Christian Marriage: Meditations 12-19

Meditation 12:

I AM—I FEEL LIKE DOING/SAYING

“The Spirit too helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit ... makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in speech. He who searches hearts knows what the Spirit means, for the Spirit intercedes for the saints as God himself wills. “ (Romans 8:26-27)

Meditation

As we let go of fruitless struggles with our feelings, our situation, or our loved ones, we create space for the movement of the Spirit. Lovingly, the Spirit exposes the hidden agendas which prevented us from entering fully into our humanity, as Jesus did. But we do not yet know how to respond creatively in cross­situations. So, though we are ready to address the prejudices which kept those agendas in play, we sometimes revert to strategies of fight or flight which promise immediate gratification. But hollow victories or successful retreats are still poor substitutes for interactions which are pregnant with infinity. So, with nowhere else to turn, we yield to the urgings of the Spirit, and we dare once again to see the Father’s signature on everyday events. And as we wait, we are haunted by memories of the times when the Lord came to us through one another.

Remember that we wait in order to let God’s love prepare us to receive a gift. Sometimes, the waiting consists of being still and simply knowing that God is God. At other times, we talk to God about our emotional reactions in depth and detail. The goal is simple. By now,  memories of futile struggles in the past sometimes enable us to bite our tongue or catch ourselves before we react. But we do not yet know what we really feel and think. To let the Spirit guide us to self-discovery, including the discovery of what we want to do, we seek to lay before God our flawed exchanges with our loved ones.

Journaling is the most effective way to enter into our tangled depths. First and foremost, it can be a time of active prayer, a time when we go apart to converse with God in  an intensely personal way. Secondly, as we write, we get off the merry-go-round in our head. Instead of going round and round (and where she stops, nobody knows), we place our thoughts and feelings out there, where we can see them as others would, if we so wish.

For those who take up journaling for the first time, I recommend a five-fold structure for each entry . Thus, to ensure that we engage in a conversation with God, I suggest the format of a letter which begins with “Dear God” or with whatever name or title for God one prefers.  But I have no difficulty with those who turn to God in concluding remarks instead, because they fear that their outpourings might be inhibited if they were too conscious of God’s presence. Either way, we place ourselves in God’s presence, willing to let God lead us through buried feelings and disguised judgments to honesty and integrity.

To focus our writing, the structure then calls for a simple description of the situation, event, or exchange which triggered the emotional reaction in question. It is best to be brief here, for the description is merely the stage for our conversation with God.

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The conversation follows the formula: “Lord , as I relive this experience here and now, I AM ... “ 

          To complete the formula, we fill in the blank with names for our tangled reaction. With malice aforethought, the formula will almost certainly make liars of us. Thus, when we search for a precise description of a complex experience, we discover how crude our language of passion really is. For a unique experience, we have only general  words. Moreover, we may suppose that we express what we feel when we begin with “I feel that....”       In fact, any such statement expresses a judgment, not a feeling; we might more honestly say “I judge that....” In the long run, however, the ambiguity of any emotional word we select can lead us into the feelings which it tames or conceals. When we try the word on, we catch glimpses of feelings which it cannot encompass and hear the cry of feelings which it silences. And as the desire for greater precision leads us from one word to another, and as we process similar experiences in later entries, we discover that all the feelings sketched in the working model in the Seventh Meditation are entangled in our emotional reactions to those we love.

  

As the fourth step into the tangles, the structure calls us to proceed in accord with the formula: “I FEEL LIKE SAYING OR DOING....”        This formula suggests a ninth Beatitude:  “Blessed are they who engage in imaginary conversations when they are upset, hurt, irritated, frightened, confused, or ashamed, for imaginary conversations can (1) reveal the ways that they have been scarred by their personal histories, (2) enable them to grieve over the ways that their judgments and strategies have plunged them into fight or flight, (3) through this grieving, release the feelings buried by those reactions in the past, and (4) promote the on-going self-discoveries which evoke personal honesty and integrity of life.

To receive this blessing, however, we must be beware of judging that we are repeating the same conversation over and over again, as we do when we go round-and-round in our head. The pattern of the entries may voice the same underlying struggle. Bu each conversation will target particular details, because each re-lives a different wound from the past, perhaps even a wound inflicted by some other person. And as long as we feel the urge to engage in an imaginary conversation, there are obviously buried memories which need to be set in motion.

Once a conversation is written down, we can often smile as we see how we play God in it, placing others into situations of our choosing, manipulating them as though they were puppets, and putting the words we want to hear in their mouths. If we remind ourselves that we are not God, we can reread it playfully, as a starting point for our own story. In particular, if we want to be honest with God about what we feel like doing, we are led to identify and own both unresolved issues from childhood and our entire repertoire of emotional reactions. Remember, we acquired these reactions through observation and imitation, and we have practiced them so thoroughly that they seem to be us. However, when we view them in terms of what we feel like doing, we discover that a host of tangled motives underlie any selection from an extensive repertoire. And with some embarrassment, we may also find that we struggle with obviously childish urges. In either instance, we can see that we really don’t want to do the things we feel like doing. And, as a bonus, we once again feel the feelings which our habitual reactions had distorted.

To conclude this time apart with God, the structure asks that we give God the opportunity to speak. To set the stage, begin by writing “Dear ... “, and fill the blank with your own name or any affectionate title that you would like to receive from God. Then , when you feel an urge from within, start writing. Occasionally, there may be no such urge. At such times, God may be saying, “Wait.” Much more often, you will find that God has a word to speak, and it will be a word of love.

Any exchange with a loved one can serve as the starting point for a journal entry. E.g., we might fruitfully relive situations in which we expressed affection, felt embarrassed, wanted to touch another’s pain, or delighted in another’s uniqueness. Too often, we miss these potentially graced moments by leaving so much unexpressed. With affection, we settle into stylized or ritualized expressions. Familiar as they are, they may be laden with rich memories, but they may also become routine. In any case, they can be enriched by entering explicitly into what we are feeling.

Though I did not realize it at the time, this structure informed my prayerful reflections on my discomfort over the furious exchange between a mother and daughter which introduced Meditation One. Once the mother made me aware that my silent disapproval added to her pain, I had to admit that the reaction was meant to punish her and that the punishment was supposed to prevent a repeat performance, at least in my presence. And once I wondered how Jesus would have responded in the situation, I had to admit that my reaction had blinded me to both her pain and my anger. Then, when I caught myself reacting to students and members of my community in this way, I glimpsed the sources of my buried pain and anger. Each time that I selected silent disapproval from my long-practiced repertoire, I disowned my deepest feelings.  I separated  my pain from an honest cry for life because I was uncomfortable with anger, and I pretended that I was neither hurt nor angry.  And when I nursed grievances, though I kept the hurt alive, I used anger to dull the pain, then twisted the anger into resentment, and thereby denied both hurt and anger any honest expression. With each of these reactions I added another drop to the ocean of  resentment.

My first awareness of the ocean of resentment within me was also a quiet but dramatic encounter with the Spirit. As I sat in prayer one morning, I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. Thinking I had belched, I tried to swallow. Immediately, it was evident that there was nothing physical to the experience. In the past, I would have wallowed in self-disgust or self-pity or rushed into some activity. Somehow, I continued to sit, for forty minutes, while wave after wave of bitterness flowed over me. I was shocked, because I had never imagined that I was a bitter person. But I also felt a strange sort of peace which I trace to an embrace of the Spirit. And I came away with the conviction that this eruption of bitterness, as well as lesser eruptions of  contempt for others, had to be traced to resentments which smoldered within me.

In effect, each time that I separated pain and anger from the event which triggered them, I added to a diffuse and free-floating resentment which could be tapped by trivial incidents. To sustain its exhausting intensity, I had also succumbed to a generalized judgment: “This shouldn’t be happening to me.” Providentially, a friend in AA helped me to see that this judgment is a refusal to live in God’s world. In God’s world, bad things do happen to good people. And in God’s world, the two people whose innocence might have justified the judgment, Jesus and Mary, made no such claim. Jesus expressed his longing to avoid the cross, but accepted the fact that he would no longer be sharing vulnerably in our lives if he were spared through the use of divine power. And even at the foot of the cross, Mary lived out her surrender to God’s word of love. Both trusted that God’s love can bring new life out of even the harshest situations.

