Unseated Knight gets Married

This post is not strictly about spirituality.  It is about love and partnership in the 21st century.  Men and women have been having a kind of hard time for decades now with roughly 50% of marriages ending in divorce.  As a marriage counselor I often have a front row seat at this crisis.  Recently I have been noticing a theme: woman who come in with their husbands and wonder how he looked so attractive as suitor and so pathetic as a husband.  Their complaints are very similar: he does not do enough (including in cases where they acknowledge that "he" does more cleaning than she does.)  He is not good with money (sometimes does not earn enough, sometimes spends to much or is clueless about family finances.)  Does not communicate about meaningful things and seems annoyingly uniformed about her feelings. But as those complaints resolve there is almost always the complaint that he does not exhibit passion towards them, does not initiate sex, or show desire towards them.  I have been known to point out "how does that work while fielding all this other disappointment, frustration and complaints from you that he will be grabbing you for a passionate kiss?"

A recent NY Times article (2/14/2014 The All or Nothing Marriage) on the history of marriage reports on stages that went from the founding of this country till about 1850 referred to as Institutional marriage where marriage was primarily  an economic partnership,  focused on cooperating on getting a roof over head to food on the table. The next stage, compassionate marriage ran from 1850 till roughly 1965 was based upon strictly defined sex roles of male provider and female childrearer, but where both filled many of their companionship needs with same gender friends but expected to find love in their marriage.  This would be the frame of our parents or grandparents marriages.  But it says since then we have turned towards the model of self-expressive marriage that sees marriage as a vehicle for self-discovery, growth and personal development.  I have to say I wonder if this is a new model shared by both genders or if many men are not still trying to be the husbands that their father's were: providers and fathers but not emotional partners?  The 2006 book Mating in Captivity in fact hypothesis that the mutual tasks of household responsibilities and erotic sexuality are essentially incompatible.  With chapter titles: More Intimacy less sex: love seeks closeness but desire needs distance.....well you start to get a sense of the problem.

I would describe the problem this way: a generation of women raised as feminists or in the shadow of feminism now seeks equality in marriage which is envisioned as a sharing of the work of marriage: taking turns with chores, child rearing and financial matters, and yet in an older more reptilian part of our brain is still the idea that the "man" will be strong, confident and decisive (and the gentle but aggressive lover).  You may already notice the collision waiting to happen here.  As one man cynically told his therapy:  "My wife would like me to share all my deepest feelings with her, but only as long as I'm not authentic because if I tell her of my fears, insecurities or doubts, that is a complete turn off."  So the man is wanted to be strong but not so strong that he dominates, confident but not to the degree that he would ignore her needs and feelings, (confidence while checking in?) and decisive as long as she likes his decision.  Not surprisingly men fail this impossible tight rope walk and then face their wives disappointment.  As one man recently told me:  Well if I withdraw I can just not care about it, or if I just make all the decisions I can be in charge.  But in the face of the disappointment, why keep initiating different efforts; the odds are against me."  And thus the now long dethroned suitor becomes the belled cat.

During the courtship both parties describe that there connection was easy and fun and their was lots of sex.  Well yes that makes sense with no mortgage, no kids to feed or bath; he could be confident, relaxed and fun.  She could be sexy and attentive and supportive without any bills to worry about or kids to tend.  Is it hopeless then?  Or should they just never have kids?  No I would not say that, but what I would say is that we have to reexamine what we expect.

If we have kids then the expectation needs to be that both will be sleep deprived for years, that both have more than 40 hour weeks and the trick is to not look resentfully at your spouse as not having done enough to save you, but at them gratefully for every piece they did you did not have to do!  Do not measure their help against what it was like without kids.  Measure it against what it would be like if you were a single parent.  Figure out how to exhibit the comadairee that is exhibited in the old Bill Crosby show where Cliff and Claire Huxtible laugh together that the children are in a plot to take the house from them, to drive them mad and turn towards each other in the expectation of understanding, perspective, humor and absolute backing.

But the much more complicated terrain is the intimate life of a couple.  I have had an image of a woman saying to her knight: get off that horse come down here and stand by my side as my equal and when he dismounts she says in dismay:  "you  are shorter than me."  Sisters I think we have to decide whether you want that equal partner or that strong guy knight.  I have known women who did not expect their emotional intimacy to be with their husbands. They long ago decided men were not capable of that and seek that sharing with their girlfriends and tell their husband the practical things and the things they gauge him to be interested in.  I have known many men who say their wives are their closest friends and yet are referencing a level of sharing most women would snort at.  So in some of these unions the dilemma has been solved by having lower expectations.

I don't think we will all make it.  There are many marriages that combine the pre-1963 model on one spouses part with the post 1963 model with the other and the paradigm collision takes its inevitable causalities.  The ever widening gap between the rich and the poor leave an increasingly cadre of those raised in the middle class with middle class expectations that will never be realized in their marriage.  In such marriages the fighting over bills and kids will be the fall out. Many modern men have no chance of providing as their father did and the old model and the new again collide to produce two frustrated partners each blaming the other for how their home life has turned out.  Hollywood movies and romance models still portray a swept off their feet model of love which shows the "fun and easy connection with passionate sparks" side of love, but never goes beyond the falling in love stage to show how intimacy functions within the grind of day to day demands and disappointments  There are several generations of men who know they are suppose to be sympathetic and caring and gentle and yet have not been taught by either father or mother how to listen empathetically to another person, and thus struggle without a skill set to fufill the role of the new husband.

However, what of those rare 25% of marriages that the NY Times article say are successful by sharing deeply every week?  Interestingly, what I have also noticed in these couples with dissatisfied wives is the wives as they loose confidence in their husbands increasingly take on more and more responsibilities: they manage the check book, carry the fear of whether the bills will all get paid, they do more of the child nurturing, they carry lists of things that need to be done for the house and in all anxiety the libido turns off completely.  They look tough and yet when asked the right questions they acknowledge being frightened, feeling very, very lonely and longing for a shoulder to turn on (but certainly not their husbands unreliable shoulder).  Their husbands sexual interest starts looking like neediness and thus the final burden.  They are so busy being strong that they no longer can say the more vulnerable things:  I need you, I'm scared, I am lonely, I want you.  Like Lake Woebegone, in this world all the women are strong and all the men are good looking.

How do we engage intimacy in this brave new land?  I think for men it means neither retreating is the hopelessness of ever not disappointing their partner, or putting on the old cowboy hat and trying to be "the MAN" but engaging in that very difficult middle ground that involves listening, not trying to fix but simply empathizing in a clear and visible way- staying in that tension in the middle between giving in and taking over but instead collaboration.  It means not going into little boy mode in face of a woman with power, nor going for the Patriarchal Power over mode. For women it means giving up the comfortable old powerlessness of our mothers who could not say directly what they needed or wanted and thus manipulated indirectly for their needs through disappointment and disapproval.  And it means not trying to be our fathers...not simply taking over the male roles of responsibilities.  It also means engaging in that uncomfortable middle ground where we don't blame our partners for our unhappiness, have to take our own risks and fight our own battles,  but tell the vulnerable truth about what we need and how we feel and our need for comfort and emotional support. Which is to say that woman also must stay out of the patriarchal patterns of either having power only indirectly or attempting to put on pants and have power over.  Even more complexly, it means having to stop seeing men as either knights or sons, but really have an image of them as collaborative partners in a shared life who will sometimes lean on us just as we lean on them.  For both genders it means listening, accepting, forgiving and collaborating.

Intending who We are

In the book Illusions, the main character of Richard Bach’s novel gets a Messiah’s Handbook which he reads verses of throughout the book.  These snippets indeed carry real wisdom.  Some examples: 

“Remember where you came from where you’re going, and why you crated the mess you got yourself into in the first place.” 

“Learning is finding out what you already know”.

“The simplest questions are the most profound.  Where were you born?  Where is your home?  Where are you going?  What are you doing?  Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change.”

“You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being an that is your real self.  Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.  You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.”

Collectively what I got out of these bits of wisdom and the book itself, at the tender age of 23, was a sense that if we let go of external symbols, rules, others expectations, and a sense of  the unweilding “facts” of our lives that we can find our true selves and work with that “clay” throughout our lives.  What goes with that for me is a sense of all of life being an exciting adventure, where learning is always possible and where mistakes really are just learning opportunities.  It means claiming growth as a birthright of all humans.  It has also meant that it is really important to look carefully at the story we tell about our own life and the power that story has to shape the way we feel about and experience our lives.  With clients I see this all the time and am very sad sometimes by the profoundly sad and limiting stories people tell about their own lives and the way they will steadfastly cling to that story even while bemoaning the unhappy and unpalatable results of such a story.  This also has tied back to my offerings of last month about how we involve the divine Spirit in this continuous process of creating the life we lead.

This has also lead to my own unique approach to New Year’s resolutions.  Every New Year’s Eve I sit with my journal and try to remember where I came from and where I’m going.  The very first time I did it I tried to list what I thought I was learning from the events of that year.  Then looking at that I wrote identities I felt I was working on developing: wife, mother, therapist, activist, physical body, spiritual being, etc.

Then for each one I wrote down who I wanted to be more of in the coming year.  In the years that followed I would look at my list of intentions and write about how I did on them and why,  and new learnings and then write down my intentions for the next year.

So for example, as a therapist I want to make time to pray (privately) for my clients, as a spiritual being I want to be more in touch with gratitude and the expression of gratitude and so forth. It is also possible to deal transformatively  in this process with any identity we don’t like.  For if you notice any negative story you tell about your self (I’m too busy, I’m disorganized, don’t have enough friends,…whatever) then it is possible to tell a different story.  To in your statements of becoming for the New Year to positively address those issues.  (“I move purposefully, and at measured pace throughout my life creating order and meaning in my life.”)

I remember once rather innocently describing this process to a man in my church and him saying:  “Wow, I always saw New Year’s resolutions as being about setting goals, but I have never thought that I can have goals for how I live, for who I am.  That feels really good”.  It does…you might want to try it.

Looking Backwards to the Present

I have been reading James Redfield's new novel: the Twelfth Insight. Without reading any reviews, I can predict that the reviewers say the novel was too much a regurgitation of his previous three novels. Perhaps a fair complaint.  I do think that for those who have been troubled by wars fought for religious reasons and with concern for the Middle East they may find interesting his ideas about the shared roots of religions as a ground for connection.  (Although this too is not the most original idea.)

While I certainly enjoyed revisiting what Redfield has to say about synchronistic events - always significant in my own faith life - what I did find interesting was Redfeld's idea that we can use intuition predicatively.  In this novel as the main characters learn/remember to tune into syncrhonicities and the common bond between all of us, they learn when contemplating a possible step to see if they can picture the two most likely possibilities and to use the feedback loop of what they can picture and what they cannot as Light from the
Universe shed upon their path.

This has been helpful to me as I have been recently contemplating one of those places where the spiritual tradition I grew up in goes bump with the beliefs I have come to learn and trust in my adult life.  So my tradition teaches me that when we consider a possible action, to listen in the silence for The Holy Author's divine guidance as to whether this is a right course of action for us.  Certainly within the Christian tradition it frames God as having power over us, although I long ago released that belief for one that is more mutual and collaborative.  There are models out there that talk about a co-creation process with God.  That does not seem quite right either because it implies we know as much as the Creator which is far from my experience.  But in my experience there is our own will and there is the Creator's intent for all life, and yes I like to believe or experience an intention for each of us as well.  Perhaps that is simply our own soul's work and what we have come to do which can place us either in alignment with Spirit or out of alignment with Spirit.

I have written much in other entries about the delicate process of "listening" to God and how the Divine often speaks in symbolic language, metaphor, or in synchronicity.  But this sort of begs the question of how we "plan" our lives.  Christianity would suggest we should not plan our lives but listen for and be "obedient" to God's intention for our lives. (Or in some strands make our own choices while being obedient to Biblical directives). Some strands of new age thinking such as The Secret would seem to suggest that we put out our intention, vision or desire out to the Universe and just manifest that which we wish.  I have deeply appreciated Neale Donald Walsch's attempt to readdress the messages from the Secret in his book: Happier than God.   In this book Walsch clarifies that we can only align with the nature of the universe as it is which he says is all interconnected and for the Good of all.  Thus he says when we attempt to manifest with either harmful intent or selfish intent we actually step out of alignment, and the messages we receive will simply bring us back into alignment for the common good.

So Walsch would say we could plan whatever we want as long as it aligned with the Universe.  Wayne Dyer who of course writes extensively about this in his book The Power of Intention, as well as in his other books, also talks a great deal about how to be in alignment, how to avoid blocks and other pitfalls.  But Dyer, while saying we can not be poor enough or sick enough to prevent other people from being poor or sick, is silent on the question of how we plan or whether our plans can be selfish or create negative effects for others.

Recently, I have been trying to discern whether to commit civil disobedience on behalf of climate change.  In my old model I would listen and not act until I received a clear message to go forward.  So far I have not received such a green light...although in both previous occasions in my life I contemplated a possible action with my mind analyzing the justice and injustice of the situation, and in both occasions just days before The Just One spoke powerfully and clearly with unmistakable direction right before the action with a power I could not have ignored.

In my new model I have been trying to hold a vision of the world re-emerging out of fossil fuel dominated world into one that uses sustainable alternative fuels.  This is very challenging to hold a vision of since both the actions and mindsets that leads to carbon consumption are deeply embedded in our society.  I know a visualizing process taught by Elise Boulding, the founder of modern Peace studies, which if engaged in with great detail can reveal strategic action, but this is different than a spiritual process. The process both Dyer and Walsch talk about would seem to suggest hold the big future vision, (not the yearning or you manifest the yearning) and then let it go in the confidence that the Universe will manifest it.  Dyer does talk about working from the end which he describes as imagining a book already written and then writing  it. This however still doesn't answer for me the question: how do we make yes/no decisions about possible actions?  Oh, the moral from the immoral is fairly easy to discern, but should I take this or action or not is a different question?

This is where Redfield's concept of trying to picture a certain action and the other course (even if that is inaction) and see if we can picture it, provides, I think, an interesting intersection between these two paradigms. It suggests to me for the first time how to listen for the Divine Author's message regarding that which dwells in the future. When I tried to picture myself getting arrested I did not see it, but oddly it was because I did not really see the whole group getting arrested either!  Perhaps this means Obama will not approve the XL pipeline.  Or perhaps as happened in the past two occasions, that as events unfold a new Truth will plant itself in my heart with a correspondingly strong picture of that very arrest.  My hope is in either, both? paradigms will be to listen in faithfulness and obedience to the Greatest Truth as it reveals itself.

Hope in My Soul

Hope is a very central issue to me. I was almost named Hope when I was born.  I was born out of the reconciliation of my parent’s separation, and my father wanted to name me Hope.  My mother vetoed this name.  Two years later when my sister was born his hope had died into a stubborn faith that they would continue, and so he wanted to name her Faith.  My mother vetoed this name, and she was named Fay.  Was his hope sucessful?  My parents were married till my mother died, for 11 more years after he reached for the name Hope.  But they were kept together by her dying and would have separated if she had not become ill.

I hoped my mother would live during the two and half years she lay dying.  Hope was disappointed when she died.  Thus also began my career of hoping for impossible things and yet needing hope to survive that which is awful.

For me at that time the Emily Dickerson poem was truth:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all

I then launched a lifetime of activism.  As a favorite quote of mine says: “An idealist is someone who is homesick for a land they have never been.”  Certainly activists always struggle for things that are not yet: justice, peace, community.  To struggle for these things which are not yet, one has to have hope.

Somehow I have been the champion of lost causes.  I worked for years as a volunteer in prisons, work which touched my soul and was deep and meaningful…and when I would go to fundraise for it I would see how clearly our society judged prisoners “hopeless”.  I tried to stop nuclear weapons which amassed more quickly than demonstrators.  And now in my most challenging of impossible causes I’m fighting climate change.  So I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the significance of hope.

Recently, I went to hear Meg Wheatly, a Buddhist, talk on being a warrior for our time.  For me the most significant part of the talk was when she talked about hope.  She started to say something about the “ambush of hope” and how people’s disappointed hope can make them give up on what they are trying to do.  She said: “The space between hope and fear is inseparable.”  I have heard people who are without hope sort of bash hope, say it is just a form of trickery, a fool’s gold…something to be avoided.  I really cannot stand that message, it seems so dark and so fatalistic.  I was concerned that that was where she was going.   I have usefully heard people say the opposite of love is fear…but it was interesting to think that hope and fear are inseparable.  Because yes, I had to admit that when I have hope there is always a niggling fear somewhere that I will be wrong, be foolish or be disappointed.   And when I have fear there is also a little niggling hope that it will be ok and everything will turn out well.

Then Meg said she’d heard the joke: “expectation is pre-meditated disappointment.”  I laughed in recognition of how often my expectations have brought me disappointment.

I have written in my Jan blog on Gratitude and Expectations: “I have been thinking about how expectations, like goals and dreams are generally a good thing and help us aim for things and collectively move forward in life.  And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way”. 

It all comes into clearer focus for me that goals, visions and dreams are a good thing that help us move forward, but that expectations do lead to disappointment.  Certainly the relationship between disappointment and fear is clear…and now leads to the issue of hope.  Then someone said: “I think an aspiration is hope without expectation.”  Whether one agrees with that term it does begin to distinguish a way of hoping that is unattached.

Another person said: “Hope is being willing to face the pain of disappointment”.  Which I think speaks to the idea that we realize there are no guarantees for the things we hope for, and we do it anyway.

Meg then introduced these two quotes.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  Vaclav Havel President of Czechoslovia  1989-92

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
― Thomas Merton

These two quotes are important to me because of the work on “Active Hope” that I have done with Joanna Macy.  Joanna has been for decades, starting with our responses to the nuclear arms race been inviting Americans to look at our grief and despair about the world.  She says in her Work that Reconnects that we must start with gratitude for what is and then experience our grief so we are not dragged down by it and can then see with new eyes and be freed to act.  The part of this formula that did not resonate with me at first was gratitude.  It was hard for me to notice what to be grateful for when I was so worried!   However, my work with Joanna has been very profound.

I recall at a workshop where I felt deeply sunk in a sense of despair over the threat of the dying of the oceans that I felt no hope.  Joanna’s assistant Anne spoke and said that she did not think we would survive but that she was sustained by “resting in the arms of all of you, in the love of you.”  I realized as I reflected upon this that I did not know if we will survive but that if the worst scenarios were to play out that I would still want in the descent of humanity for us to treat each other with as much respect as possible, without violence, to try to be fair with each other, to face our challenges cooperatively and with love. I realized that it meant I would make the same choices that I would make while fighting for our survival if I thought we would not survive.  I realized that I needed not to “concentrate on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” as Merton says.  Or as Meg Wheatly said: “It becomes “What is”.  A place of gratitude.  Gratitude for what we still have.”

After my experience in Joanna’s workshop my “hope” changed.  It was not desperate, it was actually much deeper.  There was a calm I felt even in the face of much worse news.  There was the perseverance to just keep forging forward.  And strangely the gratitude showed up.  I felt like some people with chronic illnesses report feeling…just grateful for all the small things.  Grateful for what we still have, for as long as we have it.  Grateful to rest in the love of community.

The English language is said to be poor in that it has only one word for love.  It does not distinguish between the love of parents and children, from romantic love, or the love of a comrade or for the world in general.  The same could be said about the word hope.  There is this kind of hope that has expectations and the danger of much disappointment and there is this other kind of hope that has surrendered all expectations and that is just a steady direction and intention for Good – an almost instinct towards Light.

God Who? and the Garden of Eden

As I have previously written about (See: God Who 1/12 post) I can frequently go into a “God Who?” state. This is not a state where I doubt the existence of God but rather where I forget The Holy One.  Simply drop into the World and forget that I’m divinely connected to a Higher Power.  What I have also learned after decades of struggling with this is that fear is the surest path into this God who? state.

I was in a relationship that God lead me into and yet when the going got hard I got so scared that I went into the “God who? state” which eventually lead to its end.  I am pleased that at least in the beginning I did a better job of staying connected with the divine.  In one conflict, meeting my partner’s self-righteous anger, I felt defensive and also angry.  However, when the next day we went to sit in silent meditation I remembered in that silence that the position my partner had argued for was one I had been lead to many years ago and in fact reflected the Truth as I knew it.  It was a series of life events, accommodations to life struggles, that had taken me in another direction.  I realized that while my partner’s anger was agitating me that he was in fact calling me back to the Truth as I had found it, and with that clarity I was able to easily change my behavior.  In this incident I did not feel the fear of loosing our relationship and so I was not derailed from listening to and hearing the Holy One’s voice.

