Streams of Mercy

The book I picked from the bookshelf this morning is Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, by Anne Lamott.

“If you were raised in the 1950’s or 1960’s and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child … What the term meant was that you noticed how unhappy your parents were. Also, you worried about global starvation, animals at the pound who didn’t get adopted, and smog. What a nut! You looked into things too deeply, and you noticed things that not many others could see, and this exasperated your parents and teachers. They said, ‘You need to have thicker skin.’ That would have been excellent, but you couldn’t go buy thicker skin at the five and dime.”

I was one such child, told again and again throughout life that I needed to have a “thicker skin” in order to deal effectively with the challenges of the moment. Somehow that just hasn’t happened for me, and I’m grateful.

Lamott goes on to say,

“As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, “Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you’re not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on!”

At nearly seventy three years of age, while I have yet to develop a “thicker skin,” I have become more and more comfortable in my own skin and more at peace with who and how I am.

Remember the story of the Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you’re Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Giving thanks for moments to reflect on the wonder of life’s journey, and for those streams of mercy, never ceasing!

Elizabeth