Meditation 2: ROMANTIC LOVE
“Love is a high.”
(Twenty year old student, 1981)
“When
we looked at married couples we knew, we seemed to have invented something new.
At the very least, we were caught up in something bigger than ourselves. When
we touched, sparks flew. When we held hands, there was a jolt clear up to the
shoulder. When we kissed, our legs got weak and wobbly. When we thought of one
another, we were lost to the world , and we were always thinking of one
another. When we were apart, we were alive with what we wanted to share with
each other, and we couldn’t wait to be together again. Reunited, we entered a
private world where we gazed into each other’s eyes, bared our souls, or simply
shared a pregnant silence. When friends were present, it was harder to maintain
that private world, since we couldn’t risk the revelations which brought joy
out of confusing messages. But even then there were the secret smiles, the
meaningful glances across a crowded room, and the code words which recalled our
private jokes. The romance—it was wonderful.”
(Married student, 1978)
God always
shows us where
we will come out before
sending us on
the journey through the valley of death.
Reflections
Falling head over heels
in love cannot be made to happen. If one person is hopelessly in love and the
other is not, nothing that either tries to do can generate this urgent longing
to face the journey of life together.
Because romantic love has
many counterfeits, it is often viewed with amusement or cynicism. For my part,
I pray that no one dares to enter a marriage in Christ who has not yielded to
its agonies and ecstasies. In its gratuitousness, this almost mystical
experience reveals the Father’s providence. In its heights and depths, it
partakes in Jesus Christ’s love for
each of us. In its spontaneity and creativity, it witnesses to the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit. Under its spell, even
small and simple events are touched with the sacred and pregnant with infinity.
Consequently, when I met
with couples who were in trouble, I asked them to remember the experiences
which led to their marital commitment. In every instance, those who had fallen
in love with each other recalled an awed response to a tremendous mystery, a
gratitude for the gift of each other,
a reverence for each other’s uniqueness, a delight in
revelatory exchanges, a practice of keeping mementoes, and memories of small
and simple interactions which opened to new life. And even when the ecstasy was only a memory, few dared to deny its impact
on the commitment they made to each
other.
Concretely,
most traced their sense of mystical oneness to their wonder at being freely
loved, flawed as they were, by the most precious
person in the world. For some couples, this awe was heightened by the
improbable way they had met. Almost all
felt that they had been entrusted with a gift which
they did not deserve
but received with joy. And those who
did feel that way recalled a profound sense of reverence for the beloved and of
gratitude to God, since only God could have imagined such an incomparable gift.
With some
prompting from me, most also remembered interactions which revealed
the structure of the call to deepening intimacy. In courtship, these pregnant
moments occur most clearly when one or both persons find themselves saying
something they have never said to
anyone before. Often, neither can recall what evoked the vulnerable
self-revelation. For some, the
interaction consists of a halting disclosure of a painful or shameful
experience in the past which is greeted with understanding and compassion. For
others, it is an outpouring of secret dreams and aspirations which the beloved
embraces enthusiastically. In moments
like these, both the naked honesty
of the speaker and the reverent reception by the listener offer fascinating
glimpses of incredible depths in each other. At the same time, these graced
moments encourage a trust that even one’s wildest longings might be realized and that the deepest wounds
in each’s
past might be healed by the other’
s touch.
One last
characteristic of romantic love, the motivation for keeping mementoes, might
well be noted. The response to letters exchanged when a courting couple are
separated is typical. Thus, when they
receive an anxiously awaited missive, couples in love take it in trembling hands and retire
to a private place where they can yield to its spell. There, they
read and reread the letter, dwelling
timelessly in the private world it creates and the revelations it contains. Forever after,
this intense experience is attached to the object, which is
thereby sanctified. As long as they
remain separated, the letter retains its power to transport them into the
living involvement in the days to come. And if the lovers do become more and
more intimately involved, the memento serves
as a shrine which preserves
the meaning of later experiences as well.
Of all
these features of romantic love, however, only the revelatory exchanges delineate the process
which leads to deepening
intimacy. In them, lovers place themselves in each other’s care, while leaving each other free to respond in their own way and time. Often they cannot take credit for
the freedom they allow each other; they must wait because they still know too
little of each other to project confining expectations. Still, whether the
ability to await the other’s response issues from a simple ignorance or from a
respectful fascination with the beloved, the result is much the same. The
response, when it comes, is incredibly more lovely than one could have
imagined. After all, one’s expectations are grounded in one’s own personal history,
while the beloved responds from a very different background. No wonder, then, that such reactions
reveal unfathomable depths and raise lovers to the heights.
In sum, genuine romantic
love voices a call to marriage in Christ in which small and simple interactions
are truly pregnant with infinity. Such a love is full of promise, and it is a
realizable promise. To reach an ever-deeper involvement, however, every couple
must pass through a time of disillusionment and mounting pressure. For the
intensity and newness of romantic love supports the illusion that our deepest feelings will always find spontaneous
expression, that we will never try to change each other, that we will always
interact vulnerably and respectfully, or at least that our reconciliations will
always be dramatic. Inevitably, deepening involvement will shatter that
illusion. As trust develops, hopelessly tangled feelings will be tapped. Since
the tangles choke off the free flow of feelings, spouses must learn
how to give themselves, as they vowed in the commitment they made to
each other. By that commitment, they gave themselves to each other, wholly and
freely. Now, when feelings no longer flow spontaneously, they are called
to place their choked up feelings
in each other’s care, vulnerably and respectfully, for that is who they
are as they await transformation.
Romantic love, therefore,
mirrors the experience of Peter, James,
and John in their journey with Jesus.
Shortly after they answered Jesus’
invitation to follow him, Jesus took them up a mountain and was there
transfigured before them. To cling to the ecstatic moment as it passed, Peter
wished to build a tent. But Jesus immediately led them down from the mountain.
In the mountain-top experience, he
revealed what their journey with him
would lead to. But to receive the fullness of the gift,
they had to allow everyday events, including cross
situations, to transform them in their own depths and in their responses to life.
So it is with any
disciple of Jesus. And so it is
especially with spouses who have vowed to love one another as Jesus loves them.
Romantic love is a realizable promise of a fullness of life. But that promise
can be realized only when spouses learn to let God’s love come to them through one another.
Meditation
3: THE JOURNEY
“Jesus replied, ‘Have you not read
that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and declared, “For
this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and
the two shall become as one. Thus, they
are no longer two, but one flesh.”? (Mt
19, 4-5)
“Jesus then said to his disciples: “If
anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self, take up his cross,
and begin to follow in my footsteps. Whoever would save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 16, 24- 25)
“Upon arriving, the angel said to
Mary: ‘Rejoice, O highly favored daughter!
The Lord is with you. Blessed are
you among women.’ She was deeply troubled
by his words, and wondered what his greeting meant. The angel went on to say to
her: ‘Do not be afraid, Mary. You have
found favor with God’.” (Lk 1, 29-30)
Many years ago, I was
asked to preside at the wedding of two students who were obviously in love. At
the time, I used the dictum, “You marry an opposite,” to illuminate the
dynamics of deepening involvement. To dramatize their differences, I asked them what had attracted them to the other.
Laura answered without hesitation. She was drawn by Mark’s gentle, quiet
strength. In her words, he seemed always “to float a
little bit above the storm.” Somewhat more awkwardly, Mark spoke of Laura’s vivaciousness,
her deep feelings which lay so close to the surface, her compassion for anyone
in pain.
By their own account,
they fit the pattern of a stereotypical pair of opposites, the emotional woman
and the Mr. Calm-Cool-andCollected. Once they identified with these roles, I
could suggest to Laura that, in five years, she would be pounding on Mark’s
chest and pleading: “Tell me what you feel!” To Mark, I proposed that,
confronted with Laura’s emotional swings, he would soon be saying to me, though
not to her: “Father, I’d do anything to make her happy, but sometimes I think
that women don’t want to be happy.”
With the stage thus set,
I sprang the trap: “You’ve told me what attracted you to each other; when did
you know that you were in love with each other?” Laura answered immediately, delighted to
recount an event which confirmed what she had long known. The unexpected
interaction occurred because Mark was set to graduate that spring, while she
would be returning to Quincy University for another year. Typically, he was
grieving over the coming separation from close friends. Added to that, he had
not yet heard from the graduate schools to which he had applied. And, as she
learned when his inner turmoil welled up and burst forth, he feared that, in
his absence from the campus, she would fall in love with someone else during
the year before the wedding.
Intriguingly, though
Laura loved Mark as the rock of strength, her conviction that she wanted to
spend her life with him was confirmed when he
broke down and cried in her arms. As she relived the event, tears came to her
eyes, but she hastened to insist that they were tears of joy, as she was once
again moved by the depth of her love for him and by his trust in her.
When Laura had finished,
I asked Mark what he felt and thought at the time. His shame-faced answer spoke
volumes: “I never felt so unlovable in my life, and I was determined that it
would never happen again.”
------ (Meditation) -----
Had Mark and Laura not
told their different stories in my office, Mark’s reaction might have had a
crippling effect on their future together, despite the fact that Laura
experienced his breakdown as a gift. Quite obviously, though she was attracted
to him as a rock of strength, she longed to share his deepest feelings,
including his fears and anxieties. But his determination not to “break down” in
her presence might have stood as an obstacle to their deepening involvement
with each other. As it was, by countering his supposition that real men don’t
cry and real men aren’t afraid, her story of the event exposed his unsuspected
identification with this stereotype of masculinity. And, though this one
incident could not break the hold of the past, the breakthrough was pregnant with
infinity.
As Mark’s reaction shows,
we are often unaware of the subtle prejudices implanted by our socialization as
men and women. But a love which longs for personal involvement, as Laura’s did,
will inevitably be frustrated by any closure imposed by hidden judgments, even
if they are accredited by social roles or norms. Mark’s resolution is therefore
heartbreaking on two counts. On the one hand, his determination to avoid such
self-revelations in the future issued from the discomfort he felt in being the
person he was. But Laura, like Jesus, loved him, not someone who fit a socially defined ideal. Moreover, the
self-control which he sought would dictate a flight from a full, free
involvement with Laura. By shutting her out and condemning himself to a virtual
isolation, his continuing efforts to bury fears, pain, anger, or shame could
only produce an aching loneliness in both. In the terms introduced in the
previous meditation, this event tapped his tangles. And by his efforts to mask
rather than reveal what he felt and thought, he would only twist the tangles
tighter.
At the time when the
event occurred, Mark might still suppose that he had a full emotional life,
without the need to embrace and own his fears. But, as I discovered in my own
life, he could sustain that illusion only by remaining a parasite. Thus, in his
relationship with Laura, his wholehearted responses to Laura’s feelings gave
him the illusion of wholeness. But the illusion could not survive events which
triggered his internal turmoil. To free him to be himself, the God who loved
Mark gave him the gift of Laura. But Laura could not always speak words which
released Mark from bondage. On her own, she could never have imagined that Mark
had felt unlovable that night. She needed help from the Father’s providence, in
the form of events which again and again call spouses to love each other into
wholeness.
Without such shared
events, Mark and Laura might never have discovered the truth of the dictum, “You
marry a stranger.” And even then, they might have remained strangers without
quite knowing why, had I not raised a question. For revelations continue to
occur only if spouses willingly listen to each other’s stories of the events
which undermine their romantic idealizations of each other. Yet, many spouses
have never learned how to communicate in this way.
As Mark’s reaction also
shows, habitual reactions which serve us well socially are likely to provoke
frustration in those we love. And no wonder, since we were not socialized to
intimacy. Here, the point at issue appears in a comparison between a marriage
in Christ and a marriage governed by the strategies of compromise, adjustment,
and acceptance which are common coin in our social relationships. Since these
strategies cause cries which arise from the depths to be muted, the actions
they dictate produce a union of separate lives rather than a creative and
transforming involvement. As courses of action undertaken to resolve problems,
they do not lead, from missed communications, misunderstandings, and unexpected
clashes, to new life in each other’s love. That path, delineated in the call to
love one another as Jesus loves us, is a path of risk and trust rather than a
highway to safety and security.
Three intersecting
biblical themes dramatize this difference between a marriage in Christ and a
marital union defined by social norms. The basic theme first appeared in an
unprecedented series of stories told by the Yahwist.1 In the history
of religions, this Hebrew author was the first storyteller to envision a God
who is involved with individuals in an intensely personal way. In a central
story in the series, Yahweh speaks to a tribal man known as Abram, son of
Terah, face-to-face, in words which send him forth on a journey into the
unknown. The brevity of the account does not allow a contemporary reader to
know whether Yahweh’s words were call or command. In either case, Abram’s
faithful response detaches him from his tribal identity and transforms him into
Abraham of Yahweh. From that point on, his security, too, is entirely in Yahweh’s
hands.
1The
term “Yahwist” refers to what Scripture scholars call the “documentary
hypothesis” or “four source hypothesis.” This is the hypothesis that the first
books of the Bible were authored by at least four different authors or strands
of traditions. One is called the Yahwist or Jahwist (abbreviated by “J”) because
it uses the Hebrew term “Yahweh” for God. The second one is called the “Elohist”
(E) because it uses the term “Elohim” for God. The third is called the “Deuteronomic”
(D) strand because it shows up especially in the book of Deuteronomy, and the
last is called the “Priestly” (P) source.
Observant
Jews do not pronounce the name “Yahweh.” Catholic hymns from the early 1970s
used it regularly. In recent years hymnologists have replaced it with other
names, out of deference to the sensitivities of Jewish worshippers. But
Scripture scholars have become wedded to the term “Jahwist” to describe one of
the sources of the first books of the bible.
Concretely, the story of
the call or command to Abram delineates the torturous journey which each of us
undertakes when we seek to live in God’s love. In the book of Exodus, later
authors used the narrative structure forged by the Yahwist to describe God’s
activity in leading Israel forth from captivity in Egypt. Still later, at the
time of the Babylonian Captivity, the Priestly author of the creation account
found in the first chapter of Genesis applied this Exodus theme to marriage. In
words which announced a rupture in the prevailing patriarchal order, he called
husbands to leave their fathers and mothers and to cling to their wives. And
Jesus extended the application even further when he echoed the Priestly author’s
words in his insistence that couples who marry in Christ must love one another
with an inviolable vulnerability, respect, and fidelity.
On a broader canvas,
Jesus supplemented the Yahwist’s theme with the call to deny oneself, to take up
the cross and follow him, and, in the process, to lose one’s life in order to
find it. Sadly, these life-giving words are often interpreted in death-dealing
ways. In our American culture, with its glorification of the autonomous individual,
the words seem to demand that we obliterate ourselves or become someone else. And
the hold of this language is evident when frustrated spouses are tempted to
take one of these paths, as the only way out of seemingly endless struggles. If
they embark on either path, they wittingly or unwittingly succumb to the
temptation to change themselves or each other. In so doing, they invalidate the
delight they once took in each other’s uniqueness and the awe they once had for
each other’s complexity. Implicitly, they thereby fail to understand that the
Father, the indwelling Spirit, and the risen Christ actively call them to
embark, step by step, on a journey in which they will become fully the unique
persons they are as they become more and more intimately involved with each
other.
As we will see, the “self”
we are to deny is a self-created identity which is profoundly influenced by our
socialization . To respond in faith, as Abram did, spouses must leave their
families of origin, surrender their inclination to self-sufficiency, and learn
to come forth from behind the self-protective masks which serve them well
socially. As they proceed on the journey into the unknown, they are to process their
everyday experience in terms of a vision which illuminates the ways that the
Father’s providence is active in every interaction between them, calling them
to a full “yes” to themselves, to each other, and to God. And they are also
called to listen to the words of the indwelling Spirit, those which urge
vulnerable self-revelations and those which expose their habitual reactions of
flight or fight. For it is the self-created identity constituted by these
long-practiced emotional reactions that spouses are called to surrender.
As the story of Mark and
Laura reveals, therefore, the Father’s providence respects our freedom by
working in and through events which can expose the agendas woven into our
self-created identities. In these graced moments, we can escape from endless
struggles over situations where we find ourselves at cross-purposes with one
another. But we should not be surprised if it takes numerous struggles to
convince us that the only way to deepening intimacy lies in learning to let go
and let God’s love work in all our interactions.
Once we have reached a
bottom which evokes a surrender to God’s love, we may be surprised to learn that
we can view silent struggles or eruptive clashes as the daily crosses which we
are to take up as we follow Jesus. With this perspective, we begin to discover
who we really are and to create a richer life together. To further the process,
we can self-consciously recover the events which reinforced our fearful
strategies of self-protection or self-sufficiency. In so doing, we see that we
all have a history of events which marked us with fears of being misunderstood,
betrayed or abandoned, or of failing shamefully in what we have undertaken.
These fears are addressed
by the theme which permeates the passage from Luke’s story of the Annunciation
quoted above. Since the account is so brief, Luke’s mention of Mary’s response
to the angel’s message is obviously significant. Thus, though the angel spoke
words of blessing, Luke notes that Mary was disturbed by the angel’s greeting.
Like us, Mary, though full of grace, experienced fear when God called her forth
on a journey into the unknown.
The angel’s words, “Do
not be afraid, Mary,” were not a command. Commands cannot eliminate fear any more
than they can evoke genuine laughter. The angel’s declaration obviously
resembles the words a mother might speak to a child awakened by a nightmare. If
the mother did not voice her empathy with the child’s fear, the announcement of
her presence would be less reassuring. And so it is with God. The Spirit who
dwells within us is aware of the residue of fear left by painful events in our
past. In fact, it is the Spirit’s love for us which keeps the pain and fear
alive, despite our inclination to bury them, so that they might be brought to
new life in another’s love. And the Spirit also knows that we feel so alone in
terrifying situations, since we often recognize the power of God’s love only in
long-deferred outcomes. Consequently, in words spoken through the prophets to
Israel and in the words of Jesus to his disciples, Father, Jesus, and Spirit
again and again reassure us of their presence with us in the midst of our
fears.
In particular, God hopes
that we will remember the words, “Do not be afraid,” when we find ourselves at
cross-purposes with our loved ones. In the past, these situations were often
divisive. Remembering the wounds left by clashes, we may be tempted to give in,
seeking peace at any price, or to give up, choosing the path of indifference as
a defense against being hurt again. Or we may allow our fears to paralyze us by
persuading ourselves that good little Christians would never do or say anything
which might hurt the ones they love. Or we may justify our sense of
hopelessness and helplessness by insisting that our loved ones do not want to
hear what we want to say. But we ignore God’s loving presence when we choose
these ways of safety.
As an added assurance of
God’s faithful presence, the authors who processed Israel’s historical
experience by means of stories, told of covenants forged by God with
individuals and with Israel. Their variations on this covenant-theme are worth
noting. Thus, in the earliest stories describing God’s election of Abraham and
his offspring, God declares in categorical terms: “I will be your God; you will
be my people.” In stories by authors who wrestled with God’s apparent absences
in times of trial, however, a strange revision entered, almost without notice.
In the Deuteronomic tradition, in particular, authors cast the covenant between
God and Israel in conditional terms. By implication, the God they envisioned
was no longer the Yahweh who was personally involved with each individual, but
was rather a distant Lord, Lawgiver, and Judge who rewarded the good and
punished the evil. Implicitly, this God demanded obedience and responded to
humans in terms of justice rather than love.
Providentially, this
distorted picture of God was sharply challenged by the prophet Hosea, who drew
his stunning vision of God from his own personal experience. As the fragments
of his prophecies suggest, Hosea had fallen in love with Gomer, a temple
prostitute, and had interpreted that love as God’s call to marry her. But Hosea
was wounded again and again when Gomer continued to practice her profession
after the wedding. As the names given to the three children she bore indicate,
he reacted to his pain in a typical way, first with rage, then with an effort
to harden his heart, and then with the determination to abandon her. But his
determination to take that final step only revealed how passionately he loved
her. Then, in an awe-inspiring insight, he realized that God loved Israel in
the same way, despite her repeated infidelities. And in a metaphor which was
echoed by Isaiah and Jeremiah, he
described the involvement of God with Israel and with individuals in terms of a
marriage union. In sum, God’s everfaithful love flowed from God’s passionate
love for each individual God had created. Urged on by that passion, God could
never abandon anyone.
As we will see in future
meditations, we are often tempted to interpret our covenantal relationship with
God and our loved ones in conditional terms. We succumb to this desire for a
specified identity whenever we use “shoulds” or “should nots” in judgments on
ourselves or our loved ones. But the use of this language is always
counterproductive. It cannot help us learn how to love one another as Jesus
loves us.
Consequently, we would do
well to remember that the Incarnation brought the involvement of God which
Hosea proclaimed to its fullness. By willingly becoming a human being, the
eternal Word revealed how passionately God longs to share in our lives. By
implication, God loves us as much when we flee God’s love or rebel against it
as when we respond wholeheartedly. And God does not use natural events to
reward or punish us. Often, bad things simply happen to good people, as they
did to Jesus. In many other instances, however later events may reveal that we
are afflicted by the consequences of our own actions.
In sum, these themes
reveal that Christian spouses, by “marrying a stranger,” embark on a journey
into the unknown. When they find themselves at cross-purposes, they are called
to plunge in. They have a choice. They can respond with honest self-revelations
which allow empathetic entries into each other’s tangles, or they can turn to
judgments or self-justifications, to fight or flight. If they married in
Christ, however, they obviously committed themselves to transform flawed
exchanges into passionate, vulnerable, respectful, and faithful responses.
The Catholic tradition
has always emphasized the importance of the commitment to love one another as
Jesus loves us by requiring that it be ritualized. In the ritual, couples
exchange their vows in the presence of God and of the Christian community. When
couples face the dynamics of disillusionment and mounting pressure, the
remembrance of that occasion can inspire a trust which allows them to reveal
their deepest feelings honestly. And a trust which is reinforced by
cross-situations which have been faced vulnerably, respectfully, and faithfully
will free them both to live with integrity. Their love becomes a love which
casts out fears, heals hurts, and brings ever-new life in each other’s love.
Meditation 4: THE DYNAMICS OF
DISILLUSIONMENT
“At
the time, we began to wonder if this was
all there was to love and marriage, or indeed if we had ever been in love.
After all, how could real love grow so dim; how could real love be so dull? We
had avoided confrontations for fear of the consequences. We closed ourselves up
and fought silently, yet longed for closeness and tenderness and unity. It was
the very questioning that allowed us to deepen our relationship. I do not regret the pain and sorrow we experienced,
but I do regret the times of apathy when we were less than fully alive and
aware of each other.”
Married student, 1977
I’ve been infected with a restlessness
that at times becomes almost feverish. A longing for emotional heights, high
adventure, or just the starry-eyed anticipation of youth that “something’s
coming . . . out of reach.” One thing I know is that Mike and I are definitely
in the period of disillusionment. Then you add the daily grind of three kids
who have stolen any semblance of control from my life, and any place but here
looks good. I know what the bottom line is—the sense of isolation, the feeling
sorry for myself, and my childish yelling ‘why can’t there be intimacy and
connectedness and high adventure, and why must life be a struggle?!!’”
Letter from a woman whose wedding I
had
“When we got into fights, my husband believed that sex
would solve the problem. I would always feel so degraded. There was that wall
between us, and sex was the last thing I was thinking of.”
Married student, 1984.
“We spent most of our time talking about friends of ours and the problems they might be having. I think we had a
better idea of how our friends’ marriages were going than of our own.”
Married student, 1988.
Meditation
The
fall from the highs of romantic love is inevitable. The feelings which leap any gap are truly pregnant with infinity, but the
spontaneity generates a seductive illusion as well as a realizable promise.
Sooner or later, abruptly or gradually, the illusion that feelings will always
flow freely is shattered, in every marriage. And when it is, passion is
transformed into pressure, and the mounting pressure leads us to question the
realizability of love’s promise.
Shocking though
they be, disillusionment and mounting pressure
play a fruitful role in the journey to
deepening intimacy. If we remain faithful to our commitment, they
will teach us how to let go and let God’s love work in our tangled depths. For
we learn that lesson experientially only when we discover that we married a stranger, that we are strangers to
ourselves, and that we were not socialized to express our deepest feelings
vulnerably and respectfully. In the process, we encounter the God who knows who
we really are and what will be truly fulfilling for us. And as we flounder
about, lapsing into repeat performances, we may discover a form of prayer which
allows the Father’s providence, the presence of the risen Christ, and the
indwelling Spirit to teach us how to
love one another as Jesus loves us.
To understand what God
wants to accomplish through the dynamics of disillusionment, recall the
enduring promise of romantic love. As the second meditation noted, intensely
personal involvements evoke a sense of mystical unity, a humble gratitude for
the gift of the other, an endless fascination
with each other’s unfathomable depths, an awe-filled delight in
revelatory exchanges, and a sense that even small and simple interactions are
touched with the sacred. And since these experiences bear God’s signature, we embrace them as the
foretaste of the more abundant life which is Jesus’ promise to us.
But there are also
features of romantic love which foster the illusion that exchanges will always be as intense, unique, and
spontaneous as they are in the newness of love. After all, as the second
meditation also noted, falling in love cannot be made to happen. We are, it
seems, caught up in something bigger
than ourselves. Certainly, our passionate exchanges have an urgency of their
own. So it is hardly surprising if we believe that passion will leap any gap
and incinerate any obstacle between us.
If that belief were true,
however, we would not have to live out the
vow we made to give ourselves, whole and entire,
to each other. The peak experiences which first captivated us would
carry us along. And if we found ourselves at cross-purposes, we could only
conclude that we had never been in love.
The reality is, of
course, quite different. Intriguingly, the romantic illusion is undermined more
thoroughly by deepening involvement than by willful failures to live what we
vowed. The reason is obvious. When we place ourselves in each other’s care,
compassionate responses loosen the hold of entangled pain, fear, and shame and
inspire the hope that old wounds might find new life in each other’s love. But
we do not yet know how to sort out, identify
, embrace, own, and voice these tangled feelings honestly. Instead, we cling to memories
of lovely responses to our cries in the past, interpreting them as implicit
promises that such responses would always be forthcoming. And in the absence of
these specific gifts, we feel abandoned
or betrayed. Soon, we are immersed in a storm of feelings which defy
spontaneous expression. And we add to the mounting pressure whenever we try to force
a release of choked-up feelings.
Though this process occurs in every marriage, personalities and personal
histories determine whether it strikes sooner
or later, gradually or abruptly. Regarding the timing, some couples
settle into a lifeless routine almost immediately , while
others remain in the honeymoon period for years.
Regarding the precipitating events, some couples are plunged into crisis by a
traumatic experience, such as adultery, abuse
, a miscarriage , or the loss of
a child. For others, romance dies so gradually that any protest seems childish
or demanding. In such instances, one spouse may not even notice that the other has
been living in quiet
desperation and aching
loneliness for some time.
Here,
we will trace a gradual evolution of the process. Examples of traumatic introductions would be more dramatic, but
they would also obscure many
features which
play a role in learning how to let go and let God.
Typically, disillusionment begins when the innocent idealizations of romantic
love collide with the thousand and one small
and simple events of daily
life. Thus, once everything that either of us does affects the other, minor
quirks, like squeezing the toothpaste in the middle of the tube or throwing one’s
clothes over the nearest chair, become major irritants. At the same time, our
romantic absorption in each other must compete with the demands of work,
running a household, and perhaps caring for a baby. Initially, we
tend to dismiss the vague disappointments and nagging dissatisfactions provoked
by distracted reactions, since we still wish to dwell on the mountain-top. Commonly,
we tell ourselves that we must not make mountains out of molehills. As these
buried feelings multiply, however, their insistent presence frays our sense of
mystical fusion.
Over time,
the proverbial molehills coalesce into mountainous obstacles to spontaneous
communications. Like my
silent disapproval, each disappointment
and dissatisfaction, recorded as
a memory, stands as a hidden barrier to even the simplest utterances. As pressures build, annoyances
lead to squabbles, and tension provokes clashes whose motivation includes the desire to break through those very barriers. At first glance,
such outbursts seem to confirm the illusion of romantic love. After all, fights
which release pent-up feelings sometimes seem to clear the air, while making up
may be so much fun. But since nothing really changes, the clashes soon become
repeat performances. And imperceptibly, the motivation changes. We still pick
fights to shatter barriers. But as we feel more and more lost, we fight to win
or, at least, to force an understanding of our pain, as memories laden with
pain and anger become weapons that we use against each other in ways that we
cannot control.
In time, we see that winning battles still loses the war. Despairingly, we back away
from futile arguments. But the periods of
ensuing silence lead to a desperate loneliness which is heightened
by memories of a time when no event was too trivial to share. Unable to talk
about what really matters, we may fill the void by chattering away about other
people. Or we may turn to questions, in stumbling efforts to establish personal contact, only to find
that they receive flat and factual answers. Disturbingly, we often learn
what is going on in each other’s lives only when we are out with friends. At
any rate, we see with sadness that the person we love so dearly comes alive
with friends in ways that are distant memories in our relationship.
In these silent
struggles, we wrestle with the anger which lies at the core of disappointments
and dissatisfactions. Before I learned to embrace such anger as my own, my
friends knew that I was angry two weeks before I did. To their occasional
amusement, I met suggestions that I was angry with outraged denials coupled with
torturous justifications for the reaction in question. Now I know that
unacknowledged anger always finds a disguised expression. It may appear in the
barbs which infect affectionate teasing. It is surely present whenever we peck
away at each other. In a common ploy, it inspires coded introductions designed
to deflect criticism of what we want to say. E.g., we may begin with “Now don’t
be angry, . . .” or “You must hear me
out . . .,” as we set a scene which will enable us to pass the blame for
anything that goes wrong. Or we may dramatize events, turning them into crises
by adopting the game of victim-villain. In this game, the one who provokes the
conflict, i.e., the obvious villain, traps the unsuspecting spouse into an
outraged reaction and then plays the role of victim.
When we learn to let go
and let God, we can smile at the supposition that careful exchanges can restore
communication. If our loved ones did not understand what we said point blank,
why would we expect them to read our carefully coded remarks? Moreover, the
codes always betray a hidden agenda, since we adopt such posturings to blind
ourselves to our inner turmoil. So, strange though it seems, digging in
stubbornly and suffering through days of hostile silence can be far more
fruitful. Indeed, we must sometimes
take this inward turn in order to recover what is
being lost in us. Because we care deeply, however, repressed feelings will also
show themselves in violent
eruptions. Sadly, when they do, we sometimes strike out viciously because we want the
one we love to hurt as badly as we are hurting. Then the violence of our rage leave
us with a two-pronged fear
, the soul-shaking fear evoked by a loss
of self-control and the anxious fear of losing the one we love so passionately. In
addition, when uncontrolled anger traps us
into the use of past gifts of vulnerable self-revelations against each other,
we are left with a profound shame.
Commonly , we address
such fears through
strategies designed to tame
passion. For example, to prevent such
outbursts in the future, we may adopt
a game of keeping score. In this game, when I am upset by your criticism of my flaws, I recall the many times when my gifts
of care and concern
went unnoticed or were taken for granted. And since you no longer have a
voice in the game, I always end up on the credit side of the ledger in giving
gifts. Invoking that ledger, I can counter your
dissatisfaction with me with contempt and transform my tangled feelings into a
righteous anger. In this version of an intense emotional life, I can postpone
the recognition that the game widens the gap between us.
In a more
interactive strategy, we negotiate compromises. At the very least, we seem to
get something we can live with, and we may even pretend that we both come away
winners. On the journey to intimacy, however, those who live by this economic
model are inevitably losers. For compromise involves a calculation and control
which differs radically from creative interactions.
In yet
another flight from creativity, we try to reduce our struggles to a problem to
be solved. Usually, this move occurs when we are desperate. At any rate, many
of the couples who involved me in their pain tried to reduce their struggles to
a single problem. All would be well, they would say, if only we could work
together on our financial difficulties, or resolve our differences over
child-raising, or solve the problems created by the in-laws, or . . .
In every
such instance, the problems in question added to the pressure which threatened
the marriage. But those couples who located their difficulties in their sex
life knew as well as I did that a celibate priest was not the one to plumb the
depths of sexual politics with them. Implicitly, they knew that problem-solving
was not the path to intimacy. And as long as we made progress on that journey, they never complained when I
showed little interest in their sexual frustrations. They had no cause to,
because learning to interact honestly freed their sexual passion also.
In time,
reducing tensions to problems to be solved creates an intractable problem.
Then, especially if we are inveterate strugglers, we prolong the process by desperate strategies centered in questions of identity. In early clashes, we
usually confined our recourse to power to critical judgments on our own reactions or the behavior of our loved ones.
Now, as pressure mounts, we try to change ourselves or our loved ones.
Thus, in disguised cries for care,
we direct our anger outward,
but control it by targeting the traits which we once found delightful in
our loved ones. If you recall, I suggested to Laura, the emotional woman, and
Mark, the man of self-control, that their interactions would soon fit this
pattern. In some ways, this lapse
is inevitable. We lead with our strengths. So, when we are vocal concerning our
loved ones’ flaws, it is hardly surprising if they are frustrated beyond
measure when we bring only our strengths to cross-situations. Nor is it
surprising if we are deeply wounded when they attack our self-created identity
and security. Since this identity was hard-won, their criticism strikes us as a
rejection of all that we are.
In the next
moment, however, we may turn our anger on ourselves. Then, in an orgy of self-loathing , we recall the many ways that we
have annoyed, irritated, frustrated, or infuriated our
loved ones. Sickened with shame, we determine to change ourselves
into the sort of person that our loved ones want
us to be. We fail, of course. On the superficial level, we have only mixed
messages to work with as the stuff for our imaginings.
On a deeper level, however, even perfectly clear and detailed
messages would not enable us to transform ourselves into perfect lovers. For we
are who we are, and we cannot become someone else in response to pressure from
without or within. In the end we can only cry, “Love me, warts and all.”
By this time, the mounting pressure
has taken on a life of its own.
Feeding on buried feelings, it may cry out with the intensity of romantic
passion. But the exercises of power
and judgment which inform our struggles are the opposite of love.
Counterproductive as they are, we may be ready to let go of them out of
exhaustion. So the mounting pressure
is also
fighting for its life. And it has one last disguise at hand, as its final ploy. Playing to our insidious desire for control
over our lives, it removes
us one step from raw hurting by engaging us in
questions about love. Implicitly, it
promises an objective answer to questions about
love and , thereby, a detachment which gives us control over our feelings and empowers us to walk away from failure
without pain or guilt, if that is what we want. So we voice the
anguished questions as assertions, to hide from ourselves the fears that
inspire them.
Note
well, the temptation to lessen our pain by recourse to judgments concerning love
appeals to the events in which we fell
from the heights of love with a sinking feeling, a devastating shock, a churning which left us isolated , a passionate eruption which terrified us, a weight of memories which paralyzed
us, an anger which, like a shotgun blast, hit anything at hand, and ultimately,
a pervasive hopelessness. We scold ourselves for setting ourselves up for a
let-down in the countless initiatives which
failed to realize our hidden agendas. Or we focus on the reactions of our loved ones which fail to
live up to our idealized images of
them. Or we remember the times when we have countered judgments on our flaws with pleas that we did the best we could.
But we are not yet ready to admit that
these moves of flight or fight are little more than futile efforts to come to
terms with pain.
As we
struggle with pain, anger, fear, and shame in ways which
perpetuate them, we wrestle
with judgments which are variations on a single theme:
I
must be unlovable.
Only your mother could love you.
You don’t love me anymore.
You don’t love
me as much as I love you.
We were never in love.
You are incapable of love.
I am incapable of love.
Love is an illusion.
A permanent commitment is an
impossibility.
The struggle confronts us with a choice among three paths. The most
painful, the way of divorce, is the ultimate betrayal of the vow to love one
another as Jesus loves us. Lest that vow be cheapened, however, it is important
to realize that many divorces do not betray vows which were made with
integrity. Sadly, some spouses mouth the vow to marry in Christ without the
intention or the ability to walk that journey. But if couples who married in
Christ divorce at this point in the journey, it is a real tragedy. For they are
on the threshold of moving from drama to depth.
The second
path, though lacking the finality of divorce, is
also tragic. It dictates ways
of detachment which lead to separate lives. Frequently, it leads to divorce
years later, when the children leave home and spouses discover that they no
longer know how to encounter each other face-to-face.
The third
path, grounded in the passion which exposes the wounds inflicted by either
fight or flight, calls us to face each interaction with personal integrity and
inter-personal fidelity. If we listen,
it once again
voices the call
and promise of romantic
love.
Meditation 5: FROM DRAMA TO DEPTH
"All
of you who have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with him.
There does not exist among you Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male or
female. All are one in Christ Jesus."
(Gal. 3 , 27-28)
“All
the world's a stage,
And
all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and then entrances:
And
one man in his time plays many parts.”
William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” Act II, Sc. 7.
As children, we processed
much of our experience through play. The games we played taught us to follow
rules designed to realize a particular purpose, to compete without bloodshed,
to work as a team, and, hopefully, to win or lose graciously. And in less
structured activities, we played the social roles that we would be expected to
fill as we matured. In a commonplace example, any woman who wants to see how
she mothers need only watch her daughter playing house.
----- Reflections -----
The formative power of
socialization is succinctly presented in the dictum: "What we observed, we
imitated; what we imitated, we practiced;
what we practiced, we became.”
Thus, in the midst of my mid-life crisis, I discovered the effect of my
family of origin on me when I heard my eighty year old father reliving fifty-year
old grievances as though they happened yesterday. Still, I could not blame him
for handing on the habit of nursing grievances to me, for he surely learned to
deal with pain in this way from his father. And so it is. Though we are
indebted to our parents for many life-giving traits, we also repeat some of
their mistakes, develop identical or complementary reactions, and perpetuate
unresolved conflicts, since we have no other models. We do not become their
clones. Rather, we abstract patterns of behavior from episodes that we cannot
yet understand at a time when we are also weaving a social identity. As we
create our identity, therefore, we begin
with observations of many and varied role models, try on different roles, and
dwell within the ones which serve us well socially.
Take a moment to recall
the roles you tried on in childhood, in your teens, and in your first
experiences of being fully responsible for yourselves, and look for their
contributions to your journey to self-discovery. My list, though it obviously
dates me, might be suggestive. In the neighborhood, we played cowboys and Indians,
cops and robbers, and when World War II broke out, soldiers at war. Caught up
in unrehearsed scripts, we acted out our violent urges with a wild abandonment
that placed us close to the edge, but drew back without inflicting pain on one
another. And when I replayed these
scenarios in my imagination, I cast myself
in an heroic role as the defender of the weak, the rescuer of damsels in
distress, and the loner who rode off into the
sunset when the crowd would make me king. Here, my imagination
was surely influenced by radio serials such as "Terry and the
Pirates" and
“Jack
Armstrong, the All-American Boy.” Sometimes, I chose the role of the rebel, but
always cautiously and only on safe occasions. I cannot recall its source;
perhaps it was a combination of the stories of King Arthur and his knights of
the round table, a youthful reading of Don Quixote, and a passionate
identification with Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
In my excursions into the world around me, I have vivid
memories of the first role
that I wanted to play. As I child, I would stand,
mesmerized , as trains rumbled
through town, and I was so impressed with their throbbing power
that I wanted to drive the engine. From ten to sixteen, I wanted to be a
farmer. I was a lost child, uncomfortable in social situations, and I loved the out-of-doors, working with
animals, and hard work. But I would
never have made a farmer, since I am helpless with machines of any sort,
including computers. Probably, the sense that machines were out to get me
inclined me to entertain my father’s suggestion that I go to agricultural
college. I suspect that I found the option appealing because it let me try on
the role of teacher of adults. I had dreamed
of being
a teacher from
the time when
I dwelt imaginatively in the worlds created by the
stories that I read and in the roles
they portrayed , but I did not
want to be someone who forced captive children to practice spelling and
arithmetic. In all of this, I also played at being the good little Christian,
though my beliefs were not yet my own. Then,
after refusing to follow my brothers into the seminary , I first
sensed , at sixteen, that God
was calling me to be a priest.
And so began the journey which still sends me to the Father , Jesus, and the Spirit
as I seek to integrate
my role as a priest in an
institutional Church with God's call to speak with honesty and integrity, not
to fill a role.
Regarding
family roles, my memories of childhood are scanty. I remember insisting that my sister
must let me be the naughty child if she wanted me to play house with
her. Even then, I seldom played what seemed to me to be a game for girls. I do
not recall any issues regarding my sexual identity. But, like everyone else,
I unconsciously absorbed sex roles from the dynamics within my family. I.e.,
observing and imitating the father I loved and admired, I constructed models of
what it was to be a man, a husband ,
and a father. In the same vein, my fierce devotion to my mother generated
idealized images of what it was to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. If I had
married, expectations grounded in these stereotypical roles would have collided
again and again with the expectations implicit in the models which my wife
acquired from her family of origin, and we would have played the conflicts out
to the bitter end before we surrendered them. Since I was not so intimately
involved with any one woman, the distorting aspects
of the roles I internalized took a long time to surface. But surface they did, in my mid-life crisis,
with a call to grieve over the violence to women
which they had previously legitimated and to become a new creature in Christ in
my interactions with the women whom God sent into my life.
As you reflect on roles that you integrated
or rejected over the years, remember that we are not socialized to intimacy.
Thus, in exchanges in which we need not be completely vulnerable, roles serve
useful purposes as centers of rights and obligations. To promote those
purposes effectively, however
, roles must be situated in the language of the game of victim-
villain which is so much at odds with the language of
cross-resurrection.
To see the tie between social roles and the
game of victim-villain, consider an event in which a husband criticizes his
wife and she reacts angrily. If he defends his criticism with a host of
rationalizations, he acts as though she has somehow
victimized him by what she did or said , and he adds insult to injury
by using her anger as further evidence of her villainy.
And as long as the game is kept in play, the inherent violence can only
escalate. To set a very different dynamic in motion, both must enter an inner journey in which they explore
their own motivations. Concretely, if the husband recognizes the victim-role he has adopted, he can trace the judgments he seeks to impose upon his wife
to his internalized images of what a woman, wife, and mother should be. And
once he isolates the image in question, he will surely recover memories of his
mother's behavior or his father's reactions
to the behavior he criticizes.
Note, too, how the either-or perspective
slides so easily into the all-or-none
syndrome. Under the guise of assigning responsibility, the game appeals to His
or Her Majesty,
the Baby, who wants what he
or she wants and wants it now. Laden
with a nostalgia for paradise or a myth
of personal perfectibility, it fosters the illusion that instant intimacy is
available, once and for all, through a passionate experience, a negotiated
compromise, or an apparent agreement on some judgment.
That illusion will be shattered as our
involvements deepen, but the disillusionment, no matter how thorough, cannot
break the hold of the roles which are woven tightly into our self-created
identities, including the roles of victim and villain. To be free of them, we must identify
, embrace, own, grieve over, and let go of their tangled roots.
To enter this process, we do well to recall
the cultural debt we owe to the ancient Athenians who processed their
experiences of life in the city in tragedies and comedies. We echo these
dramatic forms whenever we play a role. In so doing, we illuminate critical aspects of life which might otherwise pass unnoticed.
But we do not speak in our own voices when we use social constructions to
present ourselves as larger than life. So we do well to hear Jesus' call to
become like little children who use roles playfully once again.
The promises and perils
of roles are evident if we look at life from the perspective offered by
Shakespeare in the passage quoted above. On this stage, we rely on roles to define our
contributions to society, to justify our claims for appropriate recompense, and
to protect ourselves from unwarranted expectations. In intimate interactions, however, recourse to roles
is either a fearful flight from naked involvement or an
idolatrous worship of power. Concretely, any time we suppose that our internalized roles should rule our
involvements with our loved ones, we play God (and
it is, of course, a God we created in our own image). We endow the voice of the role we assign to ourselves with
a god-like authority to write the script of a work in progress, to determine
the roles to be played by every other
participant, and thus to direct
the entire play. And as long
as we remain passionately committed to the drama we present, we pretend to be
people without navels, engaged in a timeless
tragedy.
If we willingly become like little children, however, we find
ourselves inhabiting roles playfully. We can once again laugh at ourselves, and we
can tease one another without malice. As we replay role-directed conflicts from
the past, we send messages which integrate regret for our previous pomposity, honest self mockery, warm affection, and renewed delight in one another.
And when such conflicts re-occur, we can stage
dramatic conflicts, in imaginary conversations or angry exchanges, with confidence that,
as the roots of our self-created identities surface, we will relive these new wounds in honest conversations. When we then
speak in our own voices, our prose statements may not be half so striking as our dramatic rhetoric had been. But it is
time to let go of dramatizing our lives in favor of
telling our stories, as we interweave the different ways we experience the same incidents in the open-ended script we are writing in our life together. Or, more succinctly , it is time to go from drama to depth.
Rejoice
, then
, that the roles we used in self-discovery and in the creation of our social identities
were truly blessings. But do not turn these cultural creations into idols to be
worshipped, lest they become a curse.
Be grateful that they helped you make your way in the world outside the
family and still serve you well socially. With loved ones, however, become like children whose playful dramatizations of inarticulate tensions can reveal the hidden depths
of all concerned and so contribute to the creativity that comes with letting go and
letting God.
And when you reach the meditation on Cross-Resurrection,
look at Jesus' silence while charges were leveled against him and at his prayer of forgiveness while he hung upon the cross. In all the events which followed his
capture in the Garden,
he refused to play
the game of victim-villain. Look, too, at the way he turned Pilate's question, "Are you a king?", back upon
Pilate. In this strange response, he clearly denied any
suggestion that he sought a social or political role. Implicitly, he thereby
insisted that his call to us, to love one another as he
loves us , could speak for itself , in its appeal
to the deepest
longing of our hearts. May we
let the Spirit teach us to face events in which we are at crosspurposes with those we love in the
same way .
Meditation 6: YOU CAN’T CHANGE YOURSELF
“When they bring you before synagogues, , rulers
and authorities, do not
worry about how to defend yourselves or what
to
say. The Holy Spirit will teach you at that moment all that should be said..” Luke 12, 11-12.
A number of years ago, I
was over-involved, unable to write, and, in general, not doing anything well. Since
I enjoyed what I was doing, I could not understand why I was so miserable. In
frustration, I complained to a young friend in AA: “I’ve got to change my life.”
Laughing affectionately, she nailed me with the words: “You’ve told me; you’ve
told hundreds of other people: ‘You can’t change yourself; you’ve only got to
be willing to let God change you.’” I reacted pompously: “I’ve been waiting for
God to change my life, but God obviously hasn’t been doing anything.” With an
earthy laugh, she begged to differ. I was, she said, rather good at listening
to God in my care for other people, and I was sometimes responsible to a fault.
But I did not know how to listen to God in my exhaustion, my fears, my
disappointments, and especially my anger. Indeed, I tended to let my
savior-complex trap me into playing God. Now, I was going under because I could
not carry the burden of being responsible for everything that happened to
anyone I loved.
Taking pity on my confusion, she shared a gimmick which her sponsor had given her. According to this
formula, I was to follow a routine whenever I was asked to meet with someone,
to serve on a committee, to help out ministerially, or to bind my future in any
way. First, I was to ask myself what I felt like doing or saying and why. And I would know that I was being honest with
myself if I was all over the place. E.g., I might feel like saying yes to
everything, for fear of disappointing someone. But I might also carry on
imaginary conversations accusing others of taking advantage of me. Then, once I
let my tangled feelings have their say, I was to ask myself what I really wanted to do. And if I did all this in
God’s presence, my life would begin to change.
----Meditation----
In mid-life crisis, I discovered that I
needed an intensely personal involvement with Jesus if I wanted to love others
as he loved them. On its own, my imagination extended only to the way I wanted
others to love me. Moreover, I was becoming aware of the hidden agendas in my
emotional reactions, such as the way I used silent disapproval to punish people
who upset me. Above all, I was learning how fearful my loving was.
To escape from these flaws, I had been trying to center my life in Jesus. So I
was inclined to resist the suggestion that I enter a process which ended in
what I wanted to do.
That seemed the height of selfishness.
I also had another reason
for wanting to dismiss the suggestion . Since compulsive care-givers have
never learned how to take care of themselves, therapeutic interventions often
center on that project, as a positive way to disrupt the compulsion. I had encountered too many people who invoked
therapy as the justification for self-absorption. I had no desire to swing from one dysfunctional pole to another.
Still, lost as I was, I was willing to
try almost anything. Perhaps I
was also being prepared to understand that
the path to deepening intimacy
with
the Father
, Jesus Christ, Spirit, and any other person is laid out in the dictum: “Be
honest , with God , with yourself, and with
your loved ones,
about what you feel and think, real or imagined. At any rate, as I put the gimmick
into practice, I found myself
talking to God about
my tangled feelings and wild temptations. In these conversations,
I no longer pleaded with God to change me. And as I described the childish things
I felt like doing or saying,
I ceased to rationalize and excuse them.
Quite
obviously, I was being more honest with myself
than I had ever been. And when I risked being honest about my motives for
saying no, I saw how God could work creatively when I got out of the way.
I also began
to reflect on the difference between what was real and what I simply imagined in light of a
dictum I had often used in marriage counseling. Preparing for our earliest
meetings, spouses would build cases against each other by storing up event
after event as proof of callous disregard or dereliction of duty. Sadly, they could twist almost any action
or failure to act to support their
tortured arguments. When they wove their tales in my presence, I would insist
that the accused and I listen in silence. Once the tale was finished, I allowed
the accused to answer only one question: “Do you recognize yourself
in that picture?” In almost every instance, their incredulous
looks spoke volumes, and they were primed for rebuttals that I would not allow.
Instead , to expose the merry-go-round nature of these
arguments, I simply
asked them to reflect on the assertion: “If you don’t tell me, I imagine
all sorts of wild things, and what I imagine comes out of my personal history,
not yours.” Aware of the play of my imagination in my lingering confusions, disappointments, pain,
fear , and anger,
I saw how my efforts to understand what others meant by what they did or said were rooted in
my own responses to events in my past.
As I wove the gimmick into my prayer-life , I discovered that
God did speak to me through what I truly wanted to do or say. Sometimes, I was surprised by
the peace which came when I acknowledged the diverse ways I was pulled, despite
my fearful assessment of the consequences of every course of action that came
to mind. Experientially, the peace came as a vivid awareness of God’s presence
which enabled me to let go of my hidden agendas and to wait until I discovered
what I really wanted to do or say. I could
wait, because the peace assured me that the Father’s
providence would ensure that nothing would be lost. Somehow, I knew that I
could entrust the outcome to God.
I did not surrender suspicions of being selfish, however, until I saw that I was beginning to face
situations which I had habitually avoided or controlled. There was a peace
, but it was often little more than the certainty of knowing that this
was what I had to do, regardless of my fears, if I wanted to maintain my
self-respect. In these situations, I was sometimes
ashamed by the joy in life
which I felt. Given the fears which had bound me , the honest action or assertion was a triumph, but I knew people who did or said such things without a second thought. When I compared myself with them
, my excitement over my new-found integrity seemed childish.
Providentially , I had gone apart with God for two weeks
a few years before I put this
gimmick into practice. Miserable as I was, I had hoped that God would show me
the path I was to take in the future. Throughout the entire time, however, I found myself reliving events in the past. And each came to mind
with the same message: Anytime I had acted with less than full integrity, I had
made matters worse rather than better.
It made no diff erence that
I had acted with less than full integrity with the hope of
making things better, not with the desire to take advantage of others. Here,
my fear of anger was most revealing. I was often the peacemaker
because I am terrified by the anger
of those I love. If it was directed at
me, I wanted to plead , “Be patient with me; God is not finished with me yet,” for
I feared that I had committed some unforgivable sin. If it
was directed at others, I imagined the worst case scenario.
In either instance, I buried my fears, took everybody’s emotional temperature, appealed for mutual understanding, and later spoke compassionately to wounded parties.
Often, I succeeded in
bringing a semblance of peace,
but it was the peace that the world seeks, not the peace conferred by God’s love. For wounds which were not
healed continued to fester, and the cross-situations which triggered the conflicts did not lead to resurrections.
Obviously, I recommend this gimmick unreservedly to anyone who
wants to learn how to let go and let God. But I must warn you that the process
it sets in motion, like the journey to deepening intimacy, moves from the highs
of early triumphs to the tangled depths which deepening involvements tap. As
the freedom to be honest gives voice to those depths, you may remember
traumatic experiences which you buried because the pain seemed unbearable. Or , like me, you may uncover an ocean of anger whose source can be traced to small hurts and
angers which were buried over the course of many years. In either
instance, you will have to pass through a portal of
shame, to reject the temptation to walk away from life itself , and to embrace
life in the fast lane. For these critical moments are all involved in using up
our self-sufficiency. surrendering our self-created
identities, rooting out the
reactions we use to control others, and thereby letting go and letting
God. The promise, however, is a deepening involvement with Father, Jesus
Christ, Holy Spirit, and one another.
Meditation
7: OUR DEEPEST FEELINGS
“I grew up with the messages: ‘Don’t feel;
don't talk; don’ ‘t
trust.’ And since my
parents battled constantly, I was particularly
terrified of anger. Now I am beginning to think that there are no destructive
feelings, only destructive acts. And my actions become
destructive only when I condemn and reject my feelings. If I say that I don't
want to feel a certain way , I disregard the fact that I do feel that way and that
the feeling is me. Feeling a
certain way is one feeling; not wanting to feel that way is another
, and it does not cause the first feeling
to go away. I can change my
response to a feeling, but I can no more hide it than I can hide myself. When I
disown a feeling, I do not destroy it;
I only forfeit my capacity to act it out as I wish. By condemning it, I stop believing it to be
me, and it seems to take on a life
of its own and forces me to respond to it in an habitual way. But if I see that
I FEEL the feeling, then I retain my ability to act on it in the way I choose
rather than in the way I fear. "
Reflections offered
by a student.
Meditation
Earlier meditations introduced two
perspectives on our passionate longings for life. One, when we stifle any particular
feeling, we distort both our deepest feelings and our passionate involvements. Two, to let God teach us how to love one another
as Jesus loves
us, we must be honest about what we feel and think,
with ourselves, with God, and with our loved ones. When
the two are focused on the bewildering tangles revealed
in the
dynamics of disillusionment and mounting pressure, they show
that we must identify, embrace, and own
our feelings if we hope to express them vulnerably and respectfully.
To sort out the feelings we must own, we
must work backward from our habitual
emotional reactions. The latter seem spontaneous. In fact, they embody long-practiced judgments and
strategies which
are the opposite of love. As we trace them to their roots, we begin to
see the ways that we were marked by events in our personal histories, formed by
our place and role in our family of origin, and , in general, shaped by the pervasive process
of socialization.
Beginning with emotional reactions, as we
must, we do well to remember that our language distorts our understanding of
passion. Thus, American English is strong on action-verbs and visual
depictions, but has far fewer words for feelings than for colors.
We can, however, explore those words
anew by looking at the
uncontaminated feelings of infants.
Babies surely feel physical pain. Helpless as they are, they become angry when no one responds
to their plaintive cries. This anger is a cry for life in another's
love; only later does anger also voice outrage at the violation of one's boundaries. Some
infants seem to be born with a pervasive anxiety; others seem to face life peacefully and contentedly from the start. As
they gather experience, however, all react fearfully to specific situations. In a
somewhat different vein, all seem to be naturally caring. At the very least, they respond to care and sense its absence . And they are often playful and joyful when they are alert and involved.
Joy, playfulness, care, pain, anger, and fear, then, can be viewed as basic human feelings. But there are
three other passions which must be added to our working model, though they evolve gradually. The critical one is compassion. Compassion is rooted in care, but it involves the ability to put oneself empathetically into the place of another. Apparently, the development occurs spontaneously in
children who are treated with compassion; apparently also, the development can be aborted in children who are brutalized. In the latter instances, a stunted ability
to empathize cripples any child beyond measure. For without compassion,
there can be no genuine forgiveness of others and no creative personal involvement.
The second is the troublesome, yet fruitful,
experience of shame. Shame
awaits a two-fold development: the eruption of self-consciousness and the acquisition
of a detached perspective on
experience. Thus, we
may well have felt tinges of shame in the
emerging self-consciousness announced by the terrible two's. But
full-blown shame awaited a dawning awareness that we were naked, physically and
personally. Initially, we sometimes gloried in that nakedness, flaunting it even when it caused our parents acute embarrassment. Perhaps we wanted to
remain a child of nature. And often, we joined adults in laughter at our precocious remarks, because we did not know what they were laughing at. But our ecstatic self-assertions could not withstand the weight
of memories of the ways that others looked at us or of remarks which were critical of our actions or appearance. Gradually, we
internalized the voices of others
, as a committee in our head which commented on everything we did or did not do. And since we could not distinguish among appearances,
behavior, and personality, we were
sometimes ashamed of being us. In such instances, shame often inspired us to do violence to ourselves as we tried to control how others would see us. But shame can also be life-giving . We must not aspire to be shameless people.
Thirdly , there is the sexuality
which is central to all that we are and do. This passion has a special urgency. If we fail to integrate it with the feelings noted above at an early age, we pay a tragic price.
When we were babies, therefore, we had not yet mastered the repertoire of emotional
reactions which we now use to express these basic feelings. We did not yet
stifle our anger in ways which generated resentment, frustration, impatience,
irritation, or the like. Nor had we transformed shame into guilt, hid fear
behind bravado, dulled pain by a detached indifference or an all-absorbing self-pity, turned care
into calculation, reduced compassion to sympathy or advice, or displaced the joy of being alive
and in love with the desire for pleasures or possessions.
This repertoire, the subject of the next meditation, is not wicked.
We came by it honestly, through responses in which we identified with those we
admired and sought to be different from those who upset us. Immersed in
exciting, promising, painful, threatening, and confusing experiences, we
adopted many socially sanctioned exchanges which continue to serve us well. But if we wonder why our spouses
are more critical of us than our friends, we are well advised to remember that
we are not socialized to intimacy.
Thus, though we are called to be respectful
of every human being, we are not called to be vulnerable in social exchanges.
There, the economic model calls for transactions which satisfy the desires of all
concerned. But intimacy is the domain of longings and aspirations as well as
desires. So when we address the emotional repertoire which governs our
interactions with loved ones, we are faced with two and only two paths. We can
obey the dictates of the economic model, engaging
in emotional transactions which seem to be
rewarding. Or we can view these reactions as tangled expressions of our deepest
feelings, as we let God's love call us forth to the fullness of life.
At this stage on our journey, therefore, the decision which
confronts us is momentous. If we fail to identify our habitual emotional
reactions, with their hidden judgments and strategies, we cannot get beyond
them, to the buried feelings which exert a hidden hold upon us. Or, in terms of
a later meditation, we cannot let go of those feelings, to let God's love work in us, until we own them as our own. But the complexity of
the process is shown by the working model of basic feelings offered above. For every emotional reaction twists all of
our feelings: care, compassion, joy, playfulness, sexuality, pain, anger, fear, and
shame. And if some constellation of pain, anger , fear , or shame dominates , there is no
way through them but through them, as we seek the freedom to put ourselves vulnerably and
respectfully in each other' s care. Pray God that we choose to enter the process
of letting go and letting God.
Meditation 8: EMOTIONAL REACTIONS
“I was offended when you said that
women sometimes cry because their husbands can’t stand it and give in. But when
I told my girlfriends, they laughed guiltily. Now I’m angry at you because I’ll
be questioning my motives the next time I cry.”
I also ask you to reread
the story which introduced the first meditation. In my life, the startled awareness that I had reacted with silent disapproval was
a transforming moment. Whenever I relive it, I see again how small and simple interactions can be pregnant with infinity. And I am also reminded that any such emotional reaction issues
from a judgment which justifies a manipul ative strategy.
--Meditation--
You may be far more comfortable with your anger than I have ever been with mine. But do not assume that the following reflections apply only to angry reactions or to my journey but not yours. Whether you like it or not, you habitually express
some troublesome feelings in emotional reactions which embody judgments
and strategies. And when the dynamic of mounting pressure is played out, you will hear the call to replace repeat performances with personal responses .
When the dynamic of disillusionment ends in dull routine, that call is hidden
in the accusation that we have become boringly predictable, whatever form it takes. In our own defense, we may point to varied reactions in recent situations. But our
loved ones see only an extensive repertoire of emotional reactions which we have honed through long practice. To demolish our defenses, they may say that they can read us like a book. And they often can, since they concentrate on our behavior rather than its tangled roots. Once they cease to pride themselves on their knowledge, however, they find much of that behavior either boring or offensive. And no wonder. For habitual reactions embody well tested strategies designed to control the upsett ing feelings which triggered them. They use power and judgments to tame passion.
Anger is particularly revealing here. When we were helpless and vulnera ble babies, our anger voiced a cry for care in the midst of pain or discomfort. As we progressed in self-consciousness, the cry acquired the added dimension of outrage at violations
of our longing for love and our quest for personal integrity . As adults, if we want to be intimate with one another, both cries must be vulnerably voiced and respectfully heard. If we silence the cries for life in each other's love, we end up lonely, isolated, and, most likely, bitter and resentful. If we voice the protests in
eruptive outbursts, we may rupture the relationship
with our loved ones permanently, especially if we use their vulnerable selfrevelations against
them.
Faced with the destructive
potential of anger, our ancestors forged a host of strategies to prevent anger from
escalating into rage. I seem to have acquired most of them. According to stories
told by my aunt at the time of my ordination, I was known in the family as the child
who threw temper tantrums. But anger was not tolerated in my home. I still squirm with revulsion when I remember having to
kiss my brothers as the way to make up after fights with them. Much later, my sister uncovered a
significant feature in our family dynamic. When she could no longer maintain
the illusion that a good wife
is never angry at her husband, she asked Mother if she and Dad had ever fought. In reply,
Mother noted that they were both over thirty when they married. Determined to avoid
the turmoil that characterized their own families of origin, they agreed that they would never argue in front of us. They did have
sharp words for one another, but never in our
presence.
