Every crisis in our life gives us the opportunity to become a better version of ourself.
View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
As I write this, a conflagration is sweeping across the Malibu area in Southern California. It exploded with a ferocity that shocked everyone. On Monday evening it involved about 10 acres. By Tuesday morning 2,800 acres were in flames. About 18,000 people and over 8,000 homes and businesses are under evacuation orders or warnings. 60,000 people are without power. Students at Pepperdine University have been forced to shelter in place at the school library as the fire has raged around them.
To get a sense of how such dynamic fires might be managed, I turned to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). The NIFC is a campus located in Idaho that brings together all the relevant national fire agencies and local partners for the purpose of providing oversight and coordination in fighting wildland fires on national and state lands.
In addition to resources on how to fight fires sweeping across physical wildlands, I also discovered in NIFC’s website an article, “What Is Crisis?” The piece addresses how to deal with the anxieties that can rage through one’s mental health during dynamically stressful and traumatic events. In its opening section the article states: “Crisis is both a time of opportunity and danger. Crisis is useful when it causes one to go beyond familiar coping skills (both internal and external) and to develop new skills, therefore becoming more competent and autonomous.”
Dr. Margie Warrell is a psychologist with degrees in social and human development. The focus of her work is on guiding people to find courage amid uncertainty. Life is a series crises. Some result from anticipatable changes such as puberty, leaving home, marriage, raising a family, retirement. Others are the result of unexpected trauma such as losses, illness or displacement.
Regardless of the source, it can be easy to feel disoriented and powerless. The mental maps we have created for how the world should be no longer work. We want to live in a world structured with predictability. We exist in one that all too frequently shatters that framing.
We ask ourselves, When will this crisis be over? “The unpleasant truth is,” Dr. Warrell writes, “no one knows. Harder still is that even when we declare this crisis behind us, the life we ‘get back to’ will not be the one it was….So uncertain and uncomfortable as this crisis may be, it holds a powerful catalyst for profound transformation, individually and collectively….Collectively, it invites us to transcend the divisive, ego-dominated paradigms that keep us from rallying together to create a more sustainable, compassionate and courageous world.”
Jonas Gerard was an abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco to parents of French and Brazilian ancestry. Coursing through his work is music: the Moroccan tribal music of his childhood; the propulsive jazz of his Greenwich Village days; the French café music and Brazilian sambas of his ancestry; and the Afro-Cuban rhythms that pulsed outside his Miami studio. These primal and improvisational musical traditions supported Gerard in his visual work to unleash an experience rather than to control its outcome.
Pictured here is Gerard’s painting Embracing Uncertainty #5. There is a sense of flight, of spontaneity. Gerard wrote, “One of my teachers once said to me ‘your brushes are very smart, why don’t you let them do the work?’” Perhaps the paint brushes themselves created the piece in a flurry, and Gerard merely held onto them for dear life.
This sense of letting go, of listening to and birthing the painting that already exists within oneself, is central to Gerard’s art. He wrote, “Uncertainty is a great blessing if you can flow with it. If you’re stuck on your determination…on your outcome…then uncertainty doesn’t have a chance and miracles can’t happen.”
Parshat Vayishlach chronicles a journey, as embodied by Jacob, from scheming child to young man with planned outcomes to wiser soul honoring his origins and promise. He transitions from initially insisting that God provide him with food and clothing and safety to exposing himself to a dangerous confrontation with his brother Esau, the outcome of which is deadly uncertain.
In the middle is a wrestling match between Jacob’s baser and more noble selves. Between his self-centered anxieties and his sacred possibilities. The encounter transforms Jacob, as evidenced physically by the injury to his hip and spiritually by his change of name from Jacob to Israel.
And yet. Immediately following that elevated transformation of character are two shattering crises. Dinah, Jacob’s daughter is raped, and his sons kill all the males in the perpetrator’s village. Throughout it all Jacob remains passive and silent. Absent is Israel, Jacob’s elevated and courageous self. And then Rachel, Jacob’s beloved wife, dies and is buried along the side of the road. What good is heroic self-transformation if all that one most cherishes is lost?
The 19th century Hasidic sage Sefat Emet looks at the beginning of our Torah portion. There God tells a young Jacob, “I will deal with you in great goodness.” As described by Avivah Zornberg in her book The Beginning of Desire, Sefat Emet understands this to mean that God will not merely be good to Jacob. God will make Jacob “accomplice in the benign self-creation of Israel.”
That active participation in the creation of one’s new self is achieved not by determined pursuit of pre-planned goals and assumptions but by an “embrace of uncertainty” (Gerard) and by a transcendence of “ego-dominated paradigms” (Warrell). When will crises be over? Never. But each one gives us the opportunity to become something that was just waiting to be birthed. And that’s how we make miracles.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday December 12 as we explore when will this crisis be over.
