There once was an atheist who was out fishing one morning in Northern Scotland. Obviously he was someone who finds religion in nature with either a fishing pole or a golf club. All of a sudden the Loch Ness Monster comes up out of the water and throws the boat and the fisherman up in the air end-over-end with huge open mouth ready to receive the prey. The fisherman cries out: “Oh God, help me!”

All of a sudden the action is frozen as a booming voice rings out: “I thought you didn’t believe in me!”

The fisherman responds: “Hey, give me a break! Two minutes ago I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster either!”

As my thoughts on this subject proceed, you can figure out how that joke works in with my subject, "Bouncing Back", or in other words, what helps us work through the rough patches in our lives, what gives us that marvelous and rare quality—resilience.

Resilience has become a hot topic during these days of natural and human-made disasters. Talk show hosts, celebrities, and psychologists are doing research and traveling across the country soliciting stories of resiliency from people of all backgrounds; we have seen many books and magazine articles on the subject of how the bumps and bruises of life have not only not destroyed but strengthened certain individuals. The question I pose to you today is “What is their secret? Or do they have one?”

We see those who are doing it or have done it successfully. An outstanding example is Christopher Reeve, paralyzed from the neck down after a riding accident, who helped children who are recovering from serious spinal injuries. He spoke to them on closed-circuit TV about the determination and effort it takes to patiently reconstruct a life, and Reeve was even directing a movie before he passed away. People like Christopher Reeve and Lance Armstrong who overcame life-threatening cancer to become a world champion cyclist—they bring us the models and the good news that not everyone is devastated by devastating experiences. Just last night on the news came a report of a twenty year old who had fallen asleep on the railroad tracks, thus losing both legs and an arm. Today he is fitted with artificial limbs, running, doing sports and going around the country giving inspirational speeches.

There has been a fascinating study of children who manage to survive and even thrive after crushing family and health circumstances. Dr. Lillian Rubin, who wrote The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph over the Past, defines resilience as “the ability to be knocked down eight times and get up nine.” People who recover from crises, their stories have shown, not only have the power to transform their lives but are determined to make the world a better place.

So what makes the difference? Are some of us born with a sunny outlook that helps us to find cheery hope in any situation? Are others of us born with constant clouds over our heads that pre-dispose us to predict one rainy day after another, interspersed with thunderstorms and tornadoes.

What those people who are doing research on this question tell us is this: the primary characteristic of resilience seems to be a cheery disposition but also the ability to attract the necessary nurturing. During the Second World War, English psychiatrist John Bowlby studied infants whose parents had been killed during the blitz. Some children grew sickly and withdrew once they were separated from their mothers. But the resilient ones, those who gave out cues that said “hold me,” bonded with the nurses and continued to grow in a healthy manner.

The children who succeed in such situations are the ones who, despite their physical or emotional handicaps, gather support from the community, the extended family and religious groups. Look at some examples: The inner city environment that produces drug addicts and gang members also gives us go-getters like Christopher Darden, and poets like Maya Angelu. And, of course, I must not forget to mention Oprah Winfrey herself. You and I know personally so many folks who have grown up with poverty, physical and sexual abuse, religious abuse, who have gone on to carve out outstanding lives for themselves against all odds. That is one reason I am so interested in the question of what makes us bounce back?

The world sooner or later breaks our hearts, if not our whole bodies. Afterwards those of us who are tough enough internally can stand ourselves up, brush ourselves off and get on with it, that may come with a transformed outlook toward ourselves and our lives. Where some have become fragile and bitter, others have more compassion, where some people resort to abuse of self and those close to them, others have more courage and hope than ever.

There are so many, many stories to draw on, in and out of my own sphere of experience and research. I have a friend who endured the results of an almost fatal motor cycle accident. After being in a coma for a month, when he had recovered enough to regain consciousness, in just one week he went through twelve hours of surgery. Through sheer determination, mental and physical, he got back on his feet, was married, has children and finished a graduate degree to become a professor.

