Common day parlance portrays crisis as a sheer negative experience. Many people tend to shudder when the word is mentioned. In effect, reality is much deeper than what popular opinion holds as true.
The Greeks described krisis as a paradox. It contains a two-sided character. On one side stands danger. On the other opportunity. Crisis offers both threats and possibilities. The threats of a crisis can be easily recognised: equilibrium is disturbed; continuity is disrupted; familiar routines are upset. Life cannot be lived the way it used to. In reality, few people come out of crisis the same, be it inwardly or outwardly. God forbid if not! Dante did not mince his words when he said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Crisis is a catalyst for a positive change. An experience of great turmoil and distress can be a golden opportunity whereby new adaptations are made and new coping resources are attained. What was destructed now becomes restructured. The myriad of opportunities for revaluing, revising, and reforming can not only resuscitate long dormant relationships or endeavours but also endow them with a dynamic staying power.
It is true that crisis expose life’s contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes. Perhaps the greatest pain that crisis presents is when it confronts us with, what Charles Gerkin termed, as “our infinite aspirations and our finite possibilities.” Nevertheless I wholeheartedly subscribe to what Khalil Gibran states in his celebrated book The Prophet: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that enslaves your understanding”. The shell that needs to be broken is surely a tyrannical self-analysis whereby one mercilessly blames and lambasts oneself simply because s/he has made herself/himself the sole arbiter of her/his life. Crisis shows us that only the Holy Spirit is the underlying force which helps us undergo, withstand and mature through the pain of a crisis. As Saint Francis de Sales exhorted: “Be aware of all brooding introspection: God’s spirit cannot dwell in a soul forever occupied in self-analysis”.
Times of crisis are blessing moments because we come to realise that immanence has its fount and origin in transcendence, in the Divine alone. It is when the I ceases to be the centre of the universe and turns its searching look beyond itself, to God in prayer, that it can constructively and fruitfully garner enormous spiritual and human benefits from a crisis. And if prayer, in the words of the great Carmelite and Doctor of the Church Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “is a simple look turned toward Heaven”, how much do we need it when faced with our daily existential dilemmas! May prayer be our faithful companion in our meagre attempt to embrace life’s persistent contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes. Thanks to pray we don’t tell God how big our crisis is, but tell our crisis how big our God is!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann