By Bert Keller, Professor Emeritus (Bioethics and Humanities) at MUSC
“What about you?” said my coffee companion. “Do you have any regrets?” The question took me by surprise.
I hemmed and hawed about some missed opportunities and a few personality defects, but sensed something deeper than curiosity behind her question. So I just acknowledged that all of us must have things in our life we wish we could change and turned the same question back to her.
It didn’t take long to come out. “When I think about the unrelenting emotional abuse in my house when I was growing up, it still hurts so bad I almost break down. I’m still so afraid of anger and bullying, I don’t trust myself raising my own children and just know I’ll mess up.”
Meet a new person or join a small group in a setting of trust, wanting to go deeper than just chit-chat, and the chances are you will hear stories of hardship and pain. A childhood marred by not being loved well or by cruel punishment; a marriage that was an emotional disaster or just faded out; a traumatic experience that left deep scars and still keeps the person awake at three in the morning. The more we open ourselves to other people, the more we realize how their characters have been shaped by the sufferings they have passed through. The same can be true for us.
But it is not simply what has happened to people that defines them. Of even greater importance is how they responded to what has happened to them. Their response expresses what interpretation they give to what they have suffered—what story they tell that embeds the spirit-breaking burdens or deep wounds into the whole story of who they are.
My coffee companion spoke of feeling emotional depletion, unworthiness, and fear of her own smoldering anger that made her afraid to discipline or direct her children. Her “interpretation” of her own childhood as constant emotional abuse made her response to her early experience one of shame. Her very selfhood was torn and she felt flawed. That took away her capacity to see either herself or her parents with eyes of compassion. And now her shame was affecting the children she loved and was parenting.
Is it possible to find a new, different, life-enhancing response to suffering? As we advance into older adulthood and our past grows bigger in memory, the question becomes even more pressing—a matter of whether we will live with freedom and happiness or be saddened by a burden that grows heavier with the years. Ask the question this way: “Can I use my moral imagination to build the story of my life into one that will carry my life forward positively?”
A friend in a small memoir group was talking about her much-loved grandfather. She said she asked him once, “Grandpa, how do you draw so good?” He responded, “Well, I just imagine the picture on the paper, and then I trace around it.”
Moral imagination: the ability to see the picture on the paper! To understand even those who’ve hurt us, as themselves wounded; to unmask lazy, blaming, destructive interpretations; to imagine goodness and mercy as present realities. To feed that affirmative imagination with all our mind, to tell it, to place the image of it on the paper. And then to trace around it with our behavior. Easier said than done? Well, just telling it, again and again, until it becomes our motivating story, is the blueprint to living it out.
Put that in another, spiritual frame: It is both true and critical to our well-being to affirm that we are accepted, and loved, for who we are. That may involve forgiveness, and tears, years of mending deep wounds and damaged relationships, to arrive at a transformative acceptance of ourselves as worthy and uniquely beautiful. It may involve practicing how to accept love from other people, or from a specific person. It will involve nourishing our moral imagination by choosing with care how we seek entertainment, what we read or watch, who we befriend, how we tend our bodies and our minds. The critical thing is that we believe with all our hearts that we are accepted and loved for who we are.
That is the meaning of Jesus’s third Beatitude, as paraphrased by Eugene Peterson: “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.” No one should leave this life without feeling blessed by that kind of contentment.