I am inspired by the story of the Jungian writer June Singer. She was a gifted psychologist who had just finished her doctorate when her husband died of a heart attack. At the time, she had a teenage daughter to support and no job. Singer’s husband had been a counselor. Many of his patients came to her to discuss their grief, which provided her with the income she needed. Then, once Singer had adjusted to her new profession, her daughter was killed in an automobile accident.

Dr. Singer said that in such circumstance, “we can no longer maintain the facade that holds us together. At first we experience ourselves as disorganized and chaotic. We have to re-organize in some way, in order to survive.” She believes that a sense of one’s wholeness and faith in who we can become may sustain us when we are in crisis.

One of the most meaningful books I have ever read is Singer’s Boundaries of the Soul She tells us:

I found solace in writing. Creativity is the alchemy of making art come out of suffering. At least, it was that way for me. My own speaking and writing have come directly from my pain. They’ve included days and nights of exploring, investigating, trying to see how life works and how it can be improved. You don’t feel inclined to do that kind of searching if you’re smug and self-satisfied.

In other words, we need to be shaken up, thrown off balance, sometimes to begin our spiritual growth.

I have found that is also true for me and for so many people I know. I look back to a time of my life when I was in seminary in the mid-seventies. I was also going through many crises: from losing a husband to mental illness, and his disappearance, having to go on welfare, seeing my daughter through a year of back surgery, losing my beloved mother during that time, dealing with two teen age sons who were into a whole lot of the things that teenagers in the seventies were into. I was having to handle all these matters all by myself and work as a chaplain at Parkland Hospital in Dallas at the same time, helping other people through their crises, often much worse.

Now I am not saying that during all that time I felt “up and at’ em”—not at all. There were days when I wondered when I could get on that next train to nowhere; there were days when I not only did not feel like playing the legendary role of enduring woman, I felt as if I would like to crawl in a hole and pull the dirt in after myself and wanted to put a big rock on top of that dirt.

Suffering often does not ennoble or strengthen. It makes many of us bitter, scared, scarred and weaker. Each case is, naturally, different. We ask the question and look around ourselves and inside ourselves to discover what gives us that extra buoyancy, that extra flexibility, that extra optimism that leads to that unique ability to bounce back up instead of falling back down.

Because of all this, I am profoundly drawn to resiliency research and listening intently to the personal stories of those who have worked their way through personal setbacks and traumas. I am astonished and in awe of all those who have whatever it takes to survive misfortune and continue to grow, even thrive. My experiences with my own personal suffering led me to find places in myself that were stronger, more creative, more enduring than I would ever have found without that experience. I am persuaded that those experiences led me to being a more compassionate and centered person and counselor than I ever would have been otherwise. And the personal philosophy and spiritual outlook I learned then have certainly helped me to weather the storms in my professional and personal life since then. Yes, I know the storms and the sunny days are still yet to come, life’s like that. One lesson learned—A whole lot of resilience has to do with admitting your vulnerability and not expecting too much of life.

A sense of humor helps so much—which is another way of saying a sense of proportion. There’s a Yiddish saying: “Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” The joke I told at the beginning of this article shows our very human tendency to call on someone “up there, out there” to come to our aid in times of dire emergency. Thus opens up a total reframing of our whole belief system as in a sudden burst of thunder. Whether we begin to believe in God, or even the Loch Ness Monster, whether that works for us or not I think we need to find some meaning in our crises. We turn to ethics, or spirituality or our personal beliefs or non-beliefs. Some of us find new answers from our searching; and some of us also end up dedicating ourselves to helping others.

We need stories of resiliency to inspire us —those can be our medicine instead of relying so much on medicine from a bottle. I wonder—and I know I am getting into dangerous territory here, I do not want to oversimplify the problem—but I wonder whether too many of us turn to medication when we should be looking at the source and meaning of our suffering. Instead of closing off our dark times—what I often call —The Lower Depths or the slough of Despond, instead of muting those times with drugs or diversions, we need to find a larger picture of our setbacks.

