Category Archives: difficulty
Strike While the Stress Is Hot!
Stress is up.
It’s December. Research shows that 75 % of us feel good feelings during the Christmas season, love and happiness, but the research also predicts more stress.
Shopping, traffic, financial pressures and family expectations allow stress to rule most of us at Christmas time.
It’s been noted that women, in particular, feel a responsibility to make everyone happy during the holidays. And the poor, as the world shops, are made painfully aware of their lack. People who have social anxiety, and that would be almost all of us, have more anxiety as work, family and church holiday events increase.
Perhaps only children, and students, on break, relax more in December, but that would be after finals, not before. My children will be home, and I’ll love it, but that won’t make the house more peaceful.
Christmas equals more stress.
It’s never been different. The birth of Jesus was full of stress. His parents traveled, stress. They hit traffic, in Bethlehem, stress. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a cave and laid him in a feeding trough, stress. The shepherds saw angels, stress. They were terrified, a form of stress. Later King Herod tried to kill Jesus — major stress!
God entered the stressed world stressed. The incarnation, Christmas, was and remains intrinsically stressful.
What to do?
Of course, it’s smart to find some way to relax during the holidays. Heart attacks rise, and there are ways to keep from being a Christmas statistic. To thine own self be gentle, and at peace. Take a walk, better yet, take a run.
And consider the good uses of stress.
The birth of Jesus was full of stress, so also the birth of every great thing. Every book written, play acted, song sung for others, meal prepared, wrong righted, person rescued has stress in it.
No good is done without stress, so this Christmas get stressed. To love a difficult friend or family member this December may well require stress.
To be social, with family, work associates, church family, will include more stress. Do it and you will be better for it, and so will they. Prestressed concrete is like a person who risks and acts — stronger.
Stress may kill, a few things that need killing this year – apathy, indifference, isolationism and selfishness.
This Christmas step up and strike while the stress is hot.
You’ll find more insights about stress at www.modernproverbs.net
How to Recover from Being Radiated by Someone’s Personality
Many people, you know, have been radiated.
But maybe you don’t know that, because mostly, when you see someone, it’s not the first thing you notice.
I ran into a friend in the grocery store today. We caught up. The first thing I noticed was her unique face and her smile. We all have the same pieces, eyes, mouth, nose, ears — but “wow” and “superwow” again; those smiles are each perfectly special.
She mentioned getting forced out of her last job. That came up because she was telling me she was looking for new work.
“I think it was a personality thing,” she said. Then I could see that she had been radiated. A “personality thing” — that’s code for someone decided they didn’t want her at her workplace, and a few conversations were had behind the scenes, and then, she was history.
“I know,” I said, “It’s something I’ve experienced too.”
We chatted a bit more. I said, “Hey, I’ll pray for you.” I did, as I walked away, and later too, because, “I know.”
It’s common, to get nuked, by someone else’s personality, or their agenda, or their insecurity. At work, church, among friends and in the family, if you live long enough, you will be blasted by someone else’s poor management of their own issues, and yours.
I know another person who used to work for the same organization as the girl I met in the grocery store. She recently told me she had gotten a new job. Why? She too was radiated a few years back. It was so bad, she lost her opportunity to even work in that field anymore, despite her good credentials, and she had to go back to school and retrain for a different career. Fortunately, that worked! I’m glad for her, but she still isn’t “okay” with what happened to her.
Why all the radiated employees? Many CEO’s, supervisors, “bosses,” and just plain people aren’t good at conflict resolution; they bring to their conflict win-lose solutions. They win, the underling loses. Why? These human resource brokers tend to see the world as black and white; one person is wrong, someone else is right, and so they “do what they have to do” by making the party at fault (in their minds), the loser. This is interesting, painful, maddening, hurtful, harmful, crazy, radiating! And yet, often, the core issue, is the power broker’s own personality and problem solving weaknesses, which have created, at least a part, the problems.
And so, radiation happens.
But here it the really fine news! For those of us who have gotten up close to personalities that are leaking nuclear power plants, we have choices, afterwards, which can successfully mitigate the negative and harmful effects.
To help you thrive, after being radiated, here is what you can do, as I’ve learned it from my own experience.
Never stop moving forward into the next thing God has for you. God, the God who sent his son Jesus to die for a sin-radiated world, is the God of radiation recovery. God, as he exists in his absolutely crazy-good-loving-redemptive personality is always trying to help you move into a healthy, radiation free future. Retrain, retool, rethink the future, try again, go back at it, when you fail again, get up and try again, never stop moving, except to rest and eat. The enemy — it’s quitting!
Forgive everything! Christ forgave you; forgive everyone else. Yourself, your boss, the organization, the people who don’t apologize, the people who apologize except that it’s for the wrong thing because they still don’t get it, their friends who helped them hurt you, your friends who abandoned you, every-freaking-body on the planet, forgive them, if that is necessary. Forgive and then, when the memories come back, forgive again and forgive for the rest of your life, if that is how long it takes. That doesn’t mean you quit saying what happened was wrong; it doesn’t mean you forget it; it means something like you do all you can to make it right and then you leave it in God’s hands.
