Craig Bennett Muses on Luck of the Irish

by Craig Bennett*

Although I can’t quite claim to be a son of the “auld Sod,” I do have more than just a smattering of Irish blood in my veins. My dad’s mother had a great deal more of that than I do, as did her parents; so that, I believe, gives me sufficient reason to expect at least a little of the legendary luck of the Irish to rub off on me.

But when I look back over my life at this point (and “this point” offers quite a bit of life to look back over), I see not so much that looks like unexpected strokes of luck as I see patterns that look like sequences of synchronicity. But somewhere on the periphery of those patterns are occasional incidents that seem to have somehow placed me in the path of luck that may already have been headed in my general direction.

It has much to do with the way in which even the worst and most negative things that happened to me turned out to offer some very positive outcomes. Sometimes, in retrospect, I came to understand them as necessary breaks with something I valued in order to provide me the freedom to move toward something that I came to value even more. It’s much like the idea suggested by Fr. Richard Rohr, Dr. Parker J. Palmer, and others that in order to truly grow beyond our own self-imposed restrictions, we have to suffer some kind of defeat, lose at something important, or endure another sort of existential crisis that will force us out of our former way of being in the world and into something new—and better.

We often don’t recognize these events for what they are or may become because they seem to us at the time much like what St. John of the Cross first described as “the dark night of the soul.” We are devastated. It may look to us as if our life is effectively over—that everything we valued, loved, cherished, and needed was lost. It may even bring about the destruction of hope and plunge us into deep despair.

But this may be precisely the right thing at the right time. As Fr. Rohr explains in Falling Upward, we need to lose the idea that we are in complete control of our lives. We need to suffer something completely contrary to our previous experience, something that shatters nearly every assumption we had made about life, the world, and our place in each of them and shows us undeniably that we are absolutely vulnerable to things we cannot foresee, prevent, or hope to deal with alone. Then we will be like a forest floor after a devastating fire. The old, slowly rotting trees, long dead and fallen, along with the dense undergrowth and the species that had come to dominate the forest itself, will have been burned away and the forest floor scoured clean by fire. Then new growth will begin to appear, and the place where the forest had been will be much different from before.

I won’t go into detail about the relatively few times that such a thing has occurred in my own life. The point here is that it did—and it freed me, through circumstances beyond my control, from a situation that had become toxic but to which I had made a serious and lasting commitment; took from me a detrimental burden that I was unable to let go of myself; or placed me, ultimately, in a position where I was able devote myself to something much more important than what had occupied me previously. And those are just my own experiences. If you examine your life more closely, you may recognize events and experiences of your own that are different but still similar.

What this amounts to, I suppose, is the suggestion that we need to look at our lives now and then in terms of the big picture. Or at least a somewhat bigger picture. I’m reminded of things like the observation, “This, too, shall pass”; or the things I’ve read about the subsequent lives of many Holocaust survivors who were liberated from Auschwitz, Dachau, or one of the other camps, half naked, nearly starved to death, and without a shred of hope to cling to; some personal stories I’ve heard from other adults who have “bottomed out” to the point where there was nowhere else to go but up; and even of Aragorn’s assurance to the boy with the “good sword” before the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: “There is always hope.”

There is too much good fortune in the world for it to be confined to the people of one small island of the coast of England. At some point in your life, if you have not experienced that already, you may feel differently; but it is there, nevertheless. And there is always hope.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most book stores.

Source: Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2001

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