The Declaration of Independence says something about the pursuit of happiness, but we are not guaranteed happiness. Because so many people think they are, we are often taken by great surprise when it happens to us. In John Boorman’s film, Beyond Rangoon, an American woman travels to Asia to ease the tragic loss of her husband and son. “I thought if I was good and did all the right things and worked hard, I’d be happy,” she says. Her Buddhist tour guide replies “Here in Burma we know that life is suffering. When joy comes, we embrace it. But we know it is a fleeting thing.”

I think one of the problems we Westerners have is that we take it too personally. I know I do. I look for reasons why my misfortunes may be caused by something I did, or at least something I could have prevented. A sense of personal failure sets in: the “Not enough” syndrome. Yet Buddhists believe that these things are part of daily life. Instead of wallowing in feelings of guilt and inadequacy, they are able to use their problems as a springboard for self-transformation.

My 22 year-old-marriage that ended so miserably forced me to become more independent: it pushed me toward a new vocation and a new sense of being on my own and even enjoying it. l could no longer cling and be dependent—all of a sudden I was in charge of a family of four and then a congregation. I need to hastily add, I could not have done this by myself. I had a whole lot of help from family and friends. And that too helped my growth—in learning to ask for help I began to grow in coping skills. And that harkens back to what I said earlier about resilient children—they are the ones who know how to attract substitute parents and find suitable mentors.

This I have discovered—the key to resilience is the daily practice of opening the heart. I believe that we are given with our birth, the inner strength to endure, to love even oneself and others. It is a reservoir that we can draw on in times of trouble—t can transform even the most difficult of times and relationships. And besides, you may have noticed, “people are like tea bags—you never know how strong they will be until you put them in hot water.”

There are lessons to be learned from Buddhism. The Dalai Lama is very much in the media these days—thank goodness we have some kind of a hero to look up to. We can also look to the Tibetan monks and nuns who have emerged spiritually unscathed from brutal torture by their Chinese invaders. Western psychologists are amazed to discover that the Tibetans showed no evidence of post traumatic stress. The Dalai Lama explained that most Tibetans were able to feel compassion for (what they called) “their interrogators.”

Others had a deep understanding of karma and believed “there was an underlying sense of order, a deeper meaning to events, even ones that terrible.” The ultimate lessons in resilience then may come to us from mystics and mediators who entrust themselves to a higher power and believe that life is always unfolding according to a larger plan. (Intuition magazine, July August, 1997)

And so we come back to the original question—what helps us to bounce back? One thing that has helped me is the Chinese Book of Changes: the I Ching. It teaches us that this too shall pass, for better or worse , every aspect of life is in a constant state of change. At any given moment , some piece of our lives is falling away, while other pieces are coming into consciousness. The Chinese sought to master the art of resiliency by acknowledging change rather than fearing change because they knew it was the way of the world.

I used to wonder “what do I need to do to be happy?” Now I wonder—”what am I being called to learn and to teach and do now and with the rest of my life?” When you enter that road less traveled, it’s the time for discarding old attitudes, listening to your intuition and opening your heart. You may also be surprised at how many other people will be there with a heart to help you find your way back and to travel along with you on the road forward, while appreciating, if not enjoying this moment. Fully.

It has been said that “A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being is also produced by an injured life. If we have not been wounded, if we have not been injured, we will not produce the pearl.” (Stephen Hoeller)

From the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh who modeled for us the ultimate resilience comes this prayer:

Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment.

I vow to look at all beings with the eyes of compassion.

The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,

singing the song of eternity.

Listen. You have ears that can hear it.

Bow your head

Listen to it.

Leave behind the world of sorrow,

of preoccupation,

and get free.

The latest good news is that you can do it.

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Bibliography

Primary resource: The Art of Resilience, by Valerie Andrews, Intution,
p. 32-52, August, l997

The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph over the Past Dr. Lillian Rubin

Personal History, Washington Post, Katherine Graham

The Gifts of Suffering, Polly Young Eisendrath

Why Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron

Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Sharon Salzberg

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl