A Serenity Prayer

On my way to work this morning, running late, I was backing out of my driveway, trying not to hit my husband's car parked behind me when I destroyed our St. Francis icon in our garden. Considering my morning (OK my year), it is more than ironic that the icon had The Serenity Prayer written on the back:

"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. "

While my car is untouched, the icon, is in pieces on my driveway. What a weird synchronicity, a tangle of metaphors for the way my life has been the last few weeks.

As you can see, Dear Reader, from my more recent post(s), my faith has, of late, been dinked up a bit.

As I said in my previous post, so much is out of our control--the economy, the college budget, others' attitudes, all things I have let affect my faith. I have been running through my mental habitrail of worst case scenarios: what if we lose our jobs, get cancer, my friends abandon us, our parents get sick, does that mean God does not care? What does it mean that God never gives us more than we can handle? Job certainly got it heaped upon him. If I had an eighteenth of what he experienced, I'd probably be somewhere in a corner, in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, counting down ten minutes to Wapner.

Driving home from dinner Friday, I told my husband about a friend I had lunch with that day who seemed, unlike me, strangely unworried about the changes at work and in the economy. She has a real possibility that her position could be cut as a result of the pressing re-structuring going on in our college. She didn't say, "God will provide," but I know her well as a sincere person of strong faith, so I know that is the source of her ongoing strength.

"Is she crazy?" I wondered, while feeling this nagging tickle that maybe she wasn't. I told him I felt ashamed that I lacked her calm, her faith. He said, "Well, God is not supposed to give us more than we can handle."

Now let me be clear than my rational husband is no bible-thumper, yet I wanted to protest with a litany of terrible examples, some real, some hypothetical. He then added that he didn't think that meant we'd be sheltered from all harm.

Well duh, I thought.

"It means God helps us to be strong during the hard times," he said.

Oh.

Right.

Faith--what I've been lacking.

Well then what is faith?

Is it, as Thomas Paine argues in "The Age of Reason," hooey, a belief in hearsay.

Is it as Joel Olstein thinks, if we have faith, God will give us a house, a Hummer, and happiness? (http://emotter.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/22/)

Is it Job-like resolve, in the face of cosmic horrible, that we can still hold fast to God?

Is it the ability to delude ourselves?

Is it faith in other people to act as God's angels?

Whatever it is, unlike Job, most people (of faith and otherwise) lead pretty mundane lives, with the day-to-day trivialities, to paraphrase Chekhov, making us crazy, testing our faith.

Most of us don't face off juntas. Rather we run through our own little mental habitrails convinced that every turn is a plot against us by some cosmic force, or worse other people.

Maybe that's why we are in need of Lent, a time to sacrifice, give up those habits that, whether they feel good or bad, are comfortable because they are what we know.

So this year I'm going to try to give up and live for 40-days free from negativity, cynicism, stress, and judgment. Those are the things I'm at least trying to give up.

That and vehicular manslaughter of saints.