As a result of their strategies for controlling anger, I remember being shocked and even
frightened when I saw my father explode at employees over shoddy work. And , much later , I literally panicked when a dear friend was furiously angry
at me. I was sure that
she would never speak to me again;
after all, I had never seen my parents work through a fierce disagreement.
Added to that , the
Baltimore Catechism which we had to memorize in my Catholic grade school presented anger as a sin. With my childhood understanding of
sin, I felt more guilty when
I was consumed by rage than when I lost my temper,
perhaps because eruptions of my buried anger were triggered from without. I knew that I could never control the
world around me, but apparently assumed that I should be able to dictate what I would feel.
Given these familial and religious influences, I came by my repertoire of
angry reactions honestly, and for years they seemed to serve me well. Their apparent spontaneity
allowed me to deny that I was
angry, though my friends had to laugh
at my pretensions.
Above all, I never had to face the fear that an angry me might be rejected or abandoned. When
I was in mid-life crisis, however, I was often impatient with a frustrating
trait in my 80-year old father. Though Dad might not remember events of the previous day, he relived grievances he had nursed for 50 years. Quite obviously, he had buried these experiences alive , since the memory of what he
felt , thought ,, did , and said was still
vivid and detailed. Wanting to be a good Christian, he had not retaliated against those who took advantage of him. In
each instance, he even believed that he had turned the other cheek. But it broke my heart that he had carried these wounds for all those years.
As I dwelt on this in prayer, asking God to heal and deliver Dad , I began to
see that I dealt with pain and anger in the
same way. In my youth, Dad had never talked to my about my pain
or his. But, loving him, I somehow identified with him, and I, too, turned inward, transforming
my anger into grievances which I endlessly nursed. With my friends, I did not
act out the strategies which informed my imaginary conversations. But they could not respond
to the disappointments
and frustrations that I kept alive as grievances , since I could not embrace or own the tangled feelings. And, for my part, I fell into the
trap of endowing discrete events in the past with
an illusory intensity,
with the consequent loss of the freedom to dwell
within present events which
were pregnant with infinity. Clinging to righteous
denials that I was angry, I did not have to face my fears that my friends would
view my expectations as childish or demanding or, in the worst possible case, would find my anger unforgivable.
Providentially, I also encountered the phrase which describes habitual reactions as lapses into fight or flight. From this perspective, I saw that I let my fear led me into flight
from confrontations whenever I turned inward, to nurse a grievance or feed a
smoldering resentment. And I was devastated when I saw that my hostile outbursts were informed
by a fierce competitiveness which I had previously disowned, though it, like my
anger, must have e been evident
to everyone but me.
At the
time, I was also
mortified that I could voice frustration without panic in my professional life, but not with my loved
ones. Thus, I was seldom tempted to play the role of peacemaker in committee meetings
with colleagues. There, even when I had argued heatedly in favor of a plan, policy, or
procedure, I accepted the committee's decision with equanimity. And I was not
unduly disturbed by the fact that some colleagues were uncomfortable with my
passion and regarded it as unprofessional. If I occasionally took unspoken
criticism personally because of grievances against particular colleagues, I
wondered whether they went home and screamed at their spouses and kicked their
dogs. (I often found
out, but anecdotal evidence is scientifically suspect.
I do note, however, that many
found the professional disagreements more terrifying than any prospect of a person-to-person confrontation.)
Over time, reflection on these
experiences helped to free me from the burden of taking everything personally. In my role as a faculty member, I could approach issues with a concern for my students , a sense
of vocation , a wealth of experience , and a vision of the direction
which the institution ought to take. In meetings, I believed that we
gathered to address
problems, not personal issues. With that focus, I was not in danger of losing control of my anger. And even when I had to admit that my reactions intimidated colleagues who were terrified of passion, I was not suffused with shame . I could view that as their problem
, not mine.
The breakthrough in my fear of angry interactions with loved ones
came with the entry of a four-year-old girl into my life. Katie and I first met when her mother had to bring her to
class. As a philosophy teacher, I often introduced issues by asking rhetorical questions.
That day, I fell in love with Katie when she answered all my questions, despite the fact that
she destroyed the dramatic context I wanted to create. And our romantic
period lasted until she passed from a compliant child to a nine-year-old who
was determined to have her way. Earlier, I had championed her assertiveness when her mother found it frustrating. Now, when she exploded at
me, I reacted like a nine-year-old. Wisely, her mother pointed out that I had to begin childishly, since I had started to bury my anger as a child. And once I could embrace my childish
reactions peacefully, Katie and I had occasions when we admitted that our screaming matches had been futile and wounding and revisited our conflicts vulnerably and
respectfully. Though we were not .always creatively involved,
we were at least able to trust each other's care and concern
enough to let go of fearful or angry self-assertions.
As my lapses into fight and flight became glaringly obvious, I
discovered that these strategies were torturously intertwined in all my emotional reactions. Thus, when I reacted with silent disapproval, the
flight from confrontations was accompanied by
signals meant to discourage
any repetition of the upsetting behavior in
my presence. So, too, when I pouted or sulked, the pretense that I had been treated badly was designed to inflict my misery upon anyone who
had not let me have my way. And , though I hated to admit it, my critical, sarcastic, ridiculing, or ironic utterances were blatant efforts to usurp authority by putting others down, while my pompous reactions to such remarks by others were supposed to deflect criticism by presenting myself as bigger than life.
In yet another struggle with anger, I let myself be deluded by a language whose logic presented me as smaller than the world around me. I blithely spoke of my frustration, irritation, impatience , or confusion, as if it were caused by someone or something outside of me. As long as I could present my feelings in these terms, I could lend a moral authority to the "should 's" and "should not's" which
I used, to play on the guilt or trigger the shame of others. In effect, I staged a game of moral algebra and defined the terms in ways which guaranteed victory.
And I soon
had to admit that all emotional
reactions are simply versions of the game of victim-villain. Since this game is so destructive, we will devote a later
meditation to it. Here, I simply confess that I played this game with a vengeance whenever I nursed grievances or reacted with silent
disapproval. Implicitly, I appropriated the role of a victim whose
innocence conferred the right to impose sanctions, and I thereby cast others as villains.
We put this game in play whenever we feel. To lend it legitimacy, we disguise it as a mature desire to
determine responsibility. But when we assign responsibility for our misery to those we cast as villains, we
refuse to own our own feelings and deny that it takes two to tango. And as long as we keep the game in play, we remain captive to the dynamics of disillusionment
and mounting pressure, to strategies
of fight or flight, or to
attack or defense.
Consequently, whether we like it or not, God's love calls us to identify the crippling judgments
which trigger specific emotional reactions. They are lies. And if we remain
blind to them, they prevent us from disentangling , identifying , facing , embracing, and
owning our deepest feelings
and, therefore, from being honest
about them with God, ourselves, and our loved ones.
Correspondingly, the question
voiced by our quest for honesty
and integrity is straightforward , even if immediate answers are hard to come by . Why do I withdraw here, to nurse a
grievance, and explode there, with a hostility that I immediately regret? These reactions of flight or fight do not
simply happen. From my extensive repertoire, I somehow select the one that I expect to
serve some twisted purpose in this
situation.
Thankfully,
from prayerful reflections on my sterile reactions over the past twenty years,
I can sometimes uncover the judgments which have kept my pain, anger, fear,
shame, sexuality, care, compassion, playfulnes s, and joy in bondage to events in
my personal history. And when I tell the stories of
entanglement to Jesus and listen for a word from Father, Jesus, or Spirit, I am
repeatedly surprised by joy.
Joy might be as fruitful a focus for reflection as anger. Sadly, many people do not trust experiences in which
they are surprised
by joy. My maternal grandmother was surely one of them. Her daughters remembered
her for the formative power of her belief that nothing could ever be so bad that it could not get worse. When they spoke
of her, they could not recall a single occasion when she delighted in them or in their accomplishments.
So, too, with any other feeling.
Thus, perhaps because I have never had a child of my own, I want to weep when I am involved
with men who once looked at their infant
sons with reverence, awe, care, and
delight, but who cannot be honest
with them in their passage from childhood to manhood. And I want to weep for mothers who
cannot let go of ties with their daughters and complicate the
lives of all concerned. Since rough-housing was the only
way that my father was demonstrably affectionate, I grieve over men who cannot show affection freely.
And I am particularly pained
when fathers habitually express affection for their daughters by
teasing. I know too well that their
daughters long for
a father's validation. Without it,
they may waste years trying to fill the Daddy-hole left by an emotionally
distant father.
Remember: If you vowed to love one another as Jesus
loves you, you cannot plead that you did not undertake the project of raising the child of your in-laws. You vowed to be involved with one another
, for better or worse. And , in the experience of romantic love , you delighted that love might bring out the worst in you for new life in another's love.
"Be compassionate, as your
Father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not
be judged. Do not condemn, and you
will not be condemned. Pardon, and you shall be pardoned."
Luke 6: 36-37
When we judge others,
we act as though we are masters of all we survey. Posing as the center of the
universe, we decree that the lives of others should revolve around us. To justify this usurpation of
authority, we pretend to a pristine innocence or superior
virtue. Self-righteously, we view anyone who challenges our role as
lord, lawgiver, and judge with a
contempt which befits their supposed inferiority.
When we let fearful compulsions trap
us into arrogant judgments, however,
we suffer on two fronts. Internally, the closure they impose on our tangled
feelings silences our natural compassion. In effect, we condemn ourselves to a position from which we can be
toppled only by a humiliating event; we make it hard to learn the
obvious lesson that we cannot
lift ourselves up by putting
others down. Correspondingly, to the eyes of others, we stand forth as ridiculous creatures who are memorable mostly for the poverty of our sympathetic imaginations.
--Meditation--
To love passionately, vulnerably, and respectfully, we must
learn to speak in our own voices. To
that end, we must come to appreciate the difference between thoughts, on the one hand, and judgments and prejudices, on the other. Vulnerable
expressions of what we
think, placed respectfully in another's care, differ radically from judgments we pass on that person.
In every instance, we use judgments to impose closure on our inner turmoil or our conflicts with others. In marked contrast, vulnerable accounts of how we view a situation invite others to tell us what they feel and think and how they see the shared event. Speaking in
a narrative voice, we do not pretend to tell the authorized
version of the interaction in question. We are willing to let God's love
illuminate both the roots of our reactions and the path to deepening intimacy through the
narrative voices of others. However, few of us understand the call to speak in a narrative voice until we recognize a pervasive propensity to pass judgments on ourselves, our loved ones,
and God.
The roots of the temptation to judge can be found in the process of grieving. We grieve when our longing for life is wounded or threatened. In repeat performances of His or Her Majesty, the Baby, we struggle with what is happening to us. Depending on our ingenuity, we have many options. For example, we can deny that
the cross situation is happening, or we can normalize the experience by
reacting in a socially acceptable way, or we can clothe our outraged protests
in smug and self-righteous moralizing. If we invest these seductive judgments with our pain, anger, and fear,
however, we transform them into embittering prejudices which lie beyond the
reach of conversation, and we distract our attention from our pain and postpone
the need to embrace our rage.
As
long as we are stuck in fight or flight, we cannot discern the longing for life
in every surge of anger. For judgments, designed
to impose closure, stifle the vulnerable and respectful cries which
make small and simple interactions pregnant with infinity . To release those cries,
we must identify the many disguises
that judgments assume.
Five disguises implanted by our culture are particularly
pernicious. Since we acquire them imperceptibly, we blindly fall into the traps
they set.
The first trap, the question "Why?",
is perhaps unavoidable when we lose a loved
one, face divorce, or come
to terms with adultery. This question promises a detached perspective which can
distance us from the excruciating pain. The pain persists, of course, but we
kid ourselves that it would be tolerable if we only knew why this outrage was
happening to us. In that vein,
we may be attracted to the old Stoic belief
that God has a divine plan in which everything that
happens must happen in just the way
it happens. By means of these detached speculations, we dull a presently
intolerable pain, as we take in slowly the harsh reality of the situation we
now face. But any answer we propose, however revealing, cannot heal the pain or
bring new life. Sooner or later , we must face and embrace
even the most excruciating pain, enter the process of forgiveness, wait while God's healing love works, and listen for the call to risk another step on the journey to life.
