March
12, 2007
I filled in for Fr. Mike Quinn this
week-end. The gospel was the story of
Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. I used Jesus’ assertion that the Father
sought those who would worship in spirit and truth as the take-off point for a
sermon on letting go and letting God.
I invited members of the congregation to
reflect honestly on their tendency to respond with repeat performances to
individuals and situations that trigger pain, anger, fear, shame, frustration,
irritation, confusion and the like.
Focusing on anger, I noted that my often desperate efforts to be more
patient lead me to bury pain and anger alive.
I assume that I am controlling them, but future eruptions reveal that
they controlled me. I also indicated the
ways that dulling pain feeds the pain in the long run. Against this background, I suggested that the
process of “letting go and letting God” involved four distinguishable
steps. But since I wanted to focus on
the fourth step, I noted how I came to an understanding of the first three long
before I understood the fourth.
Thus, when I used the formula, “Let go and
let God”, to process my own experiences, I had little difficulty in formulating
the first step as the call to identify (name) the deep feelings that triggered
my repeat performances, and this formulation suggested an assignment which
enabled students to experience the process.
To frame the assignment, I provided a working model of nine basic
feelings: Pain, anger, shame, sexuality,
care, compassion, joy and playful spontaneity.
Then, in classes leading up to the assignment, I involved my students in
analyses which sorted out the basic feelings woven into standard emotional
reactions.
To set the stage, I suggested that we
acquire a repertoire of emotional reactions through the process of
socialization and that each emotional reaction incorporates a distinctive
judgment and strategy. E.g., I still
struggle with the urge to deal with pain by transforming it into a hidden
grievance against someone. I also
struggle with the temptation to react with open contempt. Whether I go one way or the other depends on
a judgment I pass at the moment. And
since both these reactions are so long-practiced that they seem spontaneous, I
am not even aware that I am making a judgment and adopting a strategy. But once I see these reactions as repeat
performances, I see how they enable me to avoid vulnerable self-revelations.
To show students the futility of efforts to
overcome the reactions triggered by tangled feelings, I used such obvious
examples as a young mother whose efforts to be more patient only set her up for
an emotional eruption. Then, to mark a
distinction between deep feelings and emotional reactions, I used jealousy as
an example of how deep feelings get tangled.
In their analyses of this common emotional reaction, most students
suggested that jealousy revealed a deep-seated insecurity. Initially, they tended to resist my
suggestion that talk of insecurity objectified an intense fear of abandonment
or betrayal which had to be faced and felt before its hold could be
broken. They failed to see that such an
objectification implied that someone could give them a strategy for minimizing
the consequences of wounds experienced in childhood. And they failed to see that the
objectification enshrined a judgment which absolved the jealous person of
responsibility for disguising a despicable possessiveness as a moral judgment.
From a philosophical perspective, jealous
individuals provide paradigm examples of individuals who pretend that their
accounts of events that upset them offer objective descriptions of themselves
and the individuals they supposedly love so passionately. To undermine this pretense, I dramatized two
points. First and foremost, once the
fear of abandonment or betrayal is identified, the experience can be used to
show how all emotional reactions have roots in one’s personal history. Then, by extension, the analysis can be used
to show why no one can pretend that the way they consign an event to a story
tells the authorized version of the event.
(To show how deep feelings were evoked
in tangled involvements, I also analyzed the outrage that a step-mother felt
when she could not prevent the natural mother from wounding her step-son again
and again. In this situation, despite a
profound sense of helplessness, a genuine care and concern for a boy she loved
would not allow her to harden her heart.
Compassion fueled her anger.)
Since feelings we bury alive continue to
exert a hidden hold on us through long-practiced emotional reactions, the
second and third steps call followers of Jesus to embrace their human condition
fully, as he did in the Incarnation. In
Jesus’ words, those who trusted the Father’s providence and the Spirit’s
urgings would find a more abundant life in the world and deepen their personal
involvement with him, the way, the truth and the life. In this context, the call to “Let go and let
God” plunges us into a journey of discovery.
On that journey, I discovered that a
deepening involvement with Jesus, fully human and fully God, called me to
identify, feel and own my deepest feelings with the knowledge that there is no
way through either long-buried or raw pain, anger, fear and shame except
through them. So, when I moved from the
first to the second step in the homily, I sought to show how judging ourselves
sets in motion a process designed to dull the pain, mask the fear, control the
anger and transform shame into guilt. In
this step, the call to “let go and let God” reminds us that, whenever we judge
and condemn ourselves, we fall into the trap that this second step is designed
to avoid. - I.e., whenever I tell myself that I should do
something, I set myself up for going it alone, without God. In effect, since I pretend that I should be
able to change myself, my prayers of petition become hidden prayers of
direction in which I tell God how to help me.
And in my reactions, I assign myself the villain-role in a drama
revolving around victim-villain relationships.
In all these ways, I avoid feeling my feelings just as they are.