Why? If you don’t forgive, you’ll radiate yourself.
And lastly, learn from what happened. Nothing is simple. “They” did something wrong, you can hold on to that if it is true, but so might you have made mistakes in what happened and in how you have handled what went down or in how you will handle it in the future. You have a personality too, and it can radiate people too, especially if you have been hurt. It’s been said that hurt people hurt people. It’s true, and so be careful, because you don’t want to become a hurt person who hurts other people. Don’t do what was done to you in any way, shape or otherwise twisted form. That will make you similar to the people who hurt you, and you don’t, trust me, want to be like them.
Take your hurt and learn to be compassionate towards others. Having been radiated, “You know,” and your knowing is a powerful force inside of you to understand and to be compassionate, and to be gentle and to take some pain out of the world, instead of smashing more pain back into the world.
The best radiation therapy in the universe is found in understanding and in compassion, which we all know by its more noble name – love.
Figure it out; people need you to work this out. You’ll meet them tomorrow in the grocery store. They will have just been radiated, and you will do best with them if you can say, without any residual toxic resentment inside of you, “I know.”
Time is Going Very Fast Now
When we boys were in grade school, my dad cut the body off an old Plymouth. While it retained some dignity with its front fenders and hood still intact, from the dashboard back it was just frame, with a gas tank and wheels at the back. But the old Plymouth had one after-market upgrade; to give the driver a place to sit, dad welded onto the top of the fame, a metal folding chair.
The stripped car was a great way to get around the campground which my parents managed, and we boys further celebrated when we discovered that the back tires, virtually weightless, spun easily under acceleration. The whole thing was a massive tribute to my dad’s unbridled creativity, regardless of the fact that it was a death trap.
“Pops!” we boys teased my dad recently over pasta, “We all drove that old Plymouth around the camp when we were just kids, but if we had fallen off the seat, we would have run over ourselves! It didn’t have a safety belt.” And then we all laughed, Dad too. We grew up in the pre-safety days America.
I love my dad. My dad has given me a good legacy: a love of cars. I love cars, with good seats or bad. I love a fast drive up the winding curves of Sunset Highway into the Luguna Mountains. I love a slow cruise along the cliffy beaches in La Jolla, and I love the extreme left lane on Interstate 5 through the Camp Pendleton area.
But I don’t like the drive I made recently to Los Angeles.
“I’m excited that you’re coming,” I heard my dad say through the tiny speaker in the phone. He sounded small, but he’s isn’t and he doesn’t live in a small town. He lives in densely populated city of Alhambra, in Los Angeles County.
I was driving up the next day to see him and my mom, because the week before my brother Steve had called me from Pasadena. Steve was concerned about dad. He said, “I think you should consider coming up here.”
And after that, my wife said, “Go, you really need to go.”
So I went. I really wanted to go see my dad. He’s eighty-four, and not doing so well. But a few things were working against me making the trip. I didn’t have a lot of time off work, and I didn’t really want to make the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles and back in a twenty-four hour period. I don’t much care for that drive. Many people don’t. You plan around the traffic, or you get engulfed. And to be honest, although I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, I didn’t want to drive toward or in anyway through the possibility of losing my dad.
Some of my San Diego friends will only drive through Los Angeles at night if they are headed north. Actually, it’s better to enter LA county after it has gone to bed. I haven’t forgotten the family trip from Chula Vista to Santa Clarita on the eve of Thanksgiving several years ago. The 5 turned into a massively long parking lot, but nobody ever left their cars. The trip took five hours. It shaped how I see life. I’d rather fly places. Last year we flew from San Diego to London. I just didn’t want to drive.
The magic motorway from Sand Diego to LA is not one drive; it’s several. It’s the drive through the megaregion of Southern California, through Solana Beach, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, Irvine, Santa Ana, Orange, Anaheim, Buena Park and you get the idea; it’s the drive through an extended chunk of time; and for me, it’s the drive through the shoulder pain I have when I drive too long.
Of course, I went anyway.
My dad’s pacemaker has quit working. But did it ever really work, correctly? He doesn’t much think so. It was too fast; it was too slow; it was reset; it was set again. It’s like the Los Angeles freeway system, it’s like the internal combustion engine, it’s like all of technology — a work in progress. The pacemaker was reinstalled; the surgery site bothered him. He swears he isn’t getting another one, despite the fact that his heart was recently clocked at thirty-five beats per minute.
Now his knee has gotten painful. Mom said that the doctor said to him, “You’re eighty-four Mr. Hasper, and you have arthritis.” Mom told me that the doctor said this to dad three times.
Driving to LA and back I thought about how I hate that. I hate the doctor implying that my dad, who has always been so alive and worked so hard and overcome so much, is so old that nothing can be done to help him. I also hate my dad being told anything three times. He knows how old he is and he knows precisely, in a way which no one else knows, that his decline will eventually be irreversible. His own dad died a few years ago; he has told me that he’s aware that he’s next on the runway, and then me. That’s comforting.