Once I could face my refusals to live in God’s world, I discovered childish expectations that God should make my life go smoothly, since I was trying hard to be a good little Christian. I also found that my disappointments could be traced to expectations I placed on others . When I addressed my frustrations, I was shocked at the complexity of  tangled judgments which provoked them, ranging from a sense of helplessness at their core to harsh judgments that others were not pulling their weight in the situation.

As the surrender of these judgments enabled me to live in the present, I began to feel pain as pain. Sometimes, when a present event tapped lon g-buried memories, the pain was excruciating. Each time, the Spirit’s embrace carried me through it. And once the hold of pain was broken, I was stunned to see how fearful my loving had been. Now, however, I could face fear as fear and embrace it as mine, yet know that I did not face anything alone. When new revelations of my flaws struck me, I was often ashamed. But the Spirit embraced me then as well. As I identified, faced, embraced, and owned these feelings, I found a new freedom in caring, a liberate d compassion, and moments of quiet peace and profound joy.

Meditation 13:

THE IMAGINARY LINE OF DEMARCATION

A loving involvement is    passionate, vulnerable, respectful, and faithful. But how do these descriptive terms apply to everyday interactions? To assist the translation, I often use a visual metaphor offered by a friend. From the perspective offered by the metaphor, we are tangled individuals who inevitably find ourselves at cross-purposes with those we love. To guide us through these situations, it draws an imaginary line of demarcation in the middle of the veritable chasm between us and calls us to come up to the line, fully and freely, without crossing it. We turn away from the call, frightened by the chasm, whenever we capitulate in or withdraw from a face-to-face encounter, and we burn whatever bridges we have erected whenever we cross the line manipulatively or explosively. I.e., we refuse to be vulnerable whenever we fail to come up to the line honestly, and any lapse into power and judgm ent crosses the line disrespectfully. In practice, therefore, we come up to the line without crossing it when we are honest with ourselves, with God, and with others about what we feel and think, owning our own stories, yet longing to rewrite them in a shared history of transforming moments .

                   Meditation

If you find my flights into theory frustrating, skip this meditation. However, if you too use models as an aid to understanding, the imaginary line of demarcation can be a fruitful supplement to the metaphors of the roles we play, the masks we wear, and the repertoire of emotional reactions we have acquired.

Thus, the earlier analysis of habitual reactions played off of flight, which traps us in separate lives and indifference, and fight, which mires us in conflict and resentment. The call to come up to the line without crossing it doubles this polarity, with a focus on thrusts to instant intimacy, manipulations,   capitulations, or withdrawals. It invites us to call a spade a spade by offering an objective perspective on the motives which underlie our reactions and on the consequences which inevitably follow.

The metaphor itself is drawn from the romantic exchanges in which our tangled feelings poured forth, with a life of their own, though we could neither predict nor control the response we longed for. Sometimes timidly, sometimes trustingly, we put ourselves into each other’s care. Note the three-f old structure. ( 1 ) Our passionate ex pressions come from our depths, yet (2) we leave each other free to respond in our own way and time, and (3) we find that we could not have imagined the responses which actually come.

Depicting this structure abstractly, the metaphor focuses on events in which our tangled feelings churn, but do not flow freely.

Memories of romantic interactions are still vivid, and sharing still matters urgently. Ruled by our hidden agendas, however, our quest for unity provokes strains on many levels. Then, when spontaneity is stifled by a weight of memories, passion is transformed into pressure. On occasion, long-practiced emotional transactions release the tension temporarily. In them, however, we dump our outbursts on our loved ones. In effect, we justify our tirades by insisting that this is what we feel, and we remain blind to their sad consequences and to our hidden motivations.

Instant Intimacy

To expose our rationalizations and excuses, the metaphor directs our attention to two sorts of reactions which fail to come up to the line and to two which cross it. The clearest sort, a thrust to instant intimacy, occurs when we are frustrated by intractable barriers to spontaneity and by the futility of our typical initiatives. We erupt, passionately, and the eruption has the force of a natural happening. In person-to-person involvements, however, nothing merely happens. Eruptions, in particular, issue from feelings that are being lost and from fears of being abandoned or betrayed; they aim to restore the free flow of feelings by overcoming resistance  or obliterating obstacles.

Thus, in times of desperate loneliness or hostile silence, spouses often turn to intercourse to bridge the gulf between them. For a time, the tension between them may fuel their sexual passion, which seems to wed an urgent self-assertion with a wild abandonment in a naked union. And as long as the glow of passion silences lost feelings, they may dwell there in memory and action. Soon, however, the dynamics of sexual intercourse take on the features of the everyday interactions between spouses. At the very least, intercourse leaves communication about tangles as limited as before. In time, its intensity exposes the gulf that it is supposed to bridge more brutally than any other exchange. And once either spouse wonders whether intercourse is indeed love-making, it easily degenerates into sexual politics.

Quite obviously, sex cannot bring instant intimacy. Sooner or later, the illusion that intense emotional experiences can restore the high of romantic love will be shattered. Then ,  if spouses hear the call to integrate their sexual encounters into the whole of their personal involvement, sexual intercourse will truly become love-making.

Uncharacteristic explosions of rage also aim at instant intimacy. They issue from an urge to action in face of mounting frustrations and sinking feelings of helplessness, with their judgments of failure and futility. In them, commonplace angers raised to the white heat of rage are supposed to incinerate barriers to closeness, and the propulsive power of rage is supposed to express the depths  of one’s passionate involvement. But volc anic eruptions only dramatize the chasm they are supposed to bridge. They shock both spouses. They are shaken by the violence of their feeling, and by painful, frightening, or disappointing experiences which  underlie our self-protective agendas, on the one hand, and remembered joys and triumphs which persist as desires and expectations, on the other. To see the tangle in living color, imagine a situation in which a husband and wife do not know how to open to the crosses between them in ways that bring new life. Now, a trivial event provokes a struggle in which both are in danger of losing. Operating from  his  socialization as   a male, the husband voices both his longing for union and his frustration in an angry or plaintive plea, “Be reasonable.” Paradoxically, his blissful ignorance of the logic of his assertion blinds him to the violence that it does to his wife.

Reflecting on that logic, even reasonable men can see six clear ways that “Be reasonable” obstructs the journey into their own deepest feelings and  the  journey to  a  deepening intimacy with their wives.

(1) In this plea, regardless of its clothing, the husband claims a privileged position in the dialogue. He pretends that he speaks disinterestedly. Presumably, his detached perspective places him above the battle. Implicitly, it promises a peaceful, joyful, glorious union.

(2) Heavy-handedly, the husband uses this privileged position to invalidate whatever his wife is feeling. From his purportedly god-like stance, he assumes that her feelings about  the issue between them do not provide her with clues that he misses. To   support the arrogant assumption, he draws on  a  cultural tradition which places passion in the category of the  irrational.

(3) To avoid any suggestion that he might be wrong, he uses her history as a girl and woman against her. In effect, he evokes the stereotype of a “dumb blond,” whatever her hair color, natural  or adopted.

(4) Voiced by the man who delighted in her as the woman she is, his words function like the distorting mirrors in a carnival. Echoing criticisms which she encountered in the past, they play on  her fears that she is childish, stupid, or unrealistic or that she needs a man to take care of her.

(5) In fact , he uses the disguise to dump his fears on  her, in  an unacknowledged refusal to take responsibility for his own pain, anger, fear, or shame. She is supposed to fix his turmoil by being reasonable. Reason, then, would free him from -cross-situations which force him to face his tangled feelings.

(6) Finally, the assertion implies that she will, of course, agree with him if she is only reasonable. He wins. To do so, however, he must (a) disguise his frustration as reason, (b) use the authority of reason to hide his flight from the call to speak in his own voice, (c) prostitute reason in the service of his rationalizations, and (d) blind himself to the fact that the assertion, accusation, and judgment inevitably provoke resentment rather than unity of mind, heart, and soul.

