My heart was full from the day I spent in the East Tennessee valley on the campus of my alma mater. That night, posting photos of shoulder-to-shoulder mug shots of friends, the comments were pouring in on Facebook from alums who had been there, and those who expressed sadness about not making it there.
I posted a snippet of our school song: "Carson-Newman, how I love thee, alma mater hail!" A Facebook friend who was not amongst us that day posted in response:
"I
hail her, too. Like any true love, it's a lifelong affair, fraught with
complexity, and not without pain."
I found her comments intriguing. I replied that I certainly understood the complexity part. The Baptist and the religion part, for me. But, pain?
Her response explained that a university would have been a better fit for her than our small college confines.
As I pondered the question further: Yes, I'd experienced pain, but much of it was self-inflicted. I replied: "Thirty years later, only,
can I look back with compassion and understanding and see why I acted in
some of the ways I did in my youth and it came from pain…." (And not just in my youth but on into my 30s and 40s.)
Through intense work with my spiritual teacher this last year, I can see that it was layers of pain that propelled me to act in ways that served to protect me (yet harmed me) and I only acted out of what I had been taught until I could heal from it. It has taken years to heal and to understand my ways and that pain. But this healing gifted me with not only compassion for myself but an understanding that when others act in ways that I or others want to judge harshly, to see it as most likely a defense mechanism and a source of unhealed pain.
I am learning that just as others need grace and mercy, I, too, need grace and mercy. And the more I grant myself these elements of the field from which we all come as our higher selves, the more I can be grace and mercy to other humankind. May I keep growing.
This post is part of a reunion series, which include this and this post thus far.
