On a personal level I have felt powerless during Japhia's two- and three-week-plus hospitalizations for a chronic disorder. I know you also have felt powerless in a variety of ways in your life -- maybe feel that way right now. On a larger scale, the terrible experience of powerlessness is also a force in many current political movements.
Being powerless is common to the human situation, and how we deal with it is important.
My first response usually is to try to gain more control. In other words, more power. When Japhia's disorder becomes so severe she is hospitalized, I google the illness. I ask the doctors and nurses as many questions as I can think of. Piece together the information I find. Identify likely patterns, causes and consequences so I can give advice, suggest next steps, lay out problems to be overcome and mistakes to be corrected. And ultimately fix it. That's definitely the first desire: to fix it. To be the one in and with power.
After that I usually get angry. I get angry (or 'just frustrated,' as I like to say) at Japhia for being sick, and make her feel like she's done something wrong. Get mad at pedestrians and other drivers on my way to and from the hospital, for things they do wrong. Vent my jealousy (or 'righteous indignation,' as I tell myself) at other people who seem to have it all together, and seem to be successful, privileged, fortunate. Truth is, I get angry. Because I feel a need to blame someone for the unfairness.
I also start to consume more than usual. In our society and culture being able to buy, to eat, to use, to own, to consume stuff in any way makes us feel good, important and ... yes, powerful. So every time I come in or go out of the hospital I buy a coffee and maybe a sourcream plain or a glazed cinnamon roll at the Tim's in the lobby (have you noticed my weight gain?), just because I can and because it makes me feel less powerless. During one of Japhia's two-week hospitalizations I bought a new stereo and used an afternoon when I said I was going home "to rest", to set it up. The next day I tried to resurrect and install an old turntable to make the system "complete." Many nights when I come home from an evening at the hospital, I eat and drink excessively, and binge-watch Netflix ("The Good Place") or listen to music for longer than I admit ("Radio Paradise"). And oh, how telling, those particular choices!
I cherish distractions. Like work can be at times like this. Or Jets' hockey. Or Blue Bombers' football.
And I live for moments of rest. Like driving through the dark streets of the city on my way home from St. Joe's. Especially that long, slow, eternally curving stretch of Cootes Drive just past the University and into Dundas. Troubles and concerns fall off and away into the ditch and into the darkness of Cootes Paradise as I gracefully steer my secure and speedy way home. A kind of momentary secular sabbath at 90 or 100 km/hr.
And I pray. Finally.
Not for miraculous supernatural healing. God forgive me if I'm wrong, but that kind of prayer feels to me like a return to response number one -- the desire to be in control and have the power to fix it (but this time, with God as my all-powerful helper to do my will) so we don't have to deal with things like bodily disorder, life-change and that whole whack of other things that comes with being human, imperfect, mortal and vulnerable.
I find myself drawn instead to the kind of prayer that Twelve-Step programs of spiritual recovery talk about -- the very simple and radically open-ended prayer for knowledge of God's will and the willingness to do it, the courage to live into it. I've no doubt healing of some kind is involved; but the healing of what? And how?
Which makes me wonder, when I think about all the ways we encounter powerlessness in life ...
... if maybe the question is not simply how we deal with powerlessness, as though it's something to be handled, attacked, tamed, wished away and resolved...
... but also how we live with powerlessness as something that's an inescapable, necessary, inevitable, God-blessed part of who we are, of what life is about, and of what drives us with a hard grace towards faith and trust in the journey we are on, as a journey with and into God towards our truest self.