An equally pernicious move, the language of needs, has considerable currency in pop psychology. In times of struggle, “I need . . .” differs radically from “I expect . . .” or “I want . . .” From childhood on, we learn that we do not get everything we want or expect. So when I tell you what I want, I indicate a willingness to learn what you might want instead and to face situations in which we find ourselves at cross-purposes. And when I tell you what I expect, I do not hide the contractual nature of my proposal. But when I tell you that I need something, I couch my appeal for your care and concern in terms of necessity and non-negotiability, and I close both ends of the exchange. By defining a need, I need say no more; I make you responsible for my feelings or desires. And by the definition I impose on my tangled depths, I dictate how you must respond. I present myself as a fragile person to disguise the fact that my desire for total control over this issue is nothing less than a fear of life. In this counterfeit of vulnerability, I play on your fears that I might break down or go elsewhere if you fail to meet my needs. And, taken literally, the language of needs has already provided an excuse for whatever I do.

These analyses of appeals to reason and declarations of need may seem dramatic. Please take  them  seriously. The  recipients  of   our assertions react to the internal logics of these words more sensitively than we intend.  In cross-situations, our intentions are at least suspect, for we have surely been known to play  on another’s feelings to achieve some hidden agenda and to tell ourselves that our good intentions excuse us from a perilous journey into      the  unknown.

In fact, if you want a formula for building resentment in your spouse, I can give you one: Be manipulative. And if you want to foster contempt for your spouse, follow the same rule: Be manipulative. The two are intertwined because our longing for intimacy is more enduring than any desire to get what we want in a particular situation. Consequently, even when we succeed in imposing our agendas, we sense the blatant disrespect for our loved ones, and we are ashamed. By long practice, however, we transform our lack of respect into a loss of respect for the capitulators. Angry because they do not trust us enough to meet us at the imaginary line of demarcation, we will soon be criticizing them contemptuously.

In  sum, to face your manipulative reactions, be aware that we often use body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions manipulatively. Remember, too, that we can use any feeling manipulatively. Look not only at intimidating uses of anger, but also at the ways we bestow care as a reward and withdraw care as punishment. Be honest  if you  are enmeshed  in sexual politics. Look for the fears that urge self-protective or self-assertive reactions. And if you criticize your spouse constantly, have the de cen c y to s ee that you are a blatant manipu lator .

Capitulation

The dynamics of manipulation require a corresponding capitulation. Sadly, we may fall into the trap of accusing our loved ones of manipulation, but insist that we are not accomplices in the exchange. For “capitulation” has connotations of abject surrender or fearful submission to force, and we would like to think that we have more courage and dignity than that.

To understand the dynamics of capitulation, however, we can use the word objectively rather than scornfully. In its light, many of us can see that we wear masks which move us to capitulate even when our loved ones are not guilty of manipulation. In effect, we capitulate to the experiences which shaped our self-created identity. Thus, if we are Pleasers, our concern with everyone’s emotional temperature may be inspired by care and compassion. Somehow, though, we translate that care into a desire to make everyone happy, perhaps because we are dreadfully uncomfortable with conflict and want desperately to be loved by all. If so, our habitual reactions can surely be traced to painful, frightening, and confusing events in our past. To keep the memories of them buried, we now avoid anything that would tap our anger or provoke anger in others by fitting fearfully to those around us, whether they expect this or not. Fear holds us back from coming up to the imaginary line of demarcation.

When we can no longer mask our pain from ourselves, we often find ourselves in uncomfortable positions. Frightened by pain’s insistent demand on our attention, we may  want   to  re-bury it. But our masks now feel like prisons, and we  sense that our flight from the cross-situation is motivated by fear. Most likely, the fear has a particular configuration: we cling to the longing to be kind, understanding, or generous because we fear that we will be selfish, weak ,    petty,    childish, demanding, or mean  if   we voice  our pain, anger, fear,   or confusion.

When we first come forth from behind capitulative masks, we may indeed do so badly. I was surely childish when my anger surfaced, since I had never learned to express anger in mature ways. I was blessed; because I could not rebury the anger, I had to face the fact that I did not take up the cross daily and follow Jesus as long as fear held me back from vulnerable honesty. Because my care and concern was truly motivated by a desire for intimacy, I told myself that I was acting nobly, and I do hope that I was never a craven coward. But as long as I let fear rule the emotional reactions which distorted by anger, I did not trust that God can work in honesty.

Temptations to capitulate are commonplace in the last stage of disillusionment and mounting pressure. When silences, arguments, clashes, and compromises have all failed, we try desperately to change ourselves. We hope that we will be loveable and loving if only we can fashion acceptable masks or fit to crazily mixed messages. But efforts to change ourselves have a predictable outcome;  they increase the turmoil within us.

When we finally face our misery, we discover that the tangles etched by capitulation have a distinctive configuration. We find that we are hurting all the time. We glimpse the fears that incline us to conform to the expectations of others. We tire of the endless self-criticism which casts us as deserving victims. We murmur in protest against guilt-trips that paralyze us. We are shocked by eruptions of a smoldering resentment, even when we are not yet ready to insist that we are not as horrible as our guilt trips suggest. We detest ourselves when we wallow in self-pity. And, as the bottom line, we allow a shame-filled loss of self­ respect to remind us that we are accomplices in the repeat performances which are now a living death.

So, blessed are we when we can admit that we have been capitulators, for we can now enter the journey to deepening intimacy as broken people. The day that we take a stand, in personal integrity, is a day for rejoicing. Afterwards, as we face, embrace, and own the multi-faceted fears which have informed our tangled reactions, we may want to retreat. At the very least, our inner journey will evoke memories of wounds inflicted by indifference, criticism, abandonment, rejection, or betrayal. But each such instance in a step in the process of letting go and letting God.

When I faced my guilt-trips, I found that I had much to let go of. In them, I took full blame for missed communications, disappointed expectations, confusing misunderstandings, disturbing conflicts, and even violence against myself. I told myself that I should have anticipated the reactions of those I loved, that I should be more patient and understanding, and even that I should be perfect as my heavenly Father was perfect. I accepted the excuses of others, but could never forgive my own failures. Believing that I should be able to make everything good, true, and beautiful, I condemned myself to capitulative reactions. I may have wanted to blame those who dared to be involved with me, prickly as I was, for failing to see that I was intimidated by their anger. But I was an accomplice to the dynamics of capitulation and manipulation.

When I faced my old nemesis, the nursing of grievances, I discovered that this capitulative move had a manipulative intent as well. Thus, in these reactions, I did not grieve. Instead of embracing my deepest feelings, I stored up the pain and nursed the anger while I waited for the chance to retaliate. I wanted transactions in which I could capitulate until I could use the pain against my loved ones without shame. Fortunately, such an occasion could never come. So when I was ready to pass through the portal of shame, I entered a process which could heal the festering wounds which nursing grievances perpetuated.

Withdrawal

Both capitulation and withdrawal fail to come up to the imaginary line of demarcation, but they have different thrusts. When we give in, we are still emotionally involved, and buried feelings will soon alert us to the way we treat others. In withdrawal, we have given up; we are taking the path to indifference and to separate lives.

The dynamics of giving up also differs from detachment, though both let go of futile struggles. In detachment, we go apart with God to sort out our churning feelings, to discover what we really want to do or say, and  to wait  until  we  can respond  creatively.   In withdrawal, we submit to judgments which revolve around a single theme: “Since no one understands or cares and nothing  ever changes, what’s the use?”

Even in the height of romantic love, we all give up on countless occasions. We may believe that we can tell each other anything and everything, but in our past we buried pain, anger, fear, and shame when others did not care how we felt or criticized what we did or said. Until we break the hold of these wounds by identifying, embracing, and owning the tangled feelings, we withdraw from interactions which might tap them.

Our past may also incline us to move from acceptance to withdrawal rather than to surrender. In a later meditation, we will look at the notion of GIVING which lies at the core of life in the FAST­lane. To  enter  this   process, we    admit  that    we   cannot FORGIVE until we have walked through buried pain, fear, anger, and shame, have acknowledged the futility of  fight or flight, and are  now ready to get on with our lives. With this three-fold acceptance, we face the situation realistically, for the first time. But  as  long  as we fail to identify and let go of our crippling judgments and controlling agendas. we remain mired in acceptance. These, too, must go, in a step of surrender, before we can GIVE ourselves, warts and all, in passionate, vulnerable,  respectful,  and faithful interactions with those we love. Otherwise, we tend to go round and round, substituting memories of wounds and transaction for memories  of   interactions which  were pregnant   with infinity. In  so doing, we    GIVE UP  the longing for intimacy and the hope   of new life in each other’s love. We transform love into tolerance and the acceptance of life, with its crosses, into the acceptance of a dull, if  comfortable and controllable, routine .

The internal and external signs that withdrawal is becoming a way of life demand attention. In place of the sadness and misery which dominates the last stage of mounting pressure, we are generally lifeless and apathetic, often depressed and profoundly hopeless. If intense feelings occasionally surface, they are either an aching loneliness, tinged with a sense of loss, or a certain  dissociation—from ourselves, experienced as an absence of. personal feelings. Insidiously, the judgment that no one cares about our thoughts and feelings has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We do not care enough to make them our own, and, in a refusal to risk, we do not allow anyone to embrace us or respond to our tangles. We lock ourselves in, cut ourselves off from life, and condemn ourselves to a carefully guarded isolation, even if we remain in a union of separate lives.

Summary

Thrusts to instant intimacy, manipulation, capitulation, and withdrawal depict obstacles to intimacy. But few of our reactions fall clearly into one category. Our reactions, like our feelings and judgments, are always tangled.

Thus, when we withdraw in pain or confusion, we usually hope that our loved ones will notice our emotional absence and be jolted into some pursuit. So, too, when we capitulate, we often seek a control which is, in its own way, as direct as when we manipulate. When we manipulate, we often yield what we must to get what we want. And, if we dare to trace these strategies to our masks, we may see, in a paraphrase of the poet, the tangled webs we weave as we practice to deceive.

When we see how little we give of the persons we are, we do well to view our interactions in light of these obstacles. We may begin with conversations which cover events of the day, concerns about the children, the lives of friends, household matters, and the like. But  if we hope for a distinctively personal involvement, we must move to exchanges which express our feelings towards each other, i.e., to face-to-face encounters at the imaginary line of demarcation.

Meditation 14:

COMING UP TO THE LINE:        THE PROCESS

“At first, I refused to believe that I crossed your imaginary line of demarcation when I placed expectations on my husband. Some of the demands on my list might be questionable, but surely, if I could expect him to be faithful, expectations couldn’t be so bad. The first step in my conversion was the admission that I resented expectations he placed on me. And I became the worst sort of convert when he reminded me that I expect him to make my birthday special because he loves me madly, not because I’ll be furious if he doesn’t. Now, we both laugh when I tell him that he had better not be faithful because I expect it. These exchanges have come to mean a lot to me. I’m trying to tell him that I’ll always be faithful to him because I’m committed to him. And, when I’m fearful, I’m reminding him that infidelity would wound me grievously. And, frankly, I’m expecting him to reassure me that he loves me.”

Marrie d student, 1988.

Meditation

In interactions which are pregnant with infinity, lovers are involved in each other’s long buried and crazily tangled feelings. They enter more deeply into each other’s lives when, instead of assigning blame, they share responsibility for empty or wounding exchanges.

In the preceding meditation, we used the imaginary line of demarcation to illuminate versions of the victim-villain game. Here, the metaphor can help us explore five crucial features of the process of letting go and letting God.

These reflections draw on earlier meditations. Recall the following: (1) Love, in any form, plunges us into personal involvements in which all human feelings are tapped. (2) Any refusal to put the entire range of uniquely personal responses into one another’s care silences a passionate longing for ever-deeper sharing. (3) Though our long-practiced emotional reactions seem spontaneous, they are unconscious refusals to be honest with ourselves, God, and one another about our churning feelings, acquired prejudices, disguised judgments, and hidden agendas. (4) Since we have been shaped by our personal histories, we cannot pretend to speak from a god-like perspective or to tell the authorized version of any story involving our loved ones. (5) Inevitably, their versions assign different roles and impute different motives to both them and us. ( 6) Clear1y, then, any story in which we assign a role to or pass a judgment on our loved ones or ourselves threatens to ensnare us in the game of victim-villain. (7) To avoid futile accusations, stubborn defenses, and silly excuses, we can use our stories to own our present feelings, judgments, and reactions, to place them in each other’s care, to await new revelations, and to find ways to extend our shared story into a future full of life and love.

All these points appear in experiences which call us to be honest with ourselves, with God, and with our loved ones about what we feel and think, real or imagined. And that is the call to enter the process of letting go and letting God.

I-Statements

To come up to the line without crossing it; we must speak in I­statements. In each such statement, we tell a story which can be retold from different perspectives and extended into the past or future. Inevitably, stories generate other stories.

Consider situations in which we are hurt by the thoughtlessness, pettiness, or meanness of loved ones. We can voice the pain in two very different ways. We speak from one of the polar opposites when we say “You hurt me” or, if we pretend to love the sinner but hate the sin, “Your action hurt me.” In either instance, we lull ourselves into believing that we send an uncomplicated message. Implicitly, we deny the influence of our expectations, fears, wounds, or just plain childishness by placing responsibility for our pain on our spouses. For the coded message in such assertions is inherently accusatory. It situates the conversation in the game of victim-villain.

Speaking from the opposite pole, we might say, “I’m hurting.” Given the penchant for assigning responsibility in social discourse, this assertion feels awkward. Nonetheless, it is the only assertion in which we own the pain as our own. And if our loved  ones   can     trust  that  we     thereby  place  ourselves in  their care, without judgment or expectation, we free them to respond in their own way and time.

In class, I analyze “You made me angry” to show how many things go wrong when I introduce my story with a sentence in which another person is the grammatical subject. To dramatize the issue, I first set a scene in which an anonymous person has been cruel rather than merely thoughtless. I then insist that I disown my anger if I make that person responsible for it. Invariably, many students react passionately. They voice angry protests against violence, or they point out that actions have consequences and that we must be held responsible for our actions. In either instance, they give reasons which reveal a crucial distinction between social exchanges and person-to-person int eracti ons.

In social transactions, we play roles, enter contracts, and bargain with one another. To play this game of reward and punishment, we must determine who is responsible for what. In a marriage in Christ, we have a very different form of life. (1) Thus, if I

make you or your behavior the issue, I imply that you must change, that I have a right to punish you, or that you must make reparation for your wickedness. You have no way of knowing which demand I am voicing. Besides, the anger is mine, and I must determine what I want to do about it. (2) In my self-presentation, I focus exclusively on my anger. But my emotional reaction is rooted in my personal history, revolves around a judgment and strategy, and disguises tangled feelings. If my statement’s accusatory form provokes a dance of anger, we avoid each other’s long buried and crazily tangled feelings. And if we transform the conflict into a problem to be solved, we privilege action over understanding, surface over depth. (3) All our interactions are also influenced by events in our shared history. Consequently, I may be using the accusation in a childish retaliation for an event in which you were thoughtless, angry, mean, or cruel, or to punish you for being no different from others who wounded me in the past. By focusing my story on you, I do not have to sort out my own motives, question my intentions, or consider the consequences of crossing the imaginary line of demarcation.

In marked contrast, I-statements preclude closure. As the understanding man who centered conversations in the thoughts and feelings of others, my first

I-statements were largely reactive. E.g., when friends suggested that I was angry, I denied it emphatically, only to discover that my pompous assertions set me  up for their fond laughter. Later, when I could tell friends what I was feeling at the moment, I found that I had committed myself to share memories which surfaced, to acknowledge that I began with an emotional reaction rather than my deeper feelings, and to hope that they did not find me as childish or absurd as I felt.

In sum, our stories concerning a present event begin with   an emotional reaction.  If we own that reaction, we commit ourselves to an expanded story in which we sort out our tangled reactions, learn to place the feelings we uncover at the line of demarcation, and discover the ways that  we have crossed    the line from the stories told by our  loved ones. Then , as our differing accounts of the same interaction inspire us to retell our stories again and again, we inevitably find care, compassion, playfulness and joy entering into our conversations.

Hopefully, we also find ourselves telling each other when a smile delights us, a gentle touch warms us, or a memory fills us with gratitude to God. These are graced moments which we too often take for granted or fail to share with one another. And, Lord knows, for most of us, there were countless times when we were blunt about our pain and anger.

“I Feel Like Doing/Saying . . .”

Our habitual reactions are triggered by events which tap feelings that we buried throughout our formative years. When we are ready to embr ace and own them, these reactions are our points of entry. But long buried feelings do not surface automatically when we catch ourselves before we react. To release them, we must retrace the histories of the many emotional reactions in our repertoire.