In the previous post I talked about how the Story of the Garden of Eden has also something to say about the state of forgetting God.  I’m not a bible fan, but certain stories are powerful allegories, and the story of Adam and Eve is such a story.  It is story of being in a seemingly perfect place, much like love is when we first fall in love.  As anyone who has ever been in love will tell you, as well as quite a bit of research, we sadly cannot stay in that rosy colored classes, oxytocin induced state forever.  Eventually, we come in contact with knowledge that makes us see the world/ our partner as they really are, to come in touch with the difficult places.  However, there is more than one possibility at that point.  There is the exile from Eden or there is the learning of how to navigate love inside of reality, the learning of the lessons The Teacher would have us learn at that point.  But that does require remembering that there is a Teacher and being attuned to that Teacher.  Adam and Eve forgot God, and so they did not receive his guidance but the false guidance of the serpent instead and thus were exiled from Eden.

For myself fear is a sure way to forget God and once the fear of the relationship breaking up hits I go into that frozen fear state.  As I did when I was a scared child I try to think my way out of the problem, I take actions or desperately demand actions out of others.  Both of these are out of the head and not out of the Spirit.  In Adam and Eve terms they are listening to the Serpent rather than the Creator of the Garden.  Unfortunately, when I’m in that scared frozen place nothing seems to help, not being at the Ocean – normally a sure path to the Holy, not sitting in prayer asking for answers…only sometimes can the message be delivered to me through others.  And of course it does not help if both me and my partner are in a state of fear for no Light can come thru either of us in this state.

So what next?  Now comes the learning we do after we have left the Garden of  Eden about how to walk with The Gardener in the World where we now live.

Living with our own Darkness

Recently my daughter did something and she was embarrassed by and she feared the judgment of others. So she kept it secret.  Not really unusual behavior.  All of us have done this at some point in time.  My reaction was mainly that I was sad that she had struggled with it alone and that she has felt so self-judgmental.  It was not the best choice she has ever made, but it was not the worst either.  She was primarily the victim of some bad luck in an arena in which our society is harshly judgmental.

When we talked about it later I told her I did not want her to ever live her life with the feeling that she had to keep secrets or be ashamed of anything because then she would become separated from a part of herself.  "What do you mean she asked?  This was hard to articulate.  I think of her father, my ex-husband, who literally committed a horrible crime.  This was something that he rightfully felt horrible about and carries much guilt about.  Some who read this will say that is a feeling of self-loathing that should never be laid down.  Do we contribute to the Good of the All by keeping ourselves small and in shame?

However, if we believe that all humans are children of a Divine Parent and an Unending Source of Love, then it follows that God has the capacity to forgive us all our diversions from the path of the Holy One. It follows that more good will be done by overcoming our own personal patch of darkness.  I believe that in the journey of the soul that everything we do holds the capacity for learning and growth in the Spirit. When I met her father he was in an Alternatives to Violence Project workshop, a program he participated in for eight years.  I also met Dan in AVP, a friend to this day, who two years ago was released from prison after serving everyday of a 30 year term for committing multiple rapes.

What these two men did represents extremes that most of us do not go to. However, the basic problem is the same; after we do something bad, something regrettable, or something embarrassing there is no taking it back.  Sometimes there are big consequences.  How do we integrate our own darkness into the tapestry of our own life?  How do we make peace with that which we regret and cannot undo?  Trite as the saying is: "How do we make lemonade out of lemons?"

I thought when I met both of them and all the men who came through the AVP workshops that they were doing the only thing we can do with darkness....redeem it. I have quoted the late Rev. Jon Nelson saying: (see 7/11/11 post) "Lean into the pain, that is where the redemptive possibilities lie." If one has come to this life to learn about violence in its most decisive way then to engage in violence and learn first-hand its horrible cost, and to renounce it, and to live without it, is as complete a learning as I imagine one life could achieve. (I believe my own walk as pacifist reflects the learning of many lifetimes, of being both the victim and the perpetrator of violence.)  

The two of them exemplified the two paths people can take in attempting to reconcile with ones own darkness.  My ex-husband could never internally reconcile what he did, so he hid it, and in so doing separated from himself. He could not be at peace in this separated state.  Over time this went beyond not putting down an accurate job history, to actually making up a whole fictional life which he told to others, thus severing himself forever from the Truth.  

