Recently, a man I knew was in church with his family, including his seven-year-old son, Michael, his mother, and grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched and scolded him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambiance of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes, we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling. My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us. But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying in that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration, something, I submit, we have failed to give to our own children sufficiently. Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel. The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief? Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.” They are, and so is life sometimes, and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Sacred Permission to be Human and the Tools to Handle Frustration”]