The most effective way to undertake this inner journey is to face what we feel like doing or saying. Once again, anger provides a paradigm example. Thus, once I longed to be free of nursing grievances, I relived trigger-events again and again in my journaling . At first, I was shocked when I saw how my inner turmoil pushed and pulled me in many directions. But when I viewed the churning in terms of what I felt like doing, I had to laugh, for my entire repertoire of reactions for expressing anger lay bare before me. I had to recognize that each revolved around a particular judgment and strategy. In time, that insight also released a flood of memories which threw light on their different roots. I saw that the primary motivation of one sort of angry reaction might well be fear, of another, pain, of  yet another, shame. And these feelings, like the anger itself, might have a different shape in each instance.

In my journaling, I also played out the grievances I was nursing in a seemingly endless stream of imaginary conversations. Initially, I supposed that I must be doing something wrong, since each such conversation seemed to repeat the preceding one. They all had the same structure: I set the stage for a remark by the other person which allowed me to say, irrefutably, what I wanted to say. As I reread the entries later, however, I saw that each outpouring addressed a different memory and that I was in fact letting go more than it seemed in my everyday life. With that awareness, the role of the imagination in the grieving process became more and more evident. To grieve over and let go of these buried memories, I had to let them surface in imaginary conversations. Only then could the hold of buried feelings be broken, to free me to come up to the line without crossing it.

Once I could face what I felt like doing and saying, I could also ask myself what I really wanted to do or say. And when I did or said what I wanted to do or say, I was more willing to take full responsibility for either, regardless of the outcome. I found a new peace in letting go and letting God.

Leave Each Other Free

When my actions or words express what I want to do or say, I am less likely to cross the imaginary line of demarcation. I.e., I am more likely to leave you free to respond in your own way and time.

Thus, as I relive an event in terms of what I feel like doing or saying, I tell myself many stories of how you might react to my initiatives. If I have entered into the grieving process imaginatively , I will surely ima gine you reacting with denial, anger, bar gai ning, and depression when I fail to come up to the line or cross it. In fact, I do well to expect such reactions on your part. For this is  the  rare expectation which leaves you free and helps me to be less judgmental as you go through the process also.

As we wait at the line, resisting urges to make something happen, we do well to remember the dictum quoted earlier: “We must wait on God, because we do not know how much work God has to do in us or in the other person to prepare us to receive the gift.”

And we do well to remind ourselves that our lives provide so much material for incorporation in creative responses. Consequently, I must plead for time if you want a response that comes from my depths and speaks uniquely to the mysterious depths you have revealed to me.

Note, therefore, that the process of letting go and letting God voices two calls to wait. The awareness that we are strangers to ourselves calls us to come apart with Father, Jesus, and Spirit, while Spirit moves in our tangled depths. And the awareness that we cannot read our loved ones like a book calls us to wait until the Father’s providence presents the occasion which reveals that our loved ones have passed through their grieving process.

Never Take Any Statement As Final

When I worked with couples in trouble, the first few meetings  were often filled with outpourings of rage. To prevent them from giving up, I had them promise that they would return one more time if they ever decided to call a halt to our talks. And it often happened that a husband would begin a session with a mournful declaration that they would no longer be coming, since they were wasting my time. The grounds for that judgment were always the same. Sitting in my office while I drew the wife out, he felt, in his gut, how angry she was at him. In his words, he now knew how she really felt about him. She might be able to be kind to him on the surface because she was a good person. But, deep down, there was no hope of reconciliation.

Fortunately, most of the wives in question rejected the fearful judgment, sometimes with outrage, sometimes with frank bemusement. They knew that we had passionate involvements to work with, as well as a lot of learning to do. Their anger went deep, but so did other feelings.

Here, I suggest that our interactions will always be flaw ed. And, as we will see, forgiveness  is a process which must take us into the depths  of our          pain, anger, fear,   and shame before it can transform us in ways that lead us to responses to the cross-situations which can lead us to new life in each other’s love. So please hear the cry: “Love me, warts and all.”

Be Willing to Return Again and Again, But Not for a Repeat Performance

Emotional reactions mire us in repeat performances. When we reflect on such reactions in terms of what we feel and feel like doing or saying, we glimpse the history of our tangles, release buried feelings, expose crippling judgments, and let go of hidden agendas. Recognizing that the event is pregnant with infinity, we relive it with Jesus, wait until we have some sense of what we want to do or say, and entrust the outcome of any action to God, knowing that God works through our flaws as well as our virtues.

In a marriage in Christ, then, we know that we can voice responses to flawed reactions of our spouses even if our fumbling efforts  to place ourselves in their care trigger angry struggles or despairing withdrawals. Aware of our limitations, we let our stories speak for themselves, in the hope that those who love us will remain involved with us even when they tap the worst within us. And we willingly retell those stories when we have heard each other’s versions, relived our tangled responses with the Spirit, and find that the Father’s providence has presented an occasion for deeper involvement with one another.

 Challenge

A marriage in Christ calls us to a life of poetry rather than prose. Prose inevitably suffocates us in routine. To escape this sad fate, we need not be poets in language. We need only embrace our wounded humanity, our personal histories, and our deepest longings in encounters which allow for graced moments. In these situations, we come up to a line of demarcation without crossing it, willing to interact poetically as we search for words which encompass what we feel and think.

Meditation 17:

ACCEPTANCE AND SURRENDER

( 1) "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faith, mildness, and chastity."

Galatians 5, 23.

( 2) "When you gave examples of the impersonality  of repeat performances         in class, it seemed that  you  had witnessed recent struggles between  me and   my husband. So I got excited  about letting go, to let God work. And once I got the hang of it, I was more peaceful.  But I sure wasn't happy, and it wasn't long before I understood your reference to the  desert  experience. I didn't do well with that, because I always wanted more . Somehow, though, I learned to wait. And I have to smile when I think that I kept wondering what more I should be doing to let go and let God.

    I guess I had to learn how to be still before I could be me."

Student, 1985.

(3)             Do not give to me that which

I can handle.

Give to me more. More than is possible for me to face, to fix, to feel.

Rage the flames of my hardships and flood the land of my soul.

Make me cry out in anguish for your help, then do not answer my cry.

Pour salt into my wounds.

Break my bones with the weight of your power. Bring me to my knees in pain so that there

I may begin to pray for relief.

Then do not comfort me nor heal my wounds. Make it so that when I fall I  cannot get up, and when I  crawl, seeking shelter,

I do not find any.

Quench not my thirst;    feed not my hunger.

Lead me to and into a suffering so excruciating

that no amount of my strength would be sufficient enough to endure.

Maybe then and only then Will I reach for you.

Let you ...

Love me,

Help me,

Save me.

Marianne Parker, 1998.

(4)  ''I have at times believed the illusion that one is born with serenity and joy and these two states of mind have nothing to do with honesty and integrity. I then wonder if it is advantageous to me to walk the twelve-step journey. But a burning bush inevitably appears and shows me that regardless of the outcomes of serenity and joy, living a conscious life with integrity and honesty is the right path for me. And, oddly enough, joy and serenity appear.”

Letter from Rick Winking, 1999.

Meditation

When we accept our situation as it is, we experience the peace which is promised in the Serenity Prayer. But acceptance cannot bring the more abundant life promised by Jesus. That comes only with surrender.

The selections above were chosen because they address the difficult passage from acceptance to surrender. The poem voices a profound awareness that only broken people can truly surrender. The first quote expresses the impatience and confusion that seizes broken people when the peace conferred by a hard-won detachment is not accompanied by a joy in life. Restlessly, we wonder what more we ought to be doing to surrender to God's loving word.

To help us wait on God, we do well to enjoy the peace that accompanies acceptance. Thus, when we accept ourselves or our loved ones as we are, we are no longer bedeviled by childish fantasies, socially-sanctioned expectations, burdensome idealizations, implacable judgments, manipulative strategies, or fearful disguises. Facing events head-on, we no longer judge that what we are experiencing should not be happening to us, and we abandon emotional reactions which have become boringly routine. Still, we somehow sense that relief over the absence of turmoil is not yet the peace which Paul includes among the gifts of the Spirit. With the release of tension, we feel a freedom to move. But it is far more important that our detachment has created room for the Spirit to move within our long surrendered longings. Consequently, as we yield to the Spirit, we await a surrender which will plunge us into life with a creative energy.

Recall my earlier suggestion that a peace within and a joy in life are the surest signs that we are walking humbly with God.  Sadly, many religious leaders offer counterfeits in their desire to assure their followers that they are among the elect. On TV, in particular, they promise that an intense  emotional experience of being justified by faith alone will save one from past, present, and future sins. But this sin-centered view of salvation deflects those who adopt it from the journey to deepening intimacy with each of the three divine Persons. Presumably, the intense experience confers an instant intimacy with God. But there is no instant intimacy. And on the journey to intimacy, the most trustworthy joy and peace is that which we experience as we face our daily crosses with the longing for new life in each other's love.

Typically, when we are ready to let God's love transform us, we place ourselves in God's care with the declaration, “Lord, this is what you have to work with," and we place ourselves in each other's care with the plea, "Love me, warts and all." And in this humble honesty, the Spirit can lead us deep within ourselves, for self­discovery and the healing of wounds.

My own moti ves for surrendering to the Spirit were surely less than noble. I was tired of counterproductive struggles with those I loved , and I had grown weary of the imagin ary conversations which left me isolated and lonely. In the desert with Jesus, I felt as though a crushing burden had been lifted. But I was also haunted by my inability to say a full yes to life, and the rare occasions when I was surprised by joy made me painfully aware of a lingering depression. In this brokenness, I finally said a halting yes to the process of transfor mation.

Several features of the process stand out in my memory. Initially, I  believe God spoke to me through my  passi on to know    and understand. Thus , once I began to accept flaws in myself and other s, the Father's providence con front ed me with events in which I dealt comfortably with traits in others which my friends found intolera ble , and vice versa. I had to wonder why I was at ease with some craziness, but reacted crazil y to behaviors which others ignored or found amusing. In time, I had to    admit that my frustrations  told me far more about myself than about anyone who tapped my tangles. Then, as I probed these human quirks, I belatedly learned that southern Christians  had  attributed  the institution of slavery to God, though we now find it to be both personally and morally intolerable. To understand them, I had to face my own temptation to normalize conditions of life or emotiona l reactions which I did not know how to change. Thereafter, I resisted any identification betwee n acceptance and normalizat io n , in favor of a desire to discern what God might be doing in the situation.

Once I questioned acceptance intellectually , I thanked God that I could finally take this step,   but I  also thanked God that acceptance was only a temporary stage  in the journey. Had I remained stuck in this stance, resentment would have recaptured me. Again, I thank the Father's providence for the events which led to  my encounters  with the Spirit. For I now had to learn to wait while      the  Spirit moved within me, healing wounds,  casting  out fears, embracing  me in ways that dissipated my shame, and, even more  incredibly , teaching  me to    express anger vulnerably and  respectfully on a least some occasions.

At the time, I did not understand the subtle ways that the Spirit enabled me to entrust my life to the Father's providence, as Jesus did. That understandin g came many years later , through a woman who shared her journey  with  me.  From her childhood, God had been central to her life. Nonetheless, in mid-life she experienced a severe depression which forced her to face the fact that she had never really trusted God. As was my habit, I insisted that God’s words to her would always be words of love. Over time, as she sat in prayer, God revealed the roots of her inability to trust. Unbeknownst to her, she had always feared that God would ask something of her that she was unable to do and that she would thereafter be overwhelmed with shame. Fearing the shame of helplessness and failure, she could not listen to God in the cross­situations in her life, though she wanted always to please God.

As she shared her story with me, a central root of my resistance to God flashed before my eyes. With a very different socialization and personal history, I had long struggled with a rebellion located somewhere beyond reach within me. As a young priest, I had alternated between passionate involvement and abrupt withdrawal. Initially, my involvements were life-giving, but when I became over-involved, I got lost without knowing it. In particular, I did not know how to listen to my longing for thoughtfulness on the part of those who wanted my care and concern. So, following the dictates of the committee in my head, I buried the anger which was triggered by their real or imagined thoughtlessness. In effect, I supposed that this committee voiced God's demand that I never be angry.

I had to rebel against an imagined God who called me to excise anger from my life, for there were only two ways that I could do that. One was self-mutilation. The other was a stance of indifference. By embracing me in my bitterness and resentments, the Spirit rejected both. And I was freed to hear the Spirit call me to creative involvement in and through my all human feelings. When I responded, there was joy in those involvements.

The relationship between personal integrity and entrusting one's life to God is eloquently expressed in the quote which depicts the troublesome interplay between illusion and reality. Paradoxically, surrender is a step of utmost simplicity, but we cannot take it without struggles. Tangled as we are, we must first abandon our savior-com plexes , admit that we are not God, face that fact that we cannot live in splendid isolation, confess that we do not know how to bring new life out of the cross-situations which upset us, and listen for the call to live with honesty and integrity , regardless of the consequences. Then, when we respond to calls with peace, we can act, while leaving the outcome up to God.

Surrender, therefore, is neither a decision nor an event which happens once. At any moment, anger at the flaws of those  we once idealized may complicate our longing to place ourselves vulnerably and respectfully into their care, since that requires that we leave them free to respond in their own way and time.     And buried anger over God's apparent absence in painful experiences in our past may be a hidde n obstacle to entrusti ng ourselves and our lives to God. We always have tangles which have not yet been tapped. As we yield to God’s  word of love at work within us, however, the words we speak and the actions we take with integrity allow God to prepare us to receive the gift. We let God transform us from tangled individuals to persons whose delight in our uniqueness and humanity frees us for joyful interactions with one another. For surrender to God's healing love, by adding trust to acceptance, frees us for a more abundant life in Christ.

Meditation 18: CROSS-RESURRECTION

"I cannot understand my own actions. I do not do what I want to do but what I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

“I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD , your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” (Deu teronomy 30: 19b-20a)

"I came that they might have life and have it to the full."

(John 10:10b)

 “ . . . I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me. . . . I assure you, as often as you neglected to do it to one of these least ones, you neglected to do it to me.”   (Matthew 25:40b,45b)

There is a gift in every cross.

SKIP THE FOLLOWING?

I once met with a couple who had to choose between the life or death of their marriage. The wife took everything personally. When she was hurt by something her husband did or said, she  locked in, shutting him out, but bristled with anger. Her hostile reactions sent an implicit message, "Get out of my life; I don't need this hassle, and I don't want this continual hurting." And  by the time they came to talk, he acted like a beaten man just waiting for the axe to fall. He never knew what would provoke her wrath. As their marriage hung in the balance, they chose life. To  renew their care, compassion, playfulness, and delight in each other, however, they first had to embrace their own and each other's pain and anger. In the process, they learned that the inseparability of cross and resurrection.

Meditation

In the quote from John's Gospel noted above, Jesus tells us that he came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Sadly, this statement is virtually ignored by Christians who emphasize that Jesus came to save us from our sins.

Jesus’ intima te involvem ent with us offers both a fullness of life and a liberation from sin. But a theology which begins with the gift of life understands both sin and the crucifixion very differently from theologies centered in salvation from sin.

Theologies centered in sin view sin as disobedience to God, the Creator and Lord. In the stories which underlie them, Adam's disobedience introduced a total break

in the relationship between God and Adam and his offspring. A just God had to pronounce the verdict of eternal condemnation which our collective guilt deserved. But a merciful God decreed that the eternal Word would become flesh in order to make a fitting reparation for our offences by a sacrificial death on a cross. And because Jesus loved us enough to obey this just demand, he restored our relationship with God and added the gift of eternal life.

In marked contrast, John's Gospel proclaims that the eternal Word became flesh to share intimately in our lives , in love following on love. In this Incarnational theology, we sin whenever we turn away from our personal involvement with Jesus, Father, Spirit, or one another. Succinctly, when we sin, we are unfaithful rather than disobedient. All too often, we break with intimacy without realizing that we thereby turn away from the fullness of life in God's love and in the love of one another. In terms of earlier meditat ions , we react to painful experiences with fight or flight. Then, as our ruptures with our loved ones leave us full of holes, we try to fill the emptiness with pleasure, possessions, power, fame, or the like. With each such move, however, we bury our pain and shame deeper and deeper and become more and more isolated. To renew our involvement with each of the three divine Persons and with our loved ones, we must embrace, own, and grieve over our buried pain, pass through the portal of shame, choose life, and face daily crosses faithfu lly. When we are ready to do so, we find that Jesus walks with us every step of the  journey.

In John's gospel message, therefore, the Cross and the resurrection are an inseparable sign of Jesus' everfaithful love, regardless of our many infidelities. One like us in everything but sin, Jesus experienced disappointments, abandonment, and betrayal, and, like some of us, he was treated brutally. In his resurrection, he revealed that even a cruel crucifixion could not diminish his  passionate, vulnerable, respectful, and faithful love for each one of us. He still lives among us as the Risen Christ.

Recall the events in Jesus's life that we relive every Holy Week. In earlier stories which set the stage for these events, Jesus faced increasing hostility on the part of the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Aware that their opposition to him was coming to a head and that Judas had betrayed him to them, he wanted to have one last meal with his disciples. Afterwards, he went to the Garden to pray. There, he asked his special friends, Peter, James, and John, to watch with him as he struggled to accept what lay ahead. Pulled to flight or flight, he experienced such intense aguish that blood burst through his skin. Yet, when he returned to his friends for comfort, he found them sleeping.

Pause for a moment to reflect on Jesus’ anguish. In the Garden, he surely glimpsed the pain experienced by human beings throughout the course of history, past, present, and to come. That pain includes the violence we inflict on one another and the pangs we feel when we separate from parents on the way to individuality. In his intimate involvement with all of us, Jesus feels whatever is experienced by each and every human being. Consequently, to  remain faithful in his love for us, he had to embrace all that pain. His anguish, therefore, was occasioned by his commitment to us far more than by any dread of physical pain or death. And to find his friends asleep must have added a piercing wound. Yet, imagine how he voiced the words, "Could you not watch one hour with me?" And be aware that the tone you use in your imagining may tell you a great deal about yourself.

Taken prisoner, Jesus was abandoned by his followers, and Peter fearfully denied that he knew the man. In the following hours, Jesus was mocked, crowned with thorns, scourged, and walked the journey marked by the Stations of the Cross. Then, as he hung naked on the cross , he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Throughout these events, Jesus embraced the pain involved in loving us and passed through the portal of shame that we dread so much. Now , as the Risen Christ, he is with us whenever we are inclined to break with integrity and fidelity. If we listen to the Spirit, as he did, we will follow a path to new life, knowing that Jesus walks each step of the way with us. In his embrace, we can let go  of the habitual reactions which perpetuate the hold of buried pain and shame.

Consequently, whenever we find ourselves at cross-purposes  with our loved ones , we are faced with a choice of life or death. Given our socialization, we are pulled to bury pain, and we fail to  see that each such reaction is a little death. Indeed,  we may not hear the cry for life arising from our depths until we are far advanced on the path of death. But if we live in Christ, our involvement with each other's long-buried and crazi ly tangled feelings leads to new life in each other's love.

Seeing that pain and shame are the roots of the infidelities which bring living death can help us open ourselves to the Spirit's embrace. Pain evokes both a fear of future wounds and an angry cry for life. When fear triumphs, we tame the anger by erecting defenses, nursing grievances, capitulating to the expectations of others, playing  the martyr, or turning the anger upon ourselves. In so doing, we die slowly  from the  loss of se lf-respect . At the same time, suppressed anger retains its urgency in resentments which eat us alive. And if we instead separate anger from the particular pain whose voice it is, we set ourselves up for free-floating rage. Fearful lest we lose control, we then pick fights to vent our feelings, or we dump our anger on our loved ones as we walk out the door. But these arguments do little more than release tension. They do not change our ways of interacting. Then, though we erupt in the desire to clear away all the barriers between us and our loved ones, we only inflict wounds which widen the gap we long to bridge. Hopefully, we then realize that we are isolating ourselves and that the only unbearable pain is pain which is borne alone.

Thus, whenever we flee from a daily cross, our self-absorption virtually silences our care, compassion, creativity, and joy. Consequently, as long as we dull our pain, we cannot be fully present to others in their pain. When we do face our pain, many of us discover that our barriers to intimacy did not come from violent clashes or abusive acts. We erected them, block by block, from buried feelings, from disappointed expectations, from repeat performances that become boring, from  rationalizations  and excuses, and from surrendered longings. As the barriers mounted, so did the pressure exerted by our passionate depths. Now, to resist the mounting pressure, we choose death if we try to bury the feelings even deeper or if we pressure our loved ones to satisfy our expectations or unlock our tangled depths. In either instance, we remain in bondage to pain.

Remember once again that Jesus wants to love us into a fully human and uniquely personal existence. We turn away from his love—and from our full humanity—when we disown our deepest feelings, with all their tangles. But the Spirit moves in them, including those we struggle most to bury, so that they may come to new life in Christ's love. To receive that gift, we must learn to give our pain, anger, fear, and shame to one another as freely as we give our care, compassion, playfulness, and joy.

The learning process involves the interplay of head and heart. In effect, we must reverse the process of socialization which transformed our feelings into emotional reactions. In crippling ways, the judgments embodied in these reactions blame others for what we feel, while the agendas they promote inevitably exert pressure. Until we catch ourselves in or after the reaction, we cannot be honest about what we feel and think, real or imagined, and we do not leave our loved ones free to respond  in their own way and time. To give such gifts, we must expose the long-practiced judgments and strategies which trigger our emotional reactions, identify, embrace, and own what we feel, go through the grieving process , and thereby learn how to wait for our loved ones to do the same.

The Spirit works through both the intellectual and emotional poles. If we go apart, in stillness, the Spirit will illuminate the dynamics of our fruitless struggles to change ourselves, our loved ones, or our situation. But, in a paraphrase of Paul, even if we come to understand the roots of our actions, there is no salvation through insight. We must journey through the emotional tangles which trap us into the reactions we now abhor.

When we face what we feel honestly, we must not ask others to affirm what we feel. Misled by psychobabble, we may view such affirmation as a sign of unconditional love or as a support for “our truth” of for “who we are.” When we do, we plead for responses which were denied us in childhood. But anyone who submits to the plea when we are adults does us the disservice of treating us as children. For our cries embody a hidden pattern of dependence, and their affirmations simply reinforce our childish ways of acting out our feelings. In the terminology forged by Al Anon, they are Enablers.

We are better served by those who love us, but refuse to love us blindly. When they cross us, sometimes bluntly, their insights can penetrate the denials with which we greet God's call to lose our lives in order to find them. Their words can strip our rationalizations and excuses of legitimacy, especially when we are tempted to play the game of victim-villain or to engage in manipulation and capitulation. Their glances can expose our efforts to present the childish fights we pick as reasonable arguments dedicated to establishing innocence and guilt. In countless ways, they unmask our self-protective identities.

But insights cannot free us from the hold of buried feelings. The socially sanctioned judgments we used to bury our intensely personal feelings could not kill them. They merely distanced us from our own depths. Now, as Paul notes, these tangled feelings control us, without us knowing how or why. And to escape from the repeat performances which they trigger, we must let the Spirit move in our minds and hearts, to heal and guide us. The Spirit will urge us to face our daily crosses with Jesus, as the path to lives of deeper intimacy.

Meditation 19:

THE SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE

A Sacrament: making holy.

Some years ago, my niece went on a Woman’s Week-End in the Woods, complete with witches and rituals. Later, she was uneasy over the fact that it was a profoundly religious experience. When I reacted enthusiastically, she blurted out, “But it was so pagan.” And, of course, it was. After all, pagans were deeply religious people. Living close to nature, they projected finite gods and goddesses as personifications  of natural or cultural forces, and when they. gathered in cities, they often sacralized society by deifying their rulers. It remained for us, in the Modern Era, to celebrate the disenchantment of nature, the secularization of society, and the myth of the autonomous individual. And with the advent of secular societies, atheism was for the first time conceivable. Now, though God is always with us, we must seek God if we wish to be touched with the sacred.

Meditation

The conversation with my niece has dominated my reflections on the Sacraments which perpetuate my Catholic community.