I left for Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, pulling out onto the 5 North and sprinting up the freeway, determined to make a quick go of it. In San Diego, we say we are going to Los Angeles when we mean that we are going to any of the cities in that vast urban sprawl that makes up that flat, smoggy, spreading web of rooftops to the north. And so I drove toward the LA complexity, up the mighty 5 North (formerly the 101 here and there), which runs from Mexico to up through Washington, up that huge artery that continuously carries the aspirations and the regrets of families and businesses and loners.
And I drove with a vague awareness that a great deal of thinking has rushed up and down that freeway, that when I drive it, I drive with millions who have driven it before and with their millions of jumbled and complicated thoughts both good and not. In some way, they have proceeded and will yet follow me.
I powered north, from Chula Vista to Alhambra with only a few slows. Good trip! I paused briefly in San Juan Capistrano to refuel, the car and myself, not far from the old mission. It’s a historically fascinating place. The Serra Chapel of 1777 is the oldest building still in use in California and the only surviving church where Father Serra said mass. It’s a reminder that many earlier people have traveled this path north, native Americans, missionaries, explorers, colonists and restless entrepreneurs.
From a gas station I called my mom. I told her, “My smart phone actually messed me up on my last trip. What are the freeways I take again?” I’m not sure why I can’t remember the best route to their house, but LA is like that. You check your route because the exits come fast, to the left and the right, and with so many cars around you, last-minute changes of lanes don’t work well.
I could hear her pulling out a paper road atlas. On the phone I could hear her and my dad muttering over it. They couldn’t remember the freeways either, and so they figured it out, again, the 5 North to the 710 North to the 10 East, the Santa Monica Freeway (the busiest freeway in Southern California), to Atlantic Boulevard, north.
I remember being at my uncle Jerry’s in LA for a Christmas party a few years back and watching the “Angelenos” stand around discussing which freeways to use to get somewhere someone at the party wanted to go. They had lived in the LA area all their lives, and they still had to stand around and discuss, at great length, how to get somewhere. The discussion felt a bit like warning sign, kind of like a road sign I saw on the East coast a few years back, “Dangerous Intersection.”
I drove to my parent’s house in two hours, and I drove home the next day. When I got to Alhambra my mom told me that my two brothers and their wives were also coming over for dinner. And they did come, and then I knew that we all felt that need for some time with him and each other. So we ate pasta that mom made, and we laughed and told stories about cars, about the Plymouth with the folding chair welded onto the frame and about the GTO my brother drove for a few months after he graduated from high school. It was powered by a pavement ripping V-8, but it didn’t have disc breaks, and you simply couldn’t stop it once you got that lengthy expanse of sheet metal hurtling down the street.
I also brought up the car my dad bought for the family when we were in high school, a 1966 candy-apple red Ford Fairlane. Suddenly everybody got lively. It was a 1966 with a 390 cubic inch V-8 sitting in front of some comfy black leather seats with dual glass packed mufflers streaming out the back. Stomp it and you were greeted by screaming tires, an eight cylinder roar, and a neck jerking blast into space.
Oddly enough my dad loaned the Fairlane to me when I was still in high school. I took it out on a gravel road and floored it in a turn. The thing that puzzled my friends and I next was how to get it out of the steep ditch that it was suddenly bottomed out in. I still remember the cars entry into the culvert. There was a great gravely roar that indicated that the whole thing was being torn to pieces and a huge bounce and rumble as it landed at the bottom of the ditch, but when we got out, we found that the candy apple paint was untouched. And so we built a rock ramp and drove it out of there. I never told my dad about this until he was old, and the car was long sold, and Dad was too feeble to do anything about it.
We boys and mom and dad had a great evening together, fueled by the great combination of dinner, laughter and dessert, and the next day, I powered back the same route I had come, Alhambra to San Diego on Monday afternoon and into Chula Vista in slightly under two hours. It was a good commute.
Coming home, I raced down the 10 East from Alhambra, exiting oddly in the left lanes to get to the 710 South. The freeway bounced the car unexpectedly, as if the construction workers had been unaware that they were making a roller coaster out of what was supposed to be flat and even. I took the 5 South through city after city to the 805 South to the H Street exit in Chula Vista, to home.
When I left from Alhambra to come home, my mom came out to the car, put her arms around me, rested her head on my shoulder and said, “I love him so much,” and she began to cry. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” she said to me, thinking ahead to what she knew was coming. I held her close and kissed her head. I didn’t cry, but I felt quiet inside, like there was a huge expanse of space inside of my mind that I wasn’t sure how to get across.
Coming home I didn’t play the radio. I didn’t play the book on CD my wife had sent with me. And, I didn’t play Pandora radio through my smart phone. I had options, but I only wanted to sit, drive, think. I watched the road and listened to the smack of the road on the tires, a hard thump here, rhythmic pops there, a smooth quiet glide again that made you wonder why it wasn’t all made smooth. But it wasn’t.
After I graduated from high school, I drove my 55 Chevy hot rod up to Iowa for the summer with a friend and we built sections of Interstate 29 south of Council Bluffs. This paid for my first year of college. I worked on the machine that lay steel rebar in the road. It was grueling labor. We whipped long metal rebar out of twisted piles of steel and we lay them in troughs that ran out of the back of the machine. Sometimes we went down onto the road and tied shorter cross pieces on the rebar with thin wires, twisting the wire around the bars with a little tool with a wooden handle. Then the great cement machines came and laid down a thick grey slab of cement, floating the bars in the middle of the massive river. We made history, we made a concrete corridor, we made place that people could pass through, to go see their fathers and to return again.
I have a connection, with freeways, I find them interesting, Interstate 29 Iowa, Interstate 5 in Southern California. In East Los Angeles the 5 is old. It’s narrow, near Downey, dropping down to three lanes. There one drives through a kind of narrow urban canyon.
The 5 South, in one of it’s narrower places, fit my mood as I drove home from visiting my dad. I had a sense of traveling in the direction that I had to go through cities that I didn’t want to stop in to get back to a place I needed to be.
As I drove, I drove through history, the history that shaped the freeway and the culture that it created. At the beginning of the 20th Century, people were still traveling around on horses. The fledgling automobile was a novelty, until Henry Ford brought out his Model T in 1908. The car was produced and reproduced until May of 1927. People could afford these cars and so they bought them and fixed them and raced them and lived in them, but they had no idea what was ahead. The country was undergoing a huge transportation revolution.
The nation fell in love with the independence automobiles provided. Soon cars glutted the dirt roads of America and propelled the development of new surfaces to roll along on. Dirt roads were paved, highways were constructed, and still there was not enough traveling space.
It’s a hugely important chapter in our national history, but it’s also an important chapter in my family’s history. My dad told me, during my trip to see him that he bought his first car in 1943. It was a 1930 Model A Ford. The first freeway he drove on was from Pasadena to downtown LA.
In 1940 the Pasadena Freeway, the 110, or the “Arroyo Seco Parkway” as it was originally called, opened to cars. The ensuing LA system was built around this. My dad lived in Glendale, and he drove the 110 after he got back from the war and met my mom and started our family. The 110′s short on ramps, twisting turns, sudden dips, absent shoulders and scenic landscape are all reminders of a time when cars were slower and fewer. But this was the way of the future, and this transportation history created, in part, my trip to Los Angeles.
The idea of a freeway, worked, and San Diego followed suite. The lone traveler in his or her personal car, on a road with no stops, was born. The first freeway in San Diego was U.S. 395, now the 163. Construction began in 1942 and it was opened in 1948 as the 395 or Cabrillo Freeway. It’s wide, grassy, tree-lined median makes it still the most beautiful freeway in the city.
And it came to me on my drive, that this past had created, in part, my present movement through time and space.
As I drove home, I sat still and alone, in my personal car, cushioned in leather and fine wood and painted metal with my right foot on the gas pedal and my SUV rushing down old pavement, past old block walls, through large billboards and industrial buildings and my mind rushing down an unknown road into a future that I couldn’t see. I traveled in a controlled, historical, channeled fashion as my mind wandered through history and into the future, down ancient, twisting, unposted mental roadways.
In Anaheim and Irvine the freeway opened up. The signs for Disneyland came into view. I thought about my friends who had told me before I left that they were going to the theme park for the weekend. I’ve done that, gone to Disney land with my two daughters and wife. Disneyland is fun with kids. It was a different feel, the trip to Disneyland. It wasn’t like traveling to go see your dad when he is figuring out how to be 84 years old and you are figuring out how to feel about that.
The freeway was twelve lanes now. In Irvine the retaining walls along the edge had beautiful flowers set in them. Instead of a narrow corridor, there were now hills and sky. I felt for a moment as if I had escaped. It was 2:30 pm and I could feel the freeway in Los Angeles filling up with traffic behind me. I rushed away from the rush and felt a sense of relief. I had escaped.
I flowed along now at 75 and 80 miles per hour, staying in the left lane and letting the car run. At 80 mph the tach said 3,000 rpms, just right for cruising. In San Juan Capistano the huge retaining walls along the freeway suddenly presented me with huge, beautiful concrete swallows who seemed to be flying along with me. I flew with them and then outran them quickly. I was feeling better.
My dad and I had talked about what you do with what you get. “Life is going by fast now,” he said.
“Does it seem to get faster as you get older?” I asked him.
“It is just flying by,” he said. “Last week, this week, then it’s next week. You can’t belive how fast it goes.” My mom agreed.
Time for him was just absolutely flying now. I wonder why? Perhaps it is because there is so much behind him that looking back over so much road, in one glance, gives the illusion of greatly increased speed. I have a bit of a sense of it too now. I’m not so far behind him.
But his body isn’t going faster. When my dad got up with us from the front room, to go out to the car when we went out to breakfast, he grabbed a cane, paused swaying, lurched forward unsteadily, and proceeded as if he might fall at any juncture. He didn’t once complain, about going slow while going fast. I’m think that I’m learning something from him that I will need for myself later.
