Creation arises from the chaos of our messy lives

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 8, 2000 by Rich Heffern

God is always with us, finding us in the fog

Patricia Livingston leads workshops, retreats and seminars throughout the country. In 1990, Livingston was given the U.S. Catholic Award by U.S. Catholic magazine, for furthering the cause of women in the Catholic church. She is author of Lessons of the Heart. Her newest book, This Blessed Mess: Finding Hope Amidst Life's Chaos, was just published by Sorin Books. She lives with her husband, Howard Gordon, in Tampa, Fla.

NCR: Your book title says that life is a blessed mess. How do you find hope in the chaos?

Livingston: We are raised thinking that our lives are supposed to flow smoothly. When the inevitable struggles and mishaps come, we think there's something wrong with us. I grew up thinking that my life would unfold with a certain peace and stability and nothing much would go wrong. Boy, was I mistaken! When I give talks, people are so relieved to hear out loud that life is just very messy for almost all of us.

We're educated to think that the messiness is not supposed to be there?

Yes, and sometimes you can keep that illusion going for quite a while. But sooner or later the messes will happen. It helps especially if you are white and live in the First World.

You can escape a lot of stuff, but still the bad things happen to everyone. When something finally goes wrong and the mess knocks on the door, you just want it to go away. It seems unreal. Of course, it doesn't go away, you have to stay with it. And gradually you discover that it has a life of its own. And it's helpful for us to sit and be with that knowledge.

You find in the end, too, that things that matter wouldn't happen if you didn't have a messy life. If the failure or catastrophe is always what meets your eye, then that's what it is. But when you start looking you will see that very often new life comes out of the broken places and that the chaos was the raw material for it. That dynamic is all through scripture, and it's also all through life itself.

Every time I come onto a new example of this I get excited. I visited my son and his wife once just after they moved to Alabama and there I ran across a monument to the boll weevil. It seems that long ago that insect pest had come and devastated the cotton crop in the area. Farmers were desperate. How could they make a living without their cotton? But it was discovered that raising peanuts instead made a good cash crop. The weevils didn't bother them. Peanuts were, in fact, easier to raise. A whole new way of farming came from that catastrophe. So they put up a memorial to the pest.

That is a good little parable for what you are saying.

My sister struggles mightily with mental illness. I think about how much we all savor life more when her medications are working. Every day is a gift to her. And no matter what is going on in my life, I think of the victory that every single day is for her. There is great dignity and heroism in her struggle every day. We would have never chosen these terrible struggles, but often, besides being terrible afflictions, they are also a light for us.

Even science tells us now that chaos is the raw material for new things, for creation. There's a whole science of chaos theory that spells out how this works. Nature is just not orderly in daily experience. She loves order, but she gets there through messes. Chaos mixes everything up. There are countless books out now about chaos in organizations, and look at how new ways of living the religious life have arisen out of the chaos that came about when the old ways are dying.

You can't just read about this; you have to experience it. You have to find the pearl of great price on your own. The whole idea of writing my book began for me when we had a season of death in my family. We had one terrible emergency after another. Both of my parents died within a few months of each other. And then, within a year of the anniversary of the death of my dad, my sons got married, my daughter had my first grandchild and I got engaged after being divorced for 20 years. I saw close-up how winter leads to spring. This stuff doesn't just happen in nature. It is really true in life. I think that I savor my joys much better now than before because we had that long season of trouble.

That sounds suspiciously like the Beatitudes, doesn't it?

We need each other. This is exactly what the Beatitudes are about. What is good about being poor? Nothing! But when we are poor, when we are hungry, kindness means so much to us. When we need food, then a little ham tastes wonderful. My mother used to say hunger is the best sauce.

For example, a couple of weeks ago my daughter and I were in a department store with her 3-year-old, who's at that age when he loves to run away from you. We went up on the escalator and we lost him. We looked for 15 minutes and all we could think of was that somebody took him. We finally found him with an older woman, who had found him wandering. She was telling him a little story. Tears were just running down my face, when I exclaimed, "How could we ever thank you?" "Honey," she said, "just seeing the look on your face is all the thanks I need." Our vulnerability that magnified that woman's kindness is a treasure to me.