Cross

Crossness is my dominant feeling today. It's a fairly destructive state of mind, in which one does stupid things like kicking the cat (if we had one to kick, which we don't), simply because it somehow makes you feel a tiny bit better to know that someone else is suffering too - or perhaps as an attempt to transfer some of your angst onto them. Anyway, the last time I tried seriously kicking anything I broke my toe, so, cross or not, I'm not going there again.

Life is rather frustrating. I am no longer able to do what I was prepared and trained to do, and felt it was my life's call to do. And, while I remain busy and involved, with lots to keep mind and body occupied, lots of projects in hand, lots of social stimulus - well, it's never going to be enough. I am a priest not presently able to be a priest, and I'm cross about that.

But who can I be cross with? With God - or with some faceless subdivision of God one might label 'fate'? Well, yes, I could, and from time to time I have. Some of my praying has been pretty anguished and bitter, and at times I've found prayer of any kind to be all but impossible.

Then there are the people I could, I suppose, accuse or feel hard done by, the people who, looking back, either could have done more, or should have done less. But the fact is that neither my crossness with God nor any cross feelings I may have about other people really bear serious scrutiny. Truthfully, the most I can accuse anyone else of is perhaps an element of apathy or forgetfulness (or perhaps naivety). I'd be painting a very untrue picture were I to suggest that people have been actively plotting against me, or are delighting in having done me down. And God? Well, probably the worst accusation I can throw at God is that he's allowed me the freedom to go my own way, and to be the author of my own fate. How can I accuse him, when the truth is that I have misused his gift and mistrusted his grace?

So these cross feelings of mine have more to do with a self-centred view of the world, and a refusal to accept responsibility for my own situation, than with the real world, which though it may be a painful, and messy, and hard to fathom sort of a place, is not in fact full of conspiracies against me. And the best way out of my crossness will not be kicking the cat (or, indeed, anything else - as it happens, I broke my toe kicking a piece of entirely blameless bedroom furniture . . .), but taking the time, the effort, the advice and (thank God) the love which, together, will help me to rebalance, to understand, and to begin to move on.

And those last two words are important. Like it or not, there is no way back. That life is over, and I can't go back there again. And it's no good my getting cross about that, it's just something that has happened. I could dwell on it, get screwed up by it, feel cross about it, but in the end as I do that I'll only harm myself and people I care about. Real life is process, in which every ending carries the possibility of new beginning, and every change of direction carries the possibility of new discovery. I need to learn (and I am learning, despite my cross moments) that for me moving on is possible, and there shall continue to be new and exciting and fulfilling places to go. And, I would have to say, speaking now very personally, to go as a priest, and in company with my Lord.