It came at a time when, as a philosopher, I could no longer subscribe to the Medieval dualism between spirit and matter. As the framework for this dualism, Medieval philosophy depicted a hierarchical structure descending from God, through angels, to humans, to animals and plants, and finally to matter. All human beings whose souls are made in the image of God long to rise up to God, but the bodies of these offspring of Adam pull them earthward. As they struggle, the sacraments, through the use of materials drawn from the earth, are supposedly channels of sanctifying grace, which make them holy, and actual grace, which enable them to do good.  In a particular  horrible  illustration  in my catechism lessons, the sacraments are like gas pumps which fill us with grace whenever we receive  them.

The Medieval framework, with its hierarchical structure, cannot accommodate the words of God which sent Abram forth on a journey into the unknown. These words, as much as the authority of science, contributed to the disenchantment of nature and the desacralization of society in western culture and civilization. God’s words detached Abram from nature and tribe and initiated a covenant whereby Abram, son of Terah, became Abraham of Yahweh.

In this early story, the covenant was categorical. With no if’s, and’s, or but’s, God was Israel’s God, and Israel was God’s chosen people . When the blessings promised to Abraham and his descendants seemed to be constantly deferred, however, the Deuteronomic tradition recast the covenant in conditional form, to absolve God of any blame. In terms of such a covenant, when Israel obeyed the Mosaic Law and the Ten Commandments, God blessed her, but when Israel disobeyed, God had to punish her. In the crisis of faith occasioned by the Exiles, however, God used Hosea’s passionate love for his unfaithful wife Gomer to voice an unprecedented understanding of the covenant. Realizing that he could not abandon or punish her, despite her repeated infidelities, Hosea understood that God’s covenant with Israel was like a marriage-union. In effect, he saw that God does not lapse into fight or flight when we do not respond to God’s call and promise. Rather, God’s everfaithful love is our only security on our journey into the unknown.

The story of the call to Abram and Hosea’s metaphor provide the framework for my understanding of the Sacramental system. From its perspective, we live in the midst of nature, with its impersonally operating forces, and we have harnessed nature to an economic system which also operates impersonally. For the touch of the sacred, we depend on God’s covenant with us, including God’s willingness to come to us through one another. In the Sacraments, we welcome God into our lives and promise to make our interactions with one another holy. The Sacraments, then, are the distinctive promises we make to God and to one another as we embrace God’s kingdom here on earth.

What, then, constitutes the holy? Or, in a variation on that theme, where do we encounter the sacred in its most insistent calls and most urgent promises? Unquestionably, the paradigm instances can be found in the graced moments which touch us personally, though God’s passionate love can speak through any means at hand.

Thus , when I am apart with God and nature, I am often overwhelmed with an almost mystical awe and reverence, and God has spoken to me in countless ways through creation. But nature is not holy; its forces operate impersonally. In the same way, I have been deeply moved at public events which recalled God’s blessings on the United States over the years of her existence. But our basic culture is not sacred; capitalism does not respond to the cries of the poor. Consequently, when my involvement with nature or human culture is touched with the sacred, it is because God uses them to speak a personal word to me.

Perhaps my identification of the holy with the personal can be traced to my first conscious experience of God’s involvement in  my life. At roughly the same time that I made the largely unconscious decision to be a loner, I often roamed the fields at night, awed by the immens ity of God’s creation. Somehow , I knew that the Creator of this seemingly endless universe was personally aware of me, the lost child in my own family. Like the descendants of Abraham, however, I later complained that the blessing of life was constantly deferred, and my complaints reached their heights when I lived without hope in the midst of my mid-life cr is. Try as I might, I could not hope until friends were present in graced moments which healed my pain, melted my resistance, exposed my judgments, and liberated me for loving. In these transforming interactions, each friend said something that no one else could have said, and they said it to me because of some experience we had shared in the past or were presently sharing.

One event stands out in my memory. In mid-life crisis, I felt  like a fraud. Out of conviction, I preached a gospel of love, life, honesty, integrity, fidelity, respect, compassion, forgiveness, etc.  I knew what I believed, but my beliefs seemed hollow, since I wrestled constantly with pain, rage, anxiety, and shame. When I voiced my fear of being a fraud, many of my friends hastened to assure me that I was in fact compassionate, caring, and respectful. Some even viewed me as a model of integrity which they wanted to emulate. But each such reassurance seemed to condemn me to the prison from which I longed to escape. The transforming movement came when a friend cried out, with compassion and affection, “O JJ, your pain is inextricable from your gifts.”

In light of these experiences, it is hardly surprising that I see the Sacraments as explicit, public promises of personal involvement. We live in a secular world. Every moment, God calls us to take another step on the journey into the unknown. Each  step will be touched with the holy only if we make it so. And we make it so by facing one another personally, for only then can God’s respectful love come to us through one another. And only then do we bring the blessings of life to otherwise routine and lifeless situations.

Each of the seven Sacraments marks a particular turning point in our lives as Christians, and the rituals which initiate them are meant to bring us face-to-face with the living Christ, to evoke an appropriate promise, and thereby to involve us in the life of the Body of Christ. When we participate in the ritual, we promise to be personally involved in the relationship     delineated in the Sacrament. As we live what we promise,  we bring the touch of the sacred to everyday interactions.

Thus, in the Sacrament of Marriage, a man and a woman come together before God and the Christian community to vow to love one another as Jesus loves each of them. They vow to be intimately involved with each other every step of the journey through life. Quite obviously, the vow extends the sacramental union into the future. When either or both lapse into impersonal exchanges or repeat performances, they fail to make their union holy. In effect, they turn away from the more abundant life which Jesus brings.

To enhance the personal encounter with Jesus Christ, Catholic couples situate their vows in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the last supper with his disciples. Knowing he was about to die, he wanted to us to know that he would still be with us every step of our journey. As a concrete sign of his continuing personal involvement with us, he took bread and wine, transformed it into his body and blood, and pleaded with us to repeat the ritual in memory of him. How, he pleads with us to renew our covenant with him when we receive his body and blood in communion, for he renews his covenant with us in each Eucharist. How fitting, then, that a couple who have just vowed to love one another in Christ celebrate by welcoming Christ in communion.

Thereafter, each time that couples who married in Christ receive communion together, they renew their marriage vows. Those vows invited Jesus to walk with them and to urge them on whenever they became forgetful or unforgiving. Now they come forth, wanting to renew their communion with Jesus. But they have surely heard Jesus’ words, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me. “  And they vowed to let Christ’s love come to them through one another. So the shared reception of the Body and Blood of Christ is not only a reminder of Jesus’ presence, but also a renewal of the commitment they made to one another.

Baptism derives much of its meaning from the sacrament of marriage. God’s love for the infant is hardly in doubt. It is our love which is in question. When parents bring their baby for Baptism, therefore , they ought to be aware that they are making a commitment to their offspring. Ideally, they make a complex vow. Hopefully, they are aware that God has entrusted a precious little person to their care and that the greatest gift they can give their child is a home in which father and mother love one another deeply. So, implicitly or explicitly, they renew their vows to one another. (I urge couples to work the renewal of their marriage vows into the Baptismal ceremony.) They are thereby reminded that they must not transfer the care and concern that they have for each other to their baby.

[Editor’s note: I first thought that the text should read “they must now transfer . .” But the original manuscript does say “not transfer.”]

If they then face the fact that this gift of God will stretch their minds, hearts, and souls , they see that they must make the same vow to this infant that they made to each other, the vow to love this person as Jesus does.

In these reflections, I do not mean to reduce the meaning of the Sacramental system to the personal. The sacraments are also intended to restore a bond with the whole of God’s creation which a journey into the unknown can easily rupture. Thus, in marriage, the Catholic tradition insists that the communion is not fully ratified without the union of sexual intercourse. There is no war between body and spirit within us. The turmoil within must instead be traced to breaks with intimacy which leave us wounded. If we go the way of fight or flight, we isolate ourselves and are therefore vulnerable to the temptation to fill the emptiness with pleasures or possessions. If we open vulnerably and respectfully, we experience graced moments with God and other human beings. The graced moments? The interactions which lead to deepening person-to-person involvement.

So, at the very least, I present a covenantal dimension of the Sacraments of marriage, Baptism, and the Eucharist for your reflection. Admittedly, I emphasize the call to live our vows because I have experienced the healing, comforting, or strengthening power of God’s love through others only when they responded personally to me, tangled though I be.