I remember many years ago walking with a friend soon after the two of us had graduated law school. He had a jury trial coming up and I had one not soon after. It was a first for both of us and we were scared. We batted around different ideas – maybe trying this approach with this witness, maybe trying that. It seemed like no matter what we did, we were going to be in for quite a ride. There was no way to avoid it.
“Oh, well,” my friend shrugged. “It’s good to get outside your comfort zone.”
I’m sure I’d heard that phrase before. After all, I’d been knocking around church basements and therapist’s offices, not to mention hanging around with aspiring psychics and attending mass close to daily, for a decade or so. But it hit me that night in a way that it hadn’t before. I remembered it. That night, I began to rethink the whole concept of what it means to be comfortable – when it’s okay and when it’s not.
Somehow, it seemed to me that healing – broadly defined – was related to this idea of comfort zones.
A few years later, reading Wendell Berry, I came across a line I hadn’t seen before. He was talking about his addiction to comfort – to always being fed, always being warm, always having plenty of paper to write on. There was a virtue, he seemed to be saying, in not surrendering to one’s definition of satisfaction. Rather, he wanted to always push himself – to challenge himself. He didn’t want to fall into a routine and call it home just because it was a routine.
This all came to mind the other day because I was dealing with something stressful and doing a lot of prayer around it. The situation had to do with our horse, who was showing some symptoms that were scaring us. I felt the usual blend of fear and guilt – I hate not knowing what is wrong with an animal (because you can’t quiz them about their symptoms), I’m scared for my daughter who loves the horse more than life and I want everything to be okay for her always, and I’m scared of the big vet bill that we appeared to be facing. There was a real loss of control – a need to trust God and Jesus - and I wasn’t in the mood for it. Not at all.
So I prayed. I prayed a lot. And the first night didn’t go so well – I was still pretty wound up. But the next morning, I felt some of the anger and fear give way. Out walking with the dog I remembered that pain is in my life because I want it there. So I stopped on the squeaky snow and said to Jesus, Okay. You take it back. I’m not sure how willing I am to let this go, but I’m willing to let some of it go.
A couple of hours later, drinking tea, I realized that the pain was mostly gone. I wasn’t anywhere near as crazy. I knew that things were going to work out, that we’d find a way to surf whatever it was life was going to toss us. So I went and prayed again, this time to say thank you. And I got a weird response: Jesus said, you are entitled to joy beyond measure, not just a relative absence of agony.
I realized that I have a comfort zone for wellness. I don’t need to be crazy and manic anymore, but I’m not really willing to be in a state of unadulterated joy. I need to hold onto at least a little pain. That’s my comfort zone – this much pain is okay, a little more is not.
That made me sad, thinking that – that no matter how far we think we’ve come spiritually, we always learn that there’s another stretch of field up ahead.
Later that morning we learned that our horse was absolutely fine and that there were no issues. My daughter rode him and he was his usual charming albeit stubborn self. I kept saying thank you – which I try to do a lot, as I think that gratitude paves a way to Heaven – but I was also mindful of the lesson Jesus had handed me. It’s not about keeping our dissatisfaction and grief to tolerable levels. It’s about undoing them altogehter. We’re allowed to be happier than we ever dreamed possible. Peace is the point of the Course.
If we’re not there, then we need to explore our comfort zone – we need to push past it and allow ourselves the sort of joy and peace that makes us feel a little scared, a little guilty, a little risky. God is not in the pain we can handle. God is in the joy we can’t imagine but still secretly long for.
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