be totally honest with God. Don't bother acting noble or putting your prayer into fine words. As regards matters of your inner life -you spiritual life- don't put on airs. Be who you are, since you can't fool God anyway, like you can put up a false front for other people, and putting on airs with God falsifies your side of the relationship, and doesn't help at all.
You can also make it a practice to spend time reading the Psalms aloud. Make them into your own prayers. When the Psalmist speaks of his enemies, regard those as your own negative thoughts- frustration, anger, depression, despair. Your real enemies are not outside you. What drags you down is actually inside your head, and your heart. Ask God to expel the negativity within you. Visualize in your mind's eye your negativity leaving your body, and confidence, health, and happiness showering down on you and everyone connected with you as a rain of blessings from Above. Keep doing that practice over and over as you read the Psalms.
Look at life the way a farmer does his fields. Take the long view. Patience means, first of all, sticking with the viewpoints and spiritual practices which do good, and not walking away from them. Farmers plant seeds in the ground, and wherever its possible they feed and water the seeds and the plants which grow from them. Farmers can't afford to be lazy about their fields. The fields have to be seen to day after day. Weeds, which would otherwise choke and kill the crop must be kept at bay. Getting the crop to a point where it can be harvested takes time, watchfulness, and effort.
One of the damaging wrong ways people see the doctrine of Salvation by Grace through Faith is the thought that we have no part in it at all, and therefore no effort we can do to make things better is either possible or necessary. But, of course we must cooperate with the Holy Spirit's work in us. If you make no effort in response to God speaking quietly (or shouting loudly!), that is a sure sign that you have to turn around your life then and there and do something.
Farmers have the advantage of having learned from experience. In England, our house was bounded by wheat fields on two sides. The farmer, Stephen Jackson, knew what to do and when to do it because he had been on his land since he was born. We, on the other hand, are doing something new in our lives- learning to make a friend of adversity, and growing “until all of us are united in the faith and in the full knowledge of God's Son, and until we attain mature adulthood and the full standard of development in the Messiah.” [Ephesians 4:13] To do that takes time, effort, and patience. Until we have grown into the full standard of development in the Messiah everything is a type of adversity to be overcome, with the help of the Holy Spirit living and moving in us.
On the other hand, there is a quicker way of going about addressing not only adversity, but addressing most questions about day to day life. Last week we had a Men's Retreat at New Clairvaux Monastery at Vina, north of Chico. The monks there are Cistercians of the Strict Observance, otherwise called Trappists. The Trappist monk's rule of life includes the classic Benedictine trinity of manual labor, study, and prayer. As well, they promise strict obedience to the Abbot (thereby slaying the false ego) and to live in community with their brother monks. The Trappist spiritual life is based on constant recollection of God... keeping God at the forefront of your mind, not forgetting Him, ever. That takes practice, of course, but it is a goal toward which each monk sets his heart.
When we arrived at the monastery I talked about what it is like being a monk. When you enter the monastic life your old life is over. In former days some Orders had a kind of funeral service for the new monk's old life, since he was entering -being born into- a new one. In a sense, when you enter the monastery you don't have a future any more. You certainly aren't going to have a career climbing one rung of a ladder upward to some kind of worldly goal. Your past is gone, also. You only have one purpose, one question to be asked, “Lord, who do You want me to be right now?” You ask that question one moment, and the next moment, and the next, and the next, until you die, whether that is in an hour or seventy five years. Time no long means anything. Only the present moment with God is of any importance. “Lord, who do You want me to be, right now?”
We who live in what is called “the world” have a tendency to get caught up in visions of the future (which never comes about in just the way we want), and memories of the past, both good and bad, which is gone forever. In many cases, we forget who God wants us to beright now, not in the future, not in the past, but NOW. Ask God the question, “Who do you want me to be at this moment?” The answer is usually clear. It has to do with character, with behavior, with attention to the presence of God in your heart. That's the best and quickest response to adversity. Just keep asking the question time after time after time, moment by moment. Then, respond intuitively. You already know what is your response should/could/can be.
