Stubbornness: Degrees of Malleability
Ken has often said, “We don’t want the peace of God, we want a piece of the action.”
The body, the world, and everything that seems to go on here, all of our special relationships, is the action.
Each of these special relationships, idols, distractions, attachments—whether it’s money, sex, fame, food, vanity, ambition etc.—each of them leads us down a path of suffering.
“On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not what will the ending be, but when it comes” (T-31.IV.2:12-14).
The pain that inevitably comes is not what we think it is. It does not come from the loss of youth, health, a loved one, or the loss of money, reputation etc. The pain is the belief we’ve lost the peace of God. That is the only pain there is; the pain of having thrown it away, of not valuing it, of turning our backs on it, of thinking there is something more appealing.
And we are so stubborn in this. Not recognizing the true value of the peace of God, we throw it away, over and over and over again, for the baubles of the world, and the pain that accompanies our pursuit of them. Over and over, again and again. And still again… and yet again we discard the peace of God in our pursuit of a greater treasure.
It doesn’t have to be like this. We could learn our lessons without going ever deeper into the blistering furnace of anguish and despair: “There is no need to learn through pain. And gentle lessons are acquired joyously, and are remembered gladly. What gives you happiness you want to learn and not forget” (T-21.I.3:1-3). And yet, for most of us, our stubbornness is so strong that in most instances we only learn our lessons when the pain becomes so great, so intolerable, that even our profound stubbornness is no match for it. If we choose not to learn our lessons gently then the next kindest decision would be to learn our lessons at the first glimpse of pain, and not stubbornly stagger all the way to the core of the furnace before finally crying out, “Enough! This hurts too much! I was wrong! I don’t want this anymore! I want to be happy! I want the peace of God!”
We all have a breaking point—and this point is different for each of us, and can always be re-negotiated in any given moment—when the pain becomes so intense and overwhelming it is like a searing fire into which the steel of our stubbornness is finally made malleable. It is at this point we finally, finally!become willing to learn the lesson, to be reshaped in the image of the Holy Spirit. What we would want to do out of kindness for ourselves is to remember we can lower our threshold of malleability so that we can learn our lessons as quickly and as gently as possible.
However many lessons there seem to be before us, and however difficult they may appear, there is but one: to finally distinguish the valuable from the valueless, to finally learn we don’t want a piece of the action, we only want the peace of God.