I had thought I’d stop on the way home, in San Juan Capistrano, for a brief rest. My wife and I always stop in San Juan Capistrano. We exit the freeway on Ortega Highway, near the old Spanish mission. There are lots of bathrooms and food stops and a Starbucks, but this day, I didn’t stop. Something in me didn’t want to stop. I wanted to go home, V8 fast, I wanted to keep going very fast.
And that’s one of the things that’s gotten me to thinking, the fast thing, which I grew up with, but which isn’t always good.
I shared my trip to see my dad and my concerns about him with a friend recently. She had an interesting response. It “seems as if you were [on the trip to see your dad] in a hurry to get it over with.” She wrote in an email to me. “I was the same when my dad was dying. But with my mom, I found I wanted more to savor each moment I had with her.”
She is right; I am rushing. I rush around a lot.
The other day, I sped up as I got closer to home.
The 5 South seemed to open up to me after San Clemente with the first sighting of the sea. I have always loved the views of the ocean from the 5. They remind me that life is bigger than I thought. I passed quickly over the freeway landscape, past the fields of drying fennel south of the San Onofre Power Plant.
Just past Del Mar, I noticed that the vista to the sea was spectacular, the eroding cliffs, the palms and pines and flat, spreading water, they seemed more beautiful than ever to me. I always think of home as near the ocean. In San Diego, the 5 runs close to the ocean and the bay. The freeway includes the water. I saw the water, I knew I was almost home.
But not for long.
Soon, because, as my dad said, time is flying so fast now, I’ll pull myself to my own feet here in my own living room, and head back onto the road again. I’ll drive to Los Angeles, up both old and new stretches of freeway, because I’ll get a call from my mom, or maybe it will be my dad, because who really know which of them will go first, and then I know I’ll cry. And I’ll drive back up the 5 again, this time with my wife and two daughters.
And this trip will feel different from any other time. I’m not looking forward to the drive.
But it will not be unfamiliar, for out on the 5, where we pass through towns known and unknown and go very fast, we travel in familiar spaces, and we go to places that many other people have gone before.
I will go, to one of my parents and she or he will be alone, and I’ll be fatherless or motherless for the first time in my life, but I will pass through the Southern California megaregion among millions and millions of people.
And we will hit some traffic, I’m sure, and have to stop, and start again, but as I pass through their cities, many of them living there will know how I feel, and I will then know, out on the road that day, how they feel too
fear
What was this?
Water was running down the driveway, lots of water, hard, out of the house and down the drive!
I hurried into the garage, turned the water shut off value; the water kept running. I rushed to my tool bench to grab a wrench. I had to turn off the water at the street. What? My tools were gone, all of them, stolen!
A man grabbed me from behind. He had been hiding, behind the side garage door. I wrestled with him for a moment. It was the thief. He broke away and escape around the side of the house.
Running back out to the driveway, I could see that the water was beginning the undermine the whole driveway; the drive had begun to sink, several inches into the ground. This was serious. The house was next! I ran back inside to try to discover where the water was coming from. It seem to be running right out of the slab, in a corner, as if a water pipe in the concrete had broken.
I ran back out in the street. My neighbor was there. I asked him if he would loan me a crescent wrench. He seemed confused. He didn’t know what this was. He went away and came back with something. It was a breaker bar for a socket. Worthless!
I ran to the concrete lid covering the water shut off valve in the sidewalk. No shut off valve there, only a a tangle of wires and plastic handles.
I could hear the water running, running, running. I was in a panic.
I sat up. Someone was in the shower; it was morning.
Then I remembered that in the night I had gotten up because I had heard water running. One of the values on my sprinkler system had gotten stuck on, and I had used a screw driver to shut it off, and had gone back to bed, and the incident had morphed, in my mind, fueled by fear, into a major dream sequence.
Fear! It drives the mind, and behavior and my dreams.
I don’t like it.
It makes me want to unravel its tangle, move beyond it, triumph over it.
Fear is the worse motivator in the world. It drives the worst machinery of mankind forward — arguments, wars, greedy take overs, crime. Fear wastes huge amounts of resources — time, money, sleep, people.
One of the main goals of the maturing person is to learn to understand and control fear, to use it, to milk it, to dominate it, to move beyond it to the higher motivation for life — love.
What does it take to not live in fear? How would it feel to not be afraid? What would you do if you were not afraid?
For starters, do this.
Get right up next to God, very close to God, trust God, trust his perfect love, a love so powerful it can cast down fear.
Get so excited and passionate about what you want to do that you drive your ramped-up desire right over the top of fear and do what you want to do even though you are afraid to do it while you are doing it.
Get your butt kicked so badly by life that you end up so familiar with hard stuff and so angry about it that you are too mad to let your fear dominate you anymore.
If you need therapy, counseling, medication, treatment go get it. Fear is not something beaten alone. Go get what you need to get so that you can start doing what you need and want to do.
Force yourself to get out of the house, into life, interacting with people, going places and being with people. Action cures anxiety.