Men especially, and also since the advent of the feminist movement (my grandmother was a Suffragette), women as well, reflexively see living in terms of doing, of accomplishment. People are always asking God what they are supposed to do but far less often ask who they should be. American culture insistently urges us to compete, achieve, and win in comparison to other people. That's not a wholly bad trait, for sure. But what you do all too often accomplished without a corresponding concentration on character development. A great number of political figures in every nation are perfect examples of what happens when a person emphasizes accomplishment over character.
Accomplishment is something relative to time and circumstance. Being – who you are as a person – is an aspect of a spiritual state, and that is beyond time and circumstance. You can't really choose to be rich or powerful or healthy or intelligent and simply make it happen, but you can choose to be noble, good, and kind. Those last qualities are the ones which last. The former are mere temporal and transient goals. The latter partake of eternity. Being compassionately in touch with real life while simultaneously plugged into eternity is the entire point of the inner life of any Christian.
An important part of inner spiritual practice in the Cistercian tradition is what is called Interior Silence. Interior Silence isn't a special Trappist practice. It happens quite naturally, all by itself, when your mind is cleared of turbulent images and thoughts and you reach a place of rest and peace in the divine presence. Interior Silence isn't a blankness or boredom. It's can be compared to diving underneath the waves and currents of a stormy sea and finding a depth without disturbances. Interior Silence can be likened, as well, to an awareness of living within God's radiant all-creating light and life. At first, it's too much to expect to remain there (though that's the long-term objective), but when you surface again and then dive back down into the depths of your soul, with perseverance you learn how to get where you want to go.
Interior Silence is the ultimate way of making friends with adversity. Your, my, our perception of so-called adverse circumstances is relative. The notion of 'adversity' is related to an ultimately false notion that something is outside God's love and plan for us. It's also part of the chatter which goes on in the thinking (discursive) mind which projects itself into the future, looks back toward the past, and generally ignores the presence of God here-and-now. Interior Silence shuts up that chatter, or at least makes it pipe down a bit for a time. Interior Silence also helps you put things in your life into a proper perspective, and diminishes the emotionally overwhelming quality of mental distress.
Ask God “Who do you want me to be?” Don't try to force an answer, or get all tangled up in discursive thinking. Simply rest in God's presence. Spend time in Interior Silence while you are doing something that involves manual work, like washing the dishes, folding laundry, pulling weeds, chopping wood, fixing the car. Get used to paying attention to God's presence more than you pay attention to other things. If something else requires a bit more concentration, keep aware of His presence out of the corner of your spiritual eye. If at first there are places or situations where you are more aware of the divine presence, spend time there cultivating your apprehension of God. Then practice importing the experience you have in sacred time and sacred space into ordinary and more challenging life situations.
You can maintain Interior Silence not only in a retreat setting or in sacred space. You can find it and maintain it, with the help of God, in any situation... even when you're talking to someone, or working at your job, or sitting at a dinner table in conversation with other people.
Ultimately, the ceasing of needless mental chatter will occur and you'll feel a sense of genuine freedom. Then the mental chatter will arise again, you'll notice it (eventually!), correct in mental flight, and rest again in God's loving arms. Interior Silence -being present with God- doesn't rely on exterior silence or quietude. Interior silence is an art, not a science. Each person has to discover how it works in his or her personal situation. There are various methods by which to get there, but it's best to work with a spiritual director to do it. I can help a bit, or I can give you the names of other people who can also assist you.
Adversity, you see, is not just some kind of adventitious circumstance to be attacked, eliminated, and discarded. Adversity is the sure and certain path to arriving at mature Christian adulthood. One of the 5th century Fathers of the Desert said, “It is by adversity that some souls are shipwrecked, and through adversity others are crowned.”
