“Joy lies in the fight, the attempt, in the
suffering involved, not in the victory itself.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

In the past when I heard someone was making accusations about me but not to me personally I would really get upset. Often I would react, especially when I thought they were false or only partially true. Since I have been working in the garden and reflecting more on nature I realize how stupid that was and how it often made things worse. Why suffer needlessly?

In nature there is cause and effect, and action and reaction, but there is no reaction to third party statements or actions. A cow does not react to what another cow said or did about her that was not to her face. A plant does not react to a storm that did not affect it directly. There is no “he said, she said” in nature. Nature naturally practices the grievance procedure taught us in the Gospel: If you wrong someone or someone does you wrong, directly deal with it to the person. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn. Recently I have had a chance to practice it and think I am doing okay. When I hear that someone has a grievance with me, for something I may have said or done, I ask the person if we can talk about it in person. If they say no or ignore my request I try, like nature, to let it go. What good is a reaction to something that never was directly said or done to you?

I am making this observation on a day when I had to resist reacting to a person making criticism about me to a third party but refusing to talk to me about the issue. Rather than spend a lot of time worrying about these third party accusations, I chose today to call up a few sick friends from Church. They are in real pain, not one caused by third party accusations. Listening to them and knowing about real pain and illnesses some close family members are now experiencing, I felt grateful for the time to listen and pray, time otherwise that might have been spent worrying about what someone may have said to others about me. There is too much pain and suffering in the world to create more, needlessly, about making accusations made to third parties or reacting to them.

Joy, as the quote and picture says, is involved in real suffering.

Warning: The above may be a lot of B.S. but it is not an April Fools joke. For a good one see Sojourners Newsletter today. On a more serious note I finished the essay on To Make Peace, Do Not Teach War today.

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