Fear and anxiety are treatable. They are something we all struggle with.
Got it? Do it.
For more thoughts and insights on fear, visit www.modernproverbs.net and click on the tab fear or record your own thoughts by bloging a response below.
i never knew you
Someone came to my office last Saturday and said, “He’s fallen off the wagon again, and he’s asking for you. Can you come see him?”So I went out to the lawn in front of the church to see him, where people were gathered to receive the food that we were handing out, but I couldn’t see him right away.
He was there, and I was looking straight into his eyes from about 18 inches distance, but I couldn’t see him. Of course I could see his face, but I couldn’t see the person I had seen when I saw him last. An opaque grey film, like a death shroud, lay on the surface of his eyes.
But it was him, I reconized the face as his. He was in there, like a mad man at home, hiding in the back of the house, lurking insanely in the back closet, looking through the crack in the door, but not coming to answer the friendly knock.
His head weaved in an unstable, drunken way, and he staggered back a little from me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
I put my hand on him to steady him and leaned in toward him trying to connect with him, trying to look into him, to see the man I had seen last time I had seen him at church. There was little of that now, mostly just thick fog, lying on the surface of his pupils, locking down his soul like a lid on a casket.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can see that you’re in a lot of pain.”
“Oh, the pain,” he cried out, and reached out toward me with an open hand.
I knew this part of him; I’ve been in psychological, spiritual pain too.
“Oh,” he groaned in complete anguish. “I just came to see you today,” he said, “to get a little love. Because I knew you guys would give me a little love.”
I remembered when he had told me with such confidence a few months earlier, “I’m done. I’m done with the drinking.”
But he wasn’t done, drinking, self-medicating, trying to kill the pain, trying to kill himself just to kill the pain.
And so I gave him a little love, by sitting down with him on the retaining wall, by taking his hand, by praying for him, by telling him he could stop, again, and by telling him that we all loved him. I told him that I wanted to see him again.
“I can’t stop,” he said.
”You can stop,” I told him, “You’ve done it before.”
But I knew what he meant. For forty years he hasn’t been able to stop after he has stopped, again and again and again he hasn’t stopped.
Then, in totally anguish he looked at me and said, “I know that Jesus loves me.”
I knew him then, because he was so much like me, a residing faith all mixed with brain numbing pain. There was the faith, the real faith, leaking out from behind the opaque eyes, hovering in front of us on the lawn, his faith and mine, the faith that makes us brothers, that has always bonded us together as brothers, two incompletely healed men in front of each other, both in need of Jesus.
“Yes, Jesus does love you,” I said. “You’ve told me this before, and I believe that it is true. He loves you, even when you are like this.”
He left after a while — to go get another beer, which begs the question: What to do?
***********
In Matthw 25 we find the following teaching of Jesus:
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
Jesus told his followers that when they saw the sick and broken and needy, that they saw him. It is interesting that he didn’t say that when they saw the good, the strong and the successful that they saw him.
Jesus’s words about needy people are actually quite unsettling. Jesus said that those who do not care for the lonely, sick, hungry and incarcerated, will not be invited into the kingdom, but instead will be punished. He didn’t teach that we had to fix them, but he did make it clear that we were to care for them.
This is kind of sobering to me, the implications of what Jesus taught, the teaching that we will not be judged, as we are so often taught in our safe, intellectualized, sanitized Christian churches, by our faith alone, but that we will be judged by whether or not our faith caused us to love and care for sick, hungry, cold, imprisoned, lonely people of the earth, regardless of whether they changed or not.
Jesus taught that if we love him, then we will love people,and that if we do not love them, he will not recognize us as his own in the final judgment. That’s unsettling too.
I know a lot of very spiritual people. I try to be one myself, God-following, praying, helping people in a good way, but Jesus actually taught that some powerfully spiritual people, who do great acts of spirituality in his name, will not be a part of his kingdom.
Look at Matthew 7: 21.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
They knew him. They claimed him. They did great things in his name. That will not be disputed. They will tell you that. Jesus will buy that, “They knew me,” he will say sadly; then he will add, “but I didn’t know them.”
What will make that true? It will be, I believe, because as these mighty ones lived out their lives, they didn’t do the will of God which is to love people the way Jesus commanded them to, and so they were very clearly not of his kind.
Jesus doesn’t know those who claim him but don’t know love. He doesn’t know them because they refuse to love and because they refused to let Jesus know them and love them. We all are at risk, I think, in this way. We do this, remain unknown to Jesus, so to speak, whenever we do not admit our brokenness, our weakness, our loneliness, our addictive habits, our spiritual famine. And when we do this, when we act like we are okay, when we aren’t okay, this has terrible consequences.
Not knowing the weakness in ourselves, we don’t know the weak in our communities, and so we don’t welcome the weak or care for them and in doing this we don’t welcome Jesus and so we don’t know him! Crazy, fascinating, the mistake, this train of mistakes, beginning in ourselves and following on in tragic fashion to our community and to God.
To deny our own humanity, our own broken, impoverished, addicted, imprisoned selves, causes us to also separate from those like this in our community, and this distances us from God.
