Setbacks

Football fans are discussing the 35-minute electrical blackout which prolonged the annual Super Bowl game last evening.  The blackout actually seemed to energize the San Francisco team, which had been faltering prior to it. They did lose eventually to Baltimore by 3 points.

 

This makes me think of life's daily setbacks: Those minuscule obstacles which often arise to baffle a well-made schedule. I am also thinking of life's major setbacks: Disease, disability and financial ruin.  

 

I have had my share of both minor and major setbacks. As a recovering obsessive compulsive, I can experience normality as a setback, unless I practice mindful observation and patience. As a person with a nearly thirty-year struggle with HIV who survived a major cancer over a decade ago, I know a major setback when I see one.

 

Setbacks have been my greatest teachers. When I was a college student at age 17, my parents refused to give me the necessary written permission to enter Jesuit seminary. At the time, this seemed a huge setback. The Jesuits in authority made little effort to convince my parents to sign. I railed at my parents' hypocrisy as devout Catholics who would withhold their son from doing God's work. The real motivations for my wanting to join the Jesuits were actually quite worldly. Living in community with highly educated men, global travel and escape from my proletarian world as an urban commuting student living at home with people who were more angry than loving.

 

Not becoming a Jesuit was the beginning of my quest for understanding how to apply higher values to my secular life. Not becoming a Jesuit freed me from my Catholic inhibitions over being a homosexual person. Not becoming a Jesuit made me aware that my parents would pursue their own needs from me over my own needs for myself  as a separate person. Not becoming a Jesuit helped me to grow up very quickly from a sheltered and compliant depressive to a healthily angry adolescent. Not becoming a Jesuit was perhaps the best setback of my life.

 

I have learned to pay attention to setbacks, as opposed to rushing to sweep them from my path. This has served me very well as a practice. I am not of the Smarmy School of the religious, who couch setbacks in terms of spiritual tests. I find this approach too passive and, frankly, stupid. I seek to learn from the setbacks along the way. This seems the intelligent thing for me to do. As I open to learn from my setbacks, they seem less like troubles and more like quizzers, which test what I have learned from their predecessors.