Kaitlyn Ramsey was in California during her first year as a Providence Volunteer Minister (PVM) in 2008 and 2009. She is giving service for a second year as a PVM in Chicago.
Straddling both halves of my volunteer year, I am Janus, god of crossroads. I look back at where I’ve been, and forward to where I’m going.
I recognize, in my retrospective face, that I’ve been placing blame where I could’ve been accepting responsibility. I’ve been looking outside for someone else’s weaknesses and flaws so that I could ignore or downplay my own.
In one of our journal/scrapbooking sessions, I made a cross from two strips of textured tissue paper. On the front, the vertical, I wrote respectful, the attitude of uprightness that I want to hold myself to publicly.
On the rear, the horizontal which supports the weight of the one hanging from it, I wrote critical — the inner strength that I want to have, but to cherish silently and keep restrained within me.
This is the ideal, it’s the goal, it’s the forward face speaking back to the backward one.
I’ve become complacent, says the backwards face in reply. See way back to the beginning, all the pains and dissatisfactions we had? How quickly they became accommodation, how quickly we accepted the situation as it was.
The forward face attends to our roadmap, made on the last day of retreat: a web of my own handprints, both hands, overlapping once and again and again.
We needn’t accept what we don’t love, it says, but we must rely on our own handiwork, our own intentions. We can’t control anyone else’s actions — only our reactions, and it’s time to start setting our own goals. Raise our own bar.
Slowly, my backwards face begins to retract, to close in. It recognizes that the important vistas, the important lessons, are within. And, smiling, I take my first (faltering, sometimes tangential) steps forward into the second half.