“I never knew you,” cries Jesus, “because you hid from me behind the reinforced gates and walls of wealth and accomplishment and self-interest. You denied your pain, and you hid from the pain of the world, and in doing so you hid from me, and I couldn’t find you to know you!”
Jesus does not know us when we do not know the drunk man staggering up to the church door. He does not know us when we do not know the hungry family living three blocks away from the church. He does not know us, when we do not go sit with the old woman, living alone, and eating dinner at night alone and wondering why she is still alive. Jesus does not know us when we do not know the child who is absent a parent, or both parents or a grandma, the inadequately loved, hurting, at risk child in our neighborhood, school or church.
We may cross the globe on a well-financed and well-intentioned mission of mercy to bring the truth to people in another country, we may minister powerfully in our church by leading worship or teaching classes or sitting on boards or praying for the weak, and yet if we will not even cross the streets and sidewalks in our own cities and commuities to know the people living in need in our own backyards, we may find it someday said by God himself, “I don’t know you.”
Jesus does not know us when we hide from him by hiding from our own hopeless, hurting, needy flesh and blood lying sprawled out on the church lawn drunk.
Flat out: Jesus doesn’t know the indifferent, the selfish and the uninvolved in all of us.
His love can forgive even our lack of love, but Jesus himself warned us very strongly about this matter.
We must cry out for mercy and help in this business of loving people. The best cry we can make to Jesus is, “Know me! Know every weak, hungry, addicted, broken, imprisoned, naked, drunken part of me.”
And when see the other fallen and broken creatures of the world, the best thing that we can cry out to them is, “I know you! I know you because you are me! And I know you because you are Christ to me.”
‘I tell you the truth,” said Jesus, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Matthew 25:45
What should we do? We should know them!
super moist tripple chocolate fudge
Into the paper cupcake holders in two cupcake pans I poured a thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake mix.
Then on top of the thin layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake, I poured a thin layer of sweet, whipped cream cheese.
Next — into each cupcake sleeve, I gently spooned, on top of the super-moist triple-chocolate-fudge and the sweet cream cheese, a layer of country-cherry pie filling.
Then I poured another layer of super-moist-triple-chocolate-fudge cake, on top of the surpy, cherry pie filling, which covered the whipped cream cheese, which covered the first layer of super-moist, triple-chocolate-fudge cake.
At this point I grew frightened and decided to put it in the oven — to kill it.
Twelve minutes later, when the little super-moist, chocolate, cheesy, cherry-filled bodies had baked, and then cooled, as part of the embalming process, I spread a thick layer of rich and creamy vanilla, cream cheese frosting on top of each one.
Then — I – ate five!
I hate myself.
Paul, the amazing Christian super saint once wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Romans 7:15)
Sounds like someone else has been into the super-moist triple-chocolate cupcakes. Of course, the truth is that we all have all been there, where we didn’t want to go, doing what we hated to do. We have overeaten cake or indulged a nasty character defect or shot off a mean-spirited repartee or harbored an infected and moldy core of unforgiveness. Or if we have not done these then we have indulged something else non grata, not fun, a fair bit of anguish, the loss of control, the doing what we don’t want to do, the regrets later. This is just what we do — the stuff we hate.
And so, what to do?
I backed our SUV into a telephone pole a few years ago. When I confessed my mistake to my wife, she said, “That’s why we have insurance.” Never once then or after did she say anything condemning about my driving mistake.
Good, very nice. There is a recipe in this. There is a culinary treat to write down, on a card and to keep in a drawer, to Facebook to a friend, to use again.
After any one of us have poured down a super-most layer of triple chocolate fudge blunder, we should pour on top of that a thick layer of sweet, cream cheese honesty. Then it is best if someone else in the kitchen with us adds a thick layer of cheer pie kindness. If as so often happens, another layer of triple chocolate fudge mistake is added, and it gets baked all together, as so often happens in life, we should all yet “cool it,” and top the mess with a thick swirl of cream cheese forgiveness.
Finally, once we have all our layered delights finished and spread out in front of us, then we should each eat five or more of them, just to help us get the layering pattern “down,” and to help us learn to make this unique way of preparing food a real part of us.
A mistake? It needs a loving relationship.
Then, ”We’re really cooking baby!”
self
When my mom got cancer, I was young, but I was not unaware of what I am aware of now, concerning her.
She had a disfiguring surgery, and she must have had feelings about that, experienced a changed sense of self because of it, entered into some kind differnt kind of self-consciousness regarding her body. And although I don’t know all she felt and yet feels about this thing, in those difficult days, I sat with her by her bed and in some way fused with her. It was difficult for me to tell the her from me completely then. I grieved for and with her then and still do, as I think of how this has changed the way she feels about herself, forever.
Am I a consciousness separated from the consciousness of others?
I am and I am not. I was not, in that season, with my mom, and I have not been at other times, and these have been some of my most acute moments of consciousness, the moments of awareness of another person and what they might feel given what they have experienced.
