Good…Enough.

My daughters tell me that the blogs they most enjoy are the ones that tell people stories.  And those are the blogs that I enjoy most too.  So on mornings like this with my keyboard, my little circle of light, and my teapot and cup, I look on the ripples of my life-pond for people who walking toward me holding the word that woke me.  Today’s, the sixth of nine “fruits” or symptoms of living in the embrace of God, cloud of unknowing that It might be, is “Goodness.”

Goodness!  Who comes to mind that is good?  We say “Good dog” when the four-legger does something we want her to do, or “Good boy” when a child conforms to our expectations of being, well, good, you know what I mean?  But what is goodness, really?  Once when someone called Jesus “Good teacher” Jesus responded sharply that “No one is good but the Father in Heaven.”  Great; the word is part of that cloud of unknowing!  So this morning I was glad to awaken with a person whose story I could share, a woman from the shelter where I spend an hour each week, carrying in her arms today’s word, Goodness, today’s sign that something is right in her, that God resides within.

From time to time when the group I’m given has lots of new people in it, I am struck by an insidious effect of homelessness, a cancer that devours the person’s sense of worth, of their innate giftedness.  To help them recover it, I help them relax through a breathing exercise, and then guide them to ride in their imagination, from a circle that they color in, to a place real or imaginary where they feel at peace to a person they enjoyed being with, a person with whom they felt comfortable to be themselves, a person who seemed to enjoy them.  You might close your eyes now and do the same – a circle, a place, a person who valued you.  Now ask the person what it is they value in you, why they like being with you.

In the circle of the table, eyes would open and turn to me as they “heard” the response of their imagined companion.  A tearful father, temporarily separated from his young son, heard that son call him “loyal”.  I asked him if he could say more about it, and he told about times he did not let his son down, and the way his son seemed to come to trust him.  An assertive, sometimes abrasive older woman was surprised to recall her aunt telling her she was kind; her face softened with the memory.  She sat deeper in her chair, letting it hold her, perhaps as her aunt would.

But it was T., a quiet, calm-faced young woman who blew me away, and came back to me today as I stirred.  "I was with my mother.  She looked deep into my eyes and told me I’m good."  As I’ve experienced from effective spiritual directors, I asked her if she could give us more words to describe this general word, good.  She smiled serenely at me for a couple of seconds, and said “there are no more words.”  Her proclamation made me think of the Dalai Lama, or Tich Nhat Hanh.  It seemed so enigmatic, so primordial, such an essential truth.  Goodness is like the butterfly whose  flight entrances and amazes us, that to take it apart to understand it would be so, so foolish.   And I smiled at her, and was glad that she knew what a treasure she had, there in her essential self.  There within her was this silence and calm in which she was rooted, this unshakable value, that needed to make no noise, no fuss.  There were, indeed, no words needed.  She was good.  Enough.

Tomorrow: Faithfulness

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.