Gifts Burdened

Sometimes we are offered a gift that we are reluctant to accept. Perhaps we do not recognize it as a gift because it feels like a burden, like a heavy responsibility that we don't quite know how to carry, and we are afraid that we will do so poorly. ~ Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler, Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada

Sometimes the gifts we are given, feel anything but. I have such a gift, one that I struggle with, and am very secretive about. I do not tell many people that I have it, not even recipients who might be very grateful to know that I do have this ability. Mostly, it feels like a burden, but sometimes I acknowledge that it is precious.

I am in the throes of preparing for South Africa. I am back into reading again--I have four books for sure to finish. I am almost done one, nearly done another, one third of the way through the third, and not yet begun the fourth, which I had read twenty years ago. I have three papers left to write. I received my mark on the first one this morning: 29/30. I am grateful for my gift of writing but I do not think I can sustain that level of performance in the next three weeks. I will have to do just the basics in order not to arrive in South Africa totally exhausted.

The readings continue to be a gift, working through the hard questions of forgiveness, memory, truth, and reconciliation. Tonight, I was fascinated by the question of what the children of perpetrators knew about what was occurring during apartheid. Are knowledge and truth gifts? If so, they can be a heavy burden to accept, even if they eventually free you at some level. What do we do with the truth when we do not know how to carry it?

Is your a gift in your life that you are reluctant to embrace? What is it and why?

Peace,

Suzanne