This Ignatian Life

When I was in kindergarten I lost my first tooth ever. It happened in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese and I was blubbery mess, convinced that the tooth fairy would not buy my story. After crying and carrying on in true over dramatic six year-old fashion, I am told that I said these words to the manager that night: “There has been a disaster.” As it turns out, the tooth fairy accepts handwritten explanations from managers on duty—crisis averted.

Twenty some years later and loss continues to tantalize me, shoving its ugly nose into very real attempts to plan, to organize and make sense of the world. But rather than remain victimized by this all too familiar force-of-loss, I’ve come to think of losing as an art, an art that I am very skilled at. I am constantly “at a loss” throughout my day—metro card, the time, my thought process. And I am especially gifted at losing my keys. The early twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop writes about the measured process of losing in her poem “One Art.”

“One Art”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write It!) like disaster.

Count your loses— on fingers, with tears, in curse words. Measure what’s now missing, maybe gone forever—gone from sight, from feeling. And if you can, in a joking voice, laugh at the loss and tell it—you are no disaster.

Then there are those other kinds of losses. What do we do about the losses that cannot simply be laughed off with self-deprecating humor, loss that cannot be consoled with a poem, loss that isn’t somewhat easily consoled?

Lost lives. Lost loves. Lost causes. Loss of innocence.

I admit that I’ve had more losses in these categories than I care to remember. And I also admit that in response to too many of these losses, faith was not my immediate response. Life dangles the temptations of quick-fix responses to the most profound hardship—and there lies the disaster. The loss itself isn’t the disaster, but the response to the loss is where the catastrophe lurks. Enter faith.

Faith is what we turn to; what we must turn to in order to weather the significant losses of life. And when I say faith, I mean much more than going to church for a quick-fix, more than swiftly reaching out for Psalm 23, more than hastily carrying yourself to the nearest confessional to own up to your part in the losing process. The faith that I am referring to is a slow faith. Slow faith means sitting down with a trusted friend, a mentor and examining, over time, how you’ve gotten to this point and how God is trying to help you through it. Slow faith means regular quiet time with your God to feel through the loss and grieve together. Slow faith means paying attention to the people, the places, the things that God has placed into your life very intentionally to inspire, encourage and even entertain. Slow faith will lead you away from disaster.

Loss. With patience, with humor, with faith we can be masters.

Photo: “letting go” by “janGlas” from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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