The other day, as we ate lunch, a co-worker (S.) and I talked about carrying emotional burdens, and about venting. She had attended Catholic school for eight grades and had been educated by priests and nuns (she wasn't sure, but they were most likely from the Religious of the Sacred Heart, a teaching order).
Because we work on a senior-living campus, walking with the residents and their families as we do, the residents march right in and set up their tents in our hearts. And we know that death comes for each of them in turn. Accepting and processing that is part of the job. But that morning one of the residents had died, and for a range of reasons it hit everyone hard. We were hurting.
In that context, I allowed as how a couple of times, hearing me venting a little to another staff member, S. typically said something gently reproachful about seeing the best in people. Together, we explored the emotional weight that we gladly assume - that we consider a privilege - as part of our jobs.
One of the ways that I vent, like a pressure cooker, is to be able to put into words the occasional frustration I feel because we all are trying to provide our residents with their most abundant life possible under the circumstances.Words allow me to articulate, to corral, the free-form feelings when they bubble up and need to be released. Once I've vented, I'm over it.
S., having been educated at a Catholic school, had been shown the ideal of the Ignatian presupposition. Ironically, I had brought this ideal up in a sermon I had preached just a couple of weeks ago. What happens, I had asked (rhetorically), when you, when I, ascribe the best possible intentions to another person's words, actions, motives?
I was mulling over this conversation this morning when M., the hubs, said that it was time to make chicken salad. We use the shortcut of canned, rinsed chicken. While he parceled out the chicken water from the cans to the small animals of the house, I assembled the other ingredients.
Ten years ago, I had been approved for ordination yet had not yet received a call. It was 2010, and the stock-market dive from a couple of years ago plus the reverberations of a social statement in my denomination meant that pastors who had considered retiring - were deciding to wait a bit, while any pastor who was in a pulpit - was likely hanging on to it. In short, there were hardly any openings.
So for a year, I did other work. The first job I landed was in a supermarket deli, in large measure because when the application asked what hours I was willing to work, I chose 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and apparently not everyone was willing to take the day shift. I worked there for three months before leaving for a seasonal temp job doing layout and editing of invitations for a company whose main business was wedding-related. That job paid more and could be done at a desk.
As I say, it's been ten years since I worked in the deli, and I was there only a few months. But my hands, my muscle memory, still knows how to make the deli's locally popular chicken salad. In my own kitchen, I still prep fruits, vegetables, and meat the way I learned to behind that counter. And so this morning, when it was chicken salad time, I shooed the hubs out of the way and quickly mixed up the deli chicken salad. And it was good. (At least he said it was when I had him taste a forkful.)
So what does it mean that, while my hands and a scrap of memory retain the knowledge of that deli chicken salad, it took a conversation with a co-worker to remind me of a precept on which I had just preached? Maybe, I hope, it means that in the future, when I vent, I will be sure to consider the best possible motivations for other people's actions. Maybe it will even mean that I might consider the complicated motivations for my own actions and words, and grant myself a little grace.
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