FORBEARANCE: THE GREATEST OF ALL SPIRITUAL QUALITIES

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

It is impossible for me to assemble the ingredients and make sense of them that my mother died thirty years ago. How have I managed to get through those years without her? Somehow, and despite my many blunders and scrapes and chronic anxiety, I have trudged along—bruised and scarred and startled. It is said that forbearance (defined as patient self-control, restraint, and tolerance) is the greatest of all spiritual qualities, and without it no other spiritual quality is worth a damn. I bagged tolerance early on, but patient self-control and restraint had a long long wait: they finally showed up alongside my first Social Security check…and then only because I was so worn out by the incessant “stitching and unstitching” that I just gave up—or gave in.

 

Maybe giving up or giving in is the “yellow brick road” to any spiritual quality. Our stewing minds and churning stomachs and fluttering hearts don’t get us there very often or very well. My mother looked for them in her Bible. I really don’t know if she found them there. There was plenty of time to talk with her about such things in the six months between her terminal diagnosis and her passing. But we didn’t talk about them. It was ground too scary to tread, at least for me, because to do so would have naturally slipped into a revelation of her feelings, and mine, regarding her imminent death. “Death” was a word she and I did not utter.

 

I am pretty sure my mother believed in the concept of an afterlife following the demise of the body. The thing I do not know and regret not knowing is if she found courage and comfort in the belief during her final days.

 

I hope not to leave my loved ones with such questions and regrets about me. But with death at my door, I might indulge my consciousness in denial and refuse to talk about death at all. I might soothe my consciousness in beautiful memories of life instead of speculations about afterlife. Maybe that was my mother’s way of dealing with her end days. And why should she not have pacified herself with the known rather than with the unknown? Another idea about my mother occurs to me. Is it possible that she had attained the spiritual quality of forbearance in its full bloom and thereby needed little to nothing more? That notion comforts me.

 

My questions remain and probably always will remain, so my alternative is to turn to things I do know about my mother. In that vein, I am prompted by Deepak Chopra in his “THE BOOK OF SECRETS” to acknowledge the five qualities for which my mother would most like to be remembered. While others who knew and loved her might submit additional responses, with the greatest love, appreciation, and admiration of her, my reply is that she was a good daughter; a good wife; a good mother. She was her children’s best friend. She was a good caretaker of her earthly home.©

 

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