The third step, to own the feelings I feel,
focuses on letting go of judgments in which I cast others in the villain-role. In some instances, they may be abusive brutes. But I cannot change them, and blaming them
will not heal my wounds. So, unless I
own the feelings I feel as my own, I cannot place them in the care of the
Father’s providential activity, the urgings of the indwelling Spirit, and the
intimate presence of Jesus, the wounded Healer.
At this point in the sermon, I noted that I
understood the dynamics of these three steps long before I grasped the dynamics
of the fourth step. I tried to weave
these steps into honest conversations with the Father, the Holy Spirit and
Jesus, and I involved individuals who came for spiritual direction in the
process. More often than not, however,
nothing changed, within or without.
Often, others tried to explain the absence of transformation by judging
that they must not be trying hard enough to let go, but I always sensed that
trying hard to let go had to be counter-productive. As usual, it took a particular event to
reveal what prevented the process from bringing new life in God’s love and in
the love of others.
The event:
I was giving a week-end Serenity Retreat to members of Al Anon. A recently divorced woman, the mother of
eight children, came to the retreat. I
had known her for years, and I was always amazed at her trust in God. In one of the talks, I sketched the first two
steps of letting go. In conversations
with other women after the talk, she found herself violently angry. Since such eruptions were uncharacteristic,
she was shaken. For the rest of the
week-end, she complained that she had come seeking serenity, but found only
uncontrollable rage. And for the first
time, I saw that letting go involved letting God work in God’s own way. From my own personal history, I could see how
she had coped with abuse by burying anger until she was filled with an ocean of
anger. On this retreat, faith-sharing
with other women opened the flood-gates.
My understanding of what was happening was
crystalized when I heard one of the women tell her that the eruption was the
work of the devil. Suddenly, I saw clearly
(1) that she was letting the Holy Spirit move in her tangled depths and (2)
that the Holy Spirit had to bring to the surface the wounds that needed healing
if she was to live fully and freely in God’s love. And with that insight, I realized for the first
time how letting go also involved letting God work in God’s way to foster the
transformation in me. In effect, I
discovered the fourth step.
As usual, I wondered why I had not seen the
dynamics of this step earlier. In the
course on marriage, I argued (1) that vulnerable self-revelations required me
to honest with myself, with God and with my loved ones about what I felt and
thought and (2) that respectful self-revelations required me to leave my loved
ones free to respond in their own way and time, since they might have to go
through the grieving process (denial, anger, bargaining and depression) before
they could respond vulnerably and respectfully.
Since I wanted an intimate involvement with Father, Jesus and Spirit, I
might have seen that I did not communicate with them in this way.
I began to understand why I had failed to
understand the fourth step in letting go and letting God through my involvement
with a woman who asked to talk with me.
In our first meeting, it became obvious that her husband was an
alcoholic. At the time, I would agree to
be the spiritual director to someone in her situation only if she would give
serious consideration to attending meetings of Al Anon, and she was the first
person who went to a meeting before our next appointment. In that first meeting, she heard the call to
detachment. As we processed that call, I
suggested that it invited her to identify two inter-related strategies he had
used to involve her as an enabler while facing honestly her willingness to be
an accomplice to this sad game. Thus, on
the one hand, she had to admit her role in perpetuating the struggles that he
used to excuse his next drunken bout, and on the other, she had to let go of
any effort to change him, including those designed to make him as miserable as
she was. As she did so, she came to
realize the need to observe the Al Anon slogan, “Keep it simple, stupid”, to
ensure that honest assertions of what
she felt and thought were vulnerable self-revelations, not disguised efforts to
change him.
In the following weeks, she recounted
events in which her detachment involved placing herself and her children
entirely in God’s care. She could not
believe that God called her out of the involvement, yet staying involved the
possible loss of all financial security.
But after each such account, she would sigh and repeat a formula she had
heard, “But I know that you have to wait on God because you don’t know how much
work God has to do in you or in others before you are ready to receive the
gift.” -
After that, I knew that the Father’s providence had worked in the
network of our mutual friends to send her to me for my sake, not hers. And I could admit that the fourth step in
letting go and letting God sometimes involved seeing how the Father’s
providence and the Spirit’s urging entered into events that brought the worst
out in me.
Looking back on events that brought out the
worst in me, I saw clearly that I initially reacted with denial, anger (at God
as well), bargaining and the sort of depression that is mostly anger gone
underground. In the denial, I played
God. I.e., I implied that, if I were
God, I would not work in this way. I
also saw that I often reacted as his Majesty, the Baby, when I brought the
pain, anger, fear and shame that I had identified and owned to God. I wanted God to pluck it out, like weeds in a
field, and to do immediately and painlessly.
And when I could appreciate the need to wait on God, I discovered that I
had identified, owned and brought to God only a few of the many emotional
reactions I had used to bury pain, anger, fear or shame or absolve me from
calls to love others as Jesus loves them.
In effect, I saw how many judgments and strategies I still used to take
back control of my life. And I had to
admit that I was often blind to the gift God sought to give in the midst of
these cross-situations in my life.
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