Making Peace with Reality
Coping with Unchangeable Things
Peace of Mind has been important to me for a long time. That doesn’t mean that I always experience a sustained inner peace. In fact, I don’t. It seems that wanting peace and having peace are two different things. Wanting peace seems straight forward. Having Peace, well, that’s another story, because experiencing peace takes work. We must give ourselves to it, moment by moment, day after day.
Richard Rohr teaches that Making Peace with reality means “forgiving reality for being what it is.” It means accepting the imperfect, messy and often disappointing nature of life. It means letting go of resistance, judgment, and the need for things to be different. And instead find wholeness by embracing the present moment, including its brokenness - as a path to deeper connection and spiritual growth.
As a Healthcare Chaplain in Hospitals and Hospice, I’ve noticed myself and others hoping to find Peace by trying to change unchangeable things. The result is usually the opposite of anything we would want to call, “Peace.” But, it may be the only first step we have toward knowing whether a situation is changeable or not. We need to know the Truth to Make Peace with Reality. Why? Because even after someone in authority tells us that a situation is unchangeable, we still feel the need to kick the tires on that car, just to make sure.
I’ve been in many meetings to support patient’s, families, and medical providers when “Bad News” needs to be delivered. When someone hears their doctor say that they have a terminal illness and there is nothing else that can be done for them, the starkness of that news turns their world upside down. They may feel overwhelmed and unsure of what it all means. And they may feel a desperate need to take decisive action to find a way through. “There must be something we can do.”
And why not? We humans have a strong will to live, and we usually won’t give up on life so easily. We just know, or hope, or hope against hope that the doctors are wrong; as we search for or try yet another test, or medical intervention, or holistic treatment.
Another example of our strong will to live is seen in the reaction of people in Minneapolis, Minnesota to raids conducted by ICE, and the killing of Renee Nicole Goode. For them, and for many Americans, these raids feel more like an invasion than law enforcement. They appear overly aggressive, cruel, unprofessional, unjust and likely illegal. And for the people who live there, the presence of ICE is a threat to the Life of their community. A Life that they are not willing to give up without a fight.
Some people may say that those struggling for life, or refusing to comply with their medical, political, or personal reality, are “in denial.” And they are partly right. I say, “partly” because denial is often seen, at this point as, as something unreasonable or unnatural. It’s not. It’s part of a larger process where denial is a normal part of coming to acceptance. For these people it seems easy to accept someone else’s stark reality. But when it’s their turn to face Bad News, they too will discover the struggle.
That’s why we have to be patient with people suffering loss, and let go of our superficial judgements and disingenuous opinions about reality. Because one day we’ll be the ones struggling with life threatening illness, economic loss, or chaotic ICE raids in our neighborhoods. We’ll be the ones who refuse to give up on life so easily. We’ll be the ones who refuse to comply with end of life, or end of life as we know it, until we are absolutely sure that the end is really near.
Only when we know that so called, “unchangeable things” are actually unchangeable, can we be at peace with accepting their outcome. And so, we’ll need to be patient with ourselves too, and realize that coping is a process, not a reaction. Trying to change unchangeable things is an early part of that process. One we all need to go through in order to make peace with uncomfortable realities, and to accept things as they are rather than as we want them to be.
With life and death realities, it means grieving the loss of the future we had hoped for, imagined and anticipated. With political realities, it means grieving the impending loss of Freedom, or Democracy, or Due Process, and many other things that make life meaningful for Americans and for others who see America as a place of hope for a better future for them and their family.
I’ll end with this - the opening lines of the famous Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr in the early 1940s.
God, Grant Me -
The Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Change,
The Courage to Change the Things I Can, and
The Wisdom to Know The Difference.
Amen.