A Prayer

I offer to you, Lord, my confusion.
I offer to you my extremes.
Let me be as a sapling in the wind,
bending to the vicissitudes of my mind,
bending to the response of Your will.

Let me see the glory
of a pine, deeply rooted:
faith by nothing overturned.

Help me to look
with equanimity for truth;
and to discover
that my sight expands by choices,
or by other choices narrows
and slowly shrinks away.

Let me lean on you in darkness, Lord;
I pray that I may pray;
and that You give me grace.

For all of this I pray to You through Christ, our Lord.
Amen.

I don’t mean to alienate any non-religious readers (and heaven knows my own relationship to Catholicism is fraught in its own ways), but it felt fitting to share a simple prayer on this Easter Sunday.

I want to reflect briefly on what it means that “my sight expands by choices, or by other choices narrows and slowly shrinks away.”

Simply put, the actions I take determine my real circumstances—the raw potentiality available for me to integrate into a conceptual worldview; and my worldview then affects how I go about future actions, and so on.

This recursive interplay between the factual and the conceptual rendering is a key insight in my reading of Christianity, informed as it is by other spiritual traditions like Buddhism.

The recursive interplay between actions and conceptual narratives plays out in many problems with addiction, disorders, and other distressful patterns. For example, one who has a negative self-narrative may push people away from them, which perpetuates a negative self-narrative, which furthers the tendency to push people away, and so on.

The idea that one’s sight “expands by choices” informs the therapeutic notion of “contrary action.” The idea is that if you have a deeply entrenched narrative about your life that is causing distress, then you should take action contrary to that narrative. Look for evidence that negates or disconfirms your narrative, rather than for evidence that confirms it, as is our tendency. The idea is to break the feedback cycle by taking an action completely contrary to one’s usual narratives.

I don’t have much time to write today, and many may not have much time to read, but this poem/prayer is a reminder to myself to take stock of my self-and-world narratives and to question them.

The approach of maintaining equanimity in truth-seeking has been very fruitful for me in navigating the extremes of my mind as I navigate my experience of bipolar disorder. I hope these ideas can be of value to some of you as well.

Happy Easter!