Let yourself feel it all – the beauty and the terror.
Yesterday, we splashed in puddles again, and as predicted… puddles had joined with other puddles into a little sidewalk lake. As the boys ran and jumped and splashed passerby (sorry!), they experienced a wealth of emotions. In seconds, they went from joy to sorrow to anger and back to joy again.
“But mama, he made my shirt wet! I didn’t want my shirt wet. Waaah!” followed by “Let’s get mommy wet! Yea!” all from the same child.
Lots of emotion experienced as children experience it best – full on!
So maybe you are calm and peaceful, maybe you are anxious and upset, maybe you are frustrated and angry… maybe you are just plain scared. And yet we are telling ourselves that we have to be strong and push all that aside…
There are healthy ways to feel.
As we walk through the strangest Lent we’ve ever known, perhaps we can let ourselves feel and experience every emotion life is bringing to us in solidarity with the one who felt them all so tangibly for us on the road to Calvary.
It’s okay to feel. And to sit with those feelings and talk about those feelings with others. You can be strong for your family and take care of you.
I mentioned this poem exactly one month ago before social distancing and our new reality. And man does it mean so much more now.
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, ⠀
then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
This is my prayer today for you and for me. That we allow ourselves to feel and share those feelings with the One who wants to take our hand and lead us through it all.
For more on feeling through Lent check out my article for DotMagis this month.