The second trap is more insidious. Everyday disappointments,
irritations , frustrations, and confusions catch us in it. For each of
these emotional reactions is the product of a judgment that the strategy
it embodies will somehow be rewarding. The judgment is hidden, since the reaction, acquired through observation, imitation, and practice, now
seems natural. Yet, the emotional reaction is an abdication of responsibility, since the
judgment shapes the experience by defining our expectations for the event. At its bidding, we translate our tangled feelings into socially coded emotions. We react rather than interact. And if we defend the reaction, we do so in voices drawn from the committee in our
head , not in
a voice that tells
our own story .
The third trap, the game of victim-villain, is transmitted through the political discourse which
assigns responsibility for the consequences of actions to detached agents. In the political realm, we must have judges to sort out
responsibility in cases of conflict or injury. In
cross-situations in intimate involvements, however, the game of victim-villain has tragic
consequences. Recall the sad options dictated by this game. If I play the victim, I cast you as the villain.
Dramatically, I accuse you of a crime and make you responsible for my pain and anger. When I cast you as a villain, however, I victimize you. To force you into your role, I must play both accuser and judge, though that would never be allowed in an
American courtroom. In the violence I do, I am inescapably villain as well as victim. If I take on the role of
victim-martyr, I turn away from you in search
of a rescuer. I refuse you an
honest hearing and thereby foreclose the possibility of new life between us. If you are frustrated by my role as martyr, you may fight me for it. If you do , however, the game becomes a fierce competition in which we use every flawed interaction between us in the past against each other. Tragically, some couples keep the game
forever in play. Striking out at me in frustration, you may argue that I set you up for your outburst, while I can use your rage as further evidence of your villainy.
And on and on this interplay of roles can go, diverting us from person-to-person involvement
and responsibility for every interaction between us.
The fourth trap, the temptation to reduce crosses to problems, is endemic in
the United States, particularly among males. Thus, when we discover that our habitual emotional reactions
are tiresomely repetitious, a desire to be reasonable inclines us to regard each other's pain, anger, or fear as a problem to be solved. Implicitly, we view our involvement
like a jig-saw puzzle. We assume that every piece of the puzzle will fall into place if we learn to read the code, or failing that, if we simply proceed by trial and error. But viewing tangled interactions as problems to be solved makes them into unsolvable problems. We must
resist when neat and tidy solutions place us in confining boxes.
Perhaps the most insidious trap lies in a detachment, which can be blessing or curse. This detachment emerges when we
separate from parents with emphatic "No's” while
we are in our terrible two's. Our willful negations have a positive aim; they issue from the longing to become unique individuals. In some instances, we forward this aim by using our “No's” to generate creative inquiries in which we learn to voice what we stand for, so that later protests advance this positive stand. At these times, we are honest searchers who listen to the "No's" which rise from deep within, thereby
discover what is being lost or threatened in us, and then dare to express what we feel and think, in our own voices. The "No"
becomes a blessing. More commonly, I fear, we turn
the “No’s” into curses. By using them self-protectively or defiantly, we remain stuck in them.
Clearly, the ability to detach is crucial to the ability to be honest about our thoughts and feelings. Once it evolves, we have an internal witness to our tangled feelings and tortured thoughts. At its best, this witness does not use judgments
to evoke shame . When we submit to anything that defaces, depersonalizes, or dehumanizes us, its objective gaze exposes our excuses, evasions, rationalizations,
and lies. It need not comment, scold, editorialize, or moralize. At its worst,
however, this witness allows itself to be suborned by some voice in
the committee in our head.
Inevitably, that voice transforms the call to integrity voiced by shame into a command to
conform to some social or religious code. Inducing
guilt by pronouncing judgments on
socially unacceptable actions,
it seems to speak as a friend,
since guilt over identifiable failures seems to be an easier burden to bear than a diffusive shame. But
the witness that it bears is badly misleading, since its perspective blinds us to such shameful
traits as our tendencies
to hide behind masks, erect defenses, mount counter-attacks, engage in negotiations, retreat in panic,
or cultivate indifference.
In these reactions, we do not express our thoughts and feelings vulnerably or utter prophetic protests against the violence inflicted upon us.
When we become aware of these traps, we must not go to the opposite
extreme. This extreme, a rugged individualism
disguised as self
reliance and self-sufficiency, is also pervasive in the culture. It suggests that we
are people who can be anything we want to be if we reject
social stereotypes and constrictive obligations. Rejecting the hard-won wisdom of the past, it prostitutes traditional notions of truth and goodness in its insistence that what anyone thinks
is true, is true for them,
and what anyone wants is good for them. Such a stance is incompatible with a passionate involvement with another unique and complicated person. Sooner or later, tangled interactions make nonsense of
any claim to speak my truth or seek my good, and I am left with allowing my story to speak for itself and leaving you free to respond to it in your own way and time, as we seek to discern where God is leading.
Hopefully, as we become aware of these traps, we can catch ourselves before we fall into them. What, then, are we to do for a positive replacement? First, we do well to see ourselves as
works in progress and trust the transforming power of our interactions. I may have to detach from you, at least for a time, if you want to hold me to a self that I have previously presented , but now disown.
I will take responsibility for that
self presentation, but I want the opportunity to show you that I no longer suppose that my masks or my emotional reactions reveal who I am.
Countless misunderstandings between us have taught me that I do not have a god-like perspective on your
motives and intentions. Now that I see how the judgments I passed on you issued from my own imagination, I must warn you that I will go through worst possible case scenarios if you don’t tell me what you
feel and think. For your silence throws me back
on my own resources, and they include many buried wounds.
Consequently, we must expect that other versions of shared events will expose our hidden judgments and deeply rooted prejudices. As I tell the story, however, I cannot let a fear of judging prevent me from saying what I think. Thus, to set the stage for a dramatic re-enactment of the event in question, I must try to describe the situation objectively. Since
I cannot do so exhaustively, I select details. Inescapably, my choice will be
colored by my personal history and will
support my understanding of your role in
my
story, your motives and intentions, and our
entire past history. Still, I must tell you what I think, while leaving
you free to be amused or angry at the role I assign you, to counter my
misunderstandings with revelations of tangled feelings,
to endow past events with
new meaning and life, and to expose my hidden agendas.
When we converse in narrative voices, the interchanges are
graced moments and transforming events. Tangled interactions move from drama to
depth. In and through them, we are transformed in ways that point each of us
toward a fully human and uniquely personal
existence while involving us more deeply with one another.
Meditation
10
THE COMMITTEE IN OUR HEAD
I tell myself that I'm not crazy, because I don't actually hear
voices. But I do have a committee in my head which constantly criticizes what I do or don't do. When it buzzes noisily, I can understand why some people bang
their heads against the wall. I don't suppose the blows silence the voices, but the distraction would be welcome. Recently, though, I've come to welcome the
times when the committee makes its presence felt. It gets my attention, so I remember to listen for
the whisper of the Holy Spirit."
Student, 1983
The older I get,
the more I sound like my father (or mother).
--Meditation--
When my eighty year old father could no longer be active, he relived fifty and sixty year old grievances again
and again. I grieved for myself
as well as for him, since I saw my own future
if I did not break the mold. Floundering about, I looked for ways to sort out the tangles I could no longer ignore.
In the usual roundabout fashion, I was providentially introduced to Eric
Berne's use of "memory tapes" in his theory of transactional
analysis. The metaphor rang true ,
because events which had not been caught up in the flow of my life were embedded in my memory. In the context of Berne's therapeutic approach,
if I dealt with tapes, I could presumably override
their mixed messages
by regarding them as
nothing more than memory traces
stored in my brain.
In my own life and in therapeutic circles, Berne's metaphor was
fruitful for a time, but only for a time. When its insights into my reactions were exhausted,
the Father's providence brought a student into my life who spoke of a committee
in her head. The difference between the
two metaphors is striking. Reference to tape recordings which
repeat the same messages invokes a mechanical model.
Talk of a community suggests the voices of individuals who are presumably engaged in a common
enterprise, but who are often at cross-purposes with one another, usually
critical of brokered decisions, occasionally petty
after the fact, and seldom clear about the goal at hand. The metaphor never fails to illuminate the cacophony
in my head.
Thus , once I listened carefully to my committee, I recalled remarks by significant people in my life, ideas from books I
had read, rationalizations and excuses with which I had defended myself against criticism, and
personifications of my compulsive tendencies. Because they were laden with unresolved emotional issues, the voices of the committee continued to plague me long after I had identified and rejected
the judgments they voiced. Even when I regarded them as the enemy, they demanded a personal dialogue with me. After all, their long captivity as discrete memories
was my doing, and, though they coded their cries, they spoke
for my longing for life in somebody’s love.
In time, I identified the chairperson of the committee, my father 's mother. Please don't judge my Grandmother
on the basis of my memories; my sister enjoyed
her lengthy stays
with us when we were children. Sadly, I remember only being forced
to sit with
Grandma while she complained about
everyone and everything , especially about
her deceased husband and about my father. Probably because her criticisms of my father stung so deeply,
she served as the spokesperson for the strident voices in my
head which knew how to evoke the shame that I had buried whenever I was criticized. So when the committee was in
session, I heard only decrees which told me what I should
or should not do,
and even when I obeyed
its dictates, there were always voices
which informed me of flaws
in my execution
of a command. As long as the messages I attributed to Grandma
governed my reflections, any voice which said something positive about my
actions or about me, past or present, was silenced.
I suspect that the intimacy issues which haunted me from childhood
led to the over-functioning committee in my head. But events in the past which
left me isolated have been a blessing as well as a curse . In times of
prayerful reflection, I can now dialogue with memories of flawed interactions
with loved ones, with anyone whom the Father' s providence sends into my life , with
whatever I read
, with the many students I have had in almost thirty five years of
teaching , with the children who grace my life, and with the faces which respond to my sermons in
different parish communities. I can now hear grateful remarks, and I need not
cringe at the critical ones.
Consequently, though your committee may not
haunt you the way mine nagged at me, I hope that you listen to it. Its
emotionally charged voices speak for
experiences which were not caught up in the flow of life. In these events,
we buried feelings, passed judgments, and adopted strategies which, in effect,
denied who we are. Once we let our tangled depths speak through
the committee, we take a huge step
toward identifying the buried shame and the burden of guilt which its voices
use to author so many of our reactions. For they maintain a hidden authority over us as
long as we fail to engage
their formative influence in a creative dialogue.
Once we personify a constellation of memories, we can carry on imaginary conversations
with it just as we do with lov ed ones .In the grieving process, we may engage it in the game of victim villain
, or we may retaliate for the ways it has silenced remarks
which affirmed us by silencing it in return. But we do well to remember (1) that a willingness to interweav e our stories of events
with the stories of our loved ones is the path to self-discovery, (2 ) that the Lord ordinarily comes to us through one another, and (3) that, through our response to the movem ent of the Spirit , the Lord comes to us also through the
stories which these voices tell . So the more personal our d ialogues with the committee become , the more we are
freed to speak in our own voices.
Johnny Reb was my most frustrating , yet fruitful
dialogue partner. At the time
he surfaced, I often
rebelled against the need to comment on student essays, do administrative paperwork, and go
to appointments. Since the roots of this fierce resistance remained hidden, I named it Johnny Reb. In my journaling, I would pour out my anger, despair,
anguished pleas, or feeble attempts at humor, and then let Johnny Reb answer. One such entry was typical. I followed the long list of what I had to do with the plea that he be a sympathetic friend for the day. When his turn came,
he replied scornfully: "You imply that I haven't been your friend, but I'm really the only friend you've got. No one else does anything when you are exhausted, lost, or overwhelmed. If I didn't dig in, demanding
attention, you'd be a full-blown workaholic, no good to yourself or anyone
else." He was right, of course. And in time, he was equally scornful of the shame
that led me to say yes to everything,
lest anyone be disappointed in me, and concerned with the aching loneliness
that I experienced whenever I was over-involved.
When we dialogue with voices of
the committee in personal ways, we create a chamber in which the voice of the Spirit can also be heard. Amidst the echoes of what we feel like doing and saying, the Spirit's words of love, resounding within our depths, can urge us to cry out,
voicing loneliness, exposing obstacles to honest interactions, and placing our crazily tangled feelings in each other's
care. If shame triggered
by feelings of helplessness
has made cowards of us, the Spirit's words penetrate the fears which inspire worst
possible case scenarios, revive or validate
our longing for intimate involvements, and enable us
to wait until we can speak or act
with integrity.
In the dialogue, the Spirit moves us to act with integrity. In effect , the Spirit asks us what we really want to do. In
our early encounters, the
committee may confuse us
by pretending that the question is a sign of selfishness. If the dialogue continues, however,
we soon see that what we want to do
is never inspired by selfish motives. It is the fearful or shame-filled voices in the committee which seek easy ways out of tangled
situations. If we know what we want to do, we recognize the word of the Spirit in the deep inward peace with which we take responsibility not only for our actions, but also for
the consequences, whatever they may be. And why should it be surprising that a loving Spirit urges us to a life in which our deepest longings are fulfilled?