Dan on the other hand, chose to tell the truth in prison about why he was there, earning him the lowest place on the prison totem pole and yet allowing him to live with the Truth of who he was.  Thus when he got out he also told the truth on every resume and job application.  He was rejected over and over but was loved by his wife and friends and eventually hired by an acquaintance who appreciated his integrity and his skill set.  He said he had expected to feel out of place when he got out of prison after such a long absence as he had before he went to prison; instead because he walks in his own skin and knows his own intentions towards others he feels deeply at home in the world.  

It has occurred to me that this indeed is the difference between leaning into the pain and not doing so.  When we are so afraid of pain, or of our own darkness that we avoid it, we never learn what it has to teach us.  We live separated from the Spirit whom we are afraid to approach and we live in constant fear of others and their judgment of us if they were to truly know us.  When we have the courage to go through the pain we come out the other side, not unlike a mother giving birth to a child.  The only way out is through, and we are "baptized" by our own struggle and its integrity—or lack of.

I'm not suggesting we just throw ourselves into darkness, or surrender to whatever evil impulse we may feel tugging at us, or lie in depression.  I'm saying that we recognize that darkness exists also on the spiritual path just as surely as night and day co-exist.  And that in whatever darkness we find ourselves we never stop looking for the Presence of the Light.  That we use as a lantern in the darkness the question, "What is my soul trying to learn from this experience?"  Redemption, if there is such a thing, must be in learning the lessons we came here to learn.

Note to reader:  My New Year's resolution was one post a month and I was doing very well until the end of May.  Then came the end of school and two church conferences in July and ...no June or July post.  Please read this as my July post!

Why do we Die?

Why do we die? is a question humanity has been trying to figure out since the beginning of time.  Alternately we ask: why do we live?  And what happens when we die? And what is the purpose of life?

I think it is perhaps more useful to ask the question what if we did not die?  I think this formation begins to reveal some of the purpose of death.  Most of us are not fond of deadlines, experiencing stress around them, or having had bad consequences for them or disappointing outcomes.  Nonetheless, if we are honest with ourselves they do push us to get things done; they do lead to the completion of tasks and to a sense of accomplishment.  Death is a deadline on life.

If you knew you would live forever would you set goals?  Would the goals matter?  Would it matter who you married or how you parented if you could just marry again or have "new" children?  (would people even marry?  What does till death do us part mean then?)  Would job performance matter?  Would career path matter?  Would there be any push to get anything done?  In fact in the Star Trek series there are a people called the Q who are immortal, and they are shown to be very immature, aimless and self-absorbed because of the lack of finality in their lives.  And in fact throughout history many martyrs and heroes/heroines have the meaning of their life be defined by what they were willing to die for, to forfeit their life for.  This formulation also points out that if we live "safely" all the way to the finish line, preserving our life at every turn, but never really doing anything, will we have lived at all?

In some belief systems we do not live forever, but we live multiple lives.  However, the belief in reincarnation would actually underscore the importance of death.  For each life then is conceptualized as building upon the learning of the past - constructed in a way that allows for specific learning.  How then would that happen if we never died and had the chance to try in a new or different ways, to learn the lessons that our soul  is trying for?  Many people have found their meaning and purpose in life by asking themselves the question what do I want to do before I die?

Death also puts a time line on love.  It means we do not have forever to get it right.  It means that if we want to be generous, kind, supportive, involved, etc., NOW is the time to do that; we may not have tomorrow.  It means that if we have rendered a hurt it is important to rectify it quickly.  It means that there is a deadline on forgiveness.  If we lived forever would we have motivation to move in decisively with love?  I have heard people say that they say "I love you" when they part from a loved one because, God forbid one of them be killed before they are together again, they want the last thing their loved one heard to be "I love you" and not "why didn't you put the dishes away?"  While this line of thought could be considered a bit morbid, there is a certain priority set in knowing that if our time is limited Love is the most important motion.  It is not uncommon for people on their death bed to say that Love is all that matters, for then as the deadline approaches all the detours and time wasters, and irrelevancies drop away and we see that we are here to Love.