As the dialogue proceeds, we may have little difficulty in recognizing the Spirit'
s urgings in the voice s which speak for our care, compassion, playfulness, and joy. But we do well also to listen for the words which the Spirit speaks in voices which are inspired by fear, shame,
pain, and anger. In time, the dialogues
will sometimes be playful, sometimes serious, always alive.
Meditation
11:
DETACHMENT
"Lord,
grant me the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change , the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
"
Reinhold Niebuhr
.
In my vanity, I assumed that God wanted me to be of help to a woman who came for spiritual direction. As it turned out, she was already working the Al Anon program of detachment with an immense trust in God.
Whenever she voiced frustration because there were no signs
of change in her alcoholic spouse, she followed the outburst
with the statement: "But I know that we must wait on God because we don't
know how much work God has to do in us or anybody else before we are ready to
receive the gift." Since his majesty the Baby practically ruled me at the
time, I soon realized that God sent her to talk with me for my sake, not hers.
“Once I learned detachment, I saw too clearly the roots of my
resentments. As I grew up, I excused the thoughtlessness of my father and
brothers, scolded myself for being hurt, and believed that I was wicked
whenever I was upset or angry. I was content with the pay-off for taking
everyone’s emotional temperature but my own; everybody praised me as a model of
patience. But the cost was higher than I knew. In each such incident, I added
to an underground ocean of anger. But God works in mysterious ways. Cay you
believe that I first became aware of God’s love for me when I embraced my
fiercest resentments? And thank God, I was ready to let go of the judgments
which fed them. Now, when I am resentful, I don’t blame anyone, including me. I
really do wait to hear what God has to say.”
Journal
entry shared by a student
“Come to me, all you who are weary and find life
burdensome , and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart.”
Mt 11:28-29a.
--Meditation--
Like the woman whose journal is quoted above
, I was amazed
that God would speak to me in and through my resentments. From childhood, I had tried to make room in my heart for God by ridding myself of
smoldering resentments, without realizing that I added fuel to the fire
every time I reacted with silent disapproval or nursed a grievance. I seem to have viewed resentments as weeds
which I might pull from the soil
of my life and cast away. Providentially, when I was ready to own them, I was introduced to the language of detachment by people in
Al Anon. From my earlier contact with AA , I had heard the phrase, "Let go and let God," but
regarded it with suspicion.
Now, exhausted as I was from struggles which went nowhere, I was ready
to go apart with God , and I welcomed the call to
abandon my futile efforts
to change myself and
my loved ones.
I still filled my journal with the anguished cry, "Lord, what am I to do?" After all, my
catechetical formation and my studies in moral theology
had emphasized involvement. Moreover, I had long supposed that there must be some one right way of doing things, if only I could find it. So I feared that a detachment in
which I abandoned the search for the perfect
solution would be an unforgivable lapse in fidelity.
In effect, I feared that detachment would
plunge me into an emptiness within and a passionless existence without. And my
worst fears seemed to be confirmed when I began to let go of the repeat performances which perpetuated
my struggles with loved ones. In the absence of
these familiar reactions, I was lost and lifeless. But the providential Father, the risen Christ, and
the indwelling Spirit found ways to show me that detachment is a process, not a passive stance, a
childish dependency, or a path to indifference . And as I allowed their love for me to unravel my tangles, I was surprised by the release of my
deepest feelings.
This process of going apart with God calls us to a place of silence within our inner turmoil. The purpose is clear. In stillness, we can hear God's word of love. But
it is more difficult to clear a
silent space within than we might imagine. Until we listen to our own cries of pain , anger , and fear, and those of our loved ones, we cannot place ourselves and them in
God's care. And when we do, we may not trust the palpable emptiness we feel when our clamoring cares and concerns are
silent. But we must embrace that emptiness, since we created it whenever we
consciously broke with intimacy and we reinforced it whenever we succumbed to the temptation to fill the hole
with possessions and pleasures.
In our
early efforts to detach, therefore, we may
squirm restlessly, unable to yield to God's embrace. If we persist, however, God fills our hard-won emptiness with a
grace-filled presence. Initially, these graced moments will be fleeting. God
gives them, I believe, to show us where
the process leads. On the way, however, we will be called to revisit
wounds in our past which still cry out for life in another' s love, to reach for Jesus' hand when we find ourselves consumed by rage, and to listen for the Spirit's word of love if we experience a shame beyond
bearing. For there is no way around long-buried pain,
rage, and shame , no short cuts on the journey. The only way through these feelings
is through them .
In the midst of the process , buried feelings may erupt in the most unexpected and unwelcome situations. I still
delight in a story told me by a woman who was suffering from an
excruciating depression after years of living joyfully in God's presence. She had been introduced to
journaling as a means of
detachment many years before we met. Now, at my suggestion, she structured her entries according to the formula, "Lord,
as I now relive this experience with you, I feel . . . and I feel like
doing or saying . . .” Within a few weeks, however, she wanted to try something else. In her words, she was tired of recording the same
imaginary conversations and reliving the same rage and
pain. She continued journaling, but only because I was able to point out subtle but
signif icant differences among these similarly structured conversations. In any case, her willingness to continue was a blessing for both of us.
The blessing came when
she began a meeting with a cry of despair. To help me understand the cry, she reported a profound experience of the presence of God, after months when God was apparently absent.
But, she continued tearfully, the
peace was almost immediately disrupted by a
violent eruption of rage. In her eyes, that rage was a sure sign that she
was not progressing on her journey to intimacy with God. In her view,
it showed that she was on the wrong
path, since she had never been so angry in her life.
I had no difficulty imagining what she felt.
Her words recalled the panic I felt when I was filled with a blind rage against my older brother
on the day of my First Communion.
I was sure that I must
be among the damned. Still, her story quieted the anxiety I still have when I call anyone to enter the
process of letting go and letting God. When
I urged her to continue to journal about her struggles, I confessed that I might
be sending her down
a dead end. So I was reassured by this
experience. Quite obviously, once she let go of the ways that she excused others
and scolded herself, the Spirit could move freely in the
rage which
she had long
hidden from herself. She was,
in fact, well into the process of letting go. Now, she need only learn to let the Spirit embrace her in
her rage .
My own experiences were never so dramatic. Once detachment drained my struggles of emotion,
I was able to listen to what I felt like doing or saying, however hostile or cowardly. Though it was by now a commonplace to those who led me into
detachment, I was awed when I experienced the peace promised in the
Serenity Prayer. Looking back, I smile at my surprise, since I now view that peace as the
surest sign that I am doing what God
calls me to do. At the time, however, three traits—reacting with silent disapproval, nursing
grievances, and fostering smoldering resentments—still concealed my ocean of buried anger. And even when I would catch myself in the midst of these
reactions, I was confused because peace came in different forms.
Sometimes, peace came when I reached a clear understanding of what I really wanted to do or say. In other instances, I might be angry with God because I dreaded taking a particular course of
action, yet knew that I must take it if I wanted to live without shame, guilt, remorse, or regret. In time, I realized that a determination to live with personal integrity was at the core of what I
wanted or had to do or say. And once I sensed that God' s words of love
evoked that determination, I was
able to entrust the outcome of exchanges to the Father's providential care.
On the basis of many
such experiences, my own and others', I suggest that we have not yet entrusted ourselves to God if we cannot speak or act without fear of consequences . We cannot disown responsibility for our
actions without loss of integrity.
But we must remember how
often fears of possible outcomes have triggered strategies of fight or flight. At the other pole, once we risk being honest about what we feel and think, we
will surely remember the
period of romantic love, when our
loved ones responded in ways
that we could not have imagined.
If we let them, these insights can cut
through our pleas that we could never do anything to hurt the ones we love. In
even the best of circumstances, blunt honesty
about what we feel and think is going to hurt them. Facing the fear,
we may need to remind ourselves of the truth of the dictum, "No pain, no gain," to give us
courage.
To fix the process
of detachment in your mind
, walk through
it with me once again. When I am ready to face the futility of a particular struggle with someone I love, I talk to God about my tangled feelings. Over time, as I tell God what I feel like doing and saying, previously hidden
agendas come to light. And once I see how childish,
mean, or
petty they are, I can let them go, especially when I discover what I really want to do or say. So more and more frequently, I am able to say what I feel and think, vulnerably and respectfully, in situations which tap my tangles. But I
cannot expect that my loved ones have faced their part in this struggle. If they
have not, I do well to remember that love brings out· the worst in us, for healing and new life , and that the grieving process offers the only
escape from repeat performances. I needed time to go apart with God, to sort out, identify, embrace, and own my tangled feelings,
to abandon my expectations, and to surrender my desire to control the situation. Now I must leave my loved ones free to respond in
their own way
and time whenever I put myself into their care.
Once again, I am indebted to a woman for a clear
understanding of the dynamics of detachment. She was well
into the process of detachment. One night , because she could keep it in no longer,
she told her husband of her aching loneliness, her anger when
he turned
her cries against her, and a fear approaching terror because she felt the urge to walk out the door and keep on walking. When we talked several days later,
she did not regret what she had said. When she reminded him of events in which he had used her words against her , she had not done so in the spirit of victim- villain.
And she was quite confident
that she would not have argued if he had reacted defensively. In fact,
he heard her in silence. And when
she grew silent, he said only "We'll talk about it tomorrow," rolled over , and went to sleep. But
he had not talked about it,
or about anything else, since that night. And she was now convinced that she had, in her terms, blown it.
In marked contrast,
I was ecstatic. From my
perspective, her honesty had created a space within which God's love could work. She had done her part. Her detachment
from the dynamics of mounting pressure, so evident in her vulnerable self-revelations, had thrown him back into his own tangled feelings.
Now, it was a matter of waiting.
As yet, he had hardly begun the inner journey . But he loved her, and her words would haunt his struggles.
On his behalf, I reminded her of a plea which she had embraced when she was impatient with herself: "Be patient with me; God is not finished with me yet."
But I also insisted
that Christian
patience was not
a process of burying upset and anger. If she let the Spirit embrace her, just as she was, the Spirit would continue to urge
her to be vulnerably honest about what she felt and thought, and to bite her tongue only when her words did not come from her depths. In the meantime, the outcome of either course of
action could be left to God.
The process of detachment, therefore, is always a call to go
apart with God. On this inner journey,
the Spirit speaks to us in our own flaws, not through our judgments on our failures or those of others. Abandoning the disguises
we adopted to hide our shame or wrestle with our pain, we tell God what we feel and
what we feel like doing or saying in upsetting situations. As the
indwelling Spirit exposes our
familiar judgments and strategies, we
discover what we really want to do or what we must do if we are to live with integrity. Living in Christ,
we can then place what we feel and think, real or imagined, in our loved ones' care. And, by allowing them to go through the process which brought us to this trust, we can leave them free to respond in their own way and time.
I promised to tell you how
God spoke to me in my resentment. When I first talked to God about what I felt and thought, the committee
in my head distracted me with judgments which left me devastated. So when I began to face my buried anger, I was ashamed of the way that I transformed my most personal feelings
into festering resentments within
and contemptuous judgments
on others. Overwhelmed with guilt, I could only repeat
the plea of the publican, "God , be merciful to me, a sinner.”
In response, the Spirit called to mind events which revealed that I had come by my crippling traits honestly. And by embracing me in my shame and regret over
actions in my past, the Spirit
suggested that I had done the
best I could, given the fact that I did not yet know how to bring my pain to the Father, Jesus,
and the Spirit. In the
midst of an immense sadness over
lost opportunities,
therefore, I felt a faint hope that all was not lost
.
Here, God once again came to me through a broken person. Since I was still plagued
with smoldering resentments , the committee in my
head easily dismissed any compliment I received by assuring
me that its author did not really know me. This woman knew me at my worst,
because I had shared my brokenness with her. And with a compassion I could never
hope to equal, she voiced perhaps the only words which I could not dismiss. “0h, JJ," she said, "your gifts are inextricable from your pain. "
As I dwelt
within her words to me, I heard God's word to me in my resentments also. They,
too, were rooted in my pain. In a sense, they were
my friends, since they also wanted the pain to find a compassionate
hearing. Consequently, when I tried to channel my pain into compassion for others, they
wrenched me back, in protest.
And once I could listen to them as
cries from the depths, I realized that God spoke
in them, with a call to let God embrace them and lead me
through them to creative involvements with others.