My mom told me a while back that her mom, my grandma, was sexually abused. It happened in this way; my grandma’s dad died when she was little, and her mom remarried, it was her step dad who abused her.
“Really, mom? I never knew that! In our family — grandma was sexually abused? Wow!” And after my mom told me this, and I knew it had happened, it entered me, connecting me in some kind of bridging way to my grandma and giving me an option really, an option to think about and enter into a new conscious awareness of my past.
My mom told me that afterwards my grandma was sent away to live with an aunt. I think of her now, our Nana, tiny like she was, when she was abused. I imagine her alone, confused and afraid afterwards, and I know she was, crying under her blankets in her dark bedroom – alone. And I wish I could have gone to her then, changed like I have changed now, changed by my own painful experiences into a more authentic self, into one who knows, and talked to her as if she were my family, as if she were my little daughter — time and space swept aside for a moment – and me patting her on the back, this harmed little girl who was to become my mom’s mom and my very one-and-only Nana, and me putting my head beside hers like a real dad would, in an appropriate unbordering of the self, and then breaking down with her, and saying to her with the tears running out of my eyes and down my cheeks and onto her cheeks, ”What was done to you was so wrong. I’m so sorry it happened! Look at me. You didn’t do anything wrong! You didn’t do anything wrong! Something wrong was done to you. And it shouldn’t have been done, and I love you, and I am going to protect you now so that this never, ever happens to you again!”
Sticking to ones own consciousness and harboring up with in one’s own self is overrated. We cross over, at times, into other’s sacred space in moments of human need and pain, and we make the choice ,when time and space allow, and as we can, when it doesn’t seem to allow, because who and what is allowed is what we allow, to come close to us.
And I wish I could have gone to her step-dad, and said what needed to be said to him too, in a controlled way, and then gone to other people who needed to look into this in some way that would bring a new awareness to him, and then I wish I could have taken my grandma away and found a loving place for her, and said to her, “Now your are safe, and you are going to be okay, we are going to have someone talk to you about this and listen to you and help you be okay.”
My grandma eventually married a much older man than herself, whose wife had died, and he was a very good man, and I think he gave her some of that, the place removed from harm for the wounded self to recover — and safety.
It happened then, when I was not a self, still unborn, but now I am, and my consciousness of it connects me with my grandma, but not her with me. It’s common, this chance, to cross over the sacred border of the self. I’ve experienced this phenomena, again and again, the awareness of pain that fuses me together with someone else, inviting me to trailer up with them and live in broken-down sameness together for a short time.
I am a self, or I think I am, but am I?
This is a real consciousness problem, not some kind of intellectualized, obfuscated philosophical triple talk, and it is my dilemma, and everyone’s– the significant, long-standing philosophical conundrum of being a consciousness self in a world of other selves. It sucks, to have this to sort out, kind of.
If you have read the extensive and abstruse literature on the consciousness, or the concept of the self, then, “I’m sorry,” and if you haven’t, then your on your own, to know the you-of-you, and the you of not-you, and the them of the-very-not you.
To get after it, I asked my wife Linda today, “Am I you?’ It was a good question, in context, which I was.
We had spent the morning together. It was a beautiful sunny, Martin Luther King holiday in Southern California. We began by drinking strong coffee and watching the weather report and talking with the caffeine kicking in the way I like to feel it – early and buzzing and crazy good. I read the first one out loud to her from the Message version, so colloquial-cool with its one-way-to-be and not the other, and its cleverish, ”You don’t go to Smart-Mouth College” and other fun paraphrasy stuff. After, we said a short prayer of gratefulness together, which we do once in a while to help us deframe from the self, and then we rode our bikes down to Target to pick up a bike lock. We got one, with a self of its own, a thick, smooth, serpentine, springly, clickish bike lock. In the future we won’t have only two options for nearby shopping: walk or take the cars. We can bike, with the protective serpent, and hopefully not have to buy new bikes, afterward.
As I rode behind Linda, I tried to find my consciousness, my self, my not-her. And so I engaged in a few random consciousness experiments. I looked out from my moving self, and I pointed my digital camera-screen eyes at a subject and clicked — on the moving black shadow of my bike on the white side walk below me. I like shadows, and so I rode happily observing my shadow, until it disappeared under a tree. Here and then gone, and then forgotten as I came into an avian racket in the branches above me.
Bird chatter — I heard it in the background of my shadow centered awareness on the approach to the tree, then nearer, then above, then behind, ”Now that’s got my late focusing attention,” and turning on my bike seat, I looked back and up, scanning and listening. I couldn’t see any feathered color, only green leaves and grey branches. ”Starlings” I thought, checking my memory for, ”yacky birds,” but I couldn’t be sure, and kept pedaling, following my wife, the pleasant avian din receding like a wind chime in a dying breeze – then gone. I clicked back ahead, 0n some people, standing by the lake, with children. But looking, so to speak, through them, I found myself mostly conscious of my most recent consciousness, ”I looked at what I was interested in, and I heard what I didn’t plan to hear but liked, a lot.” My conscious, of the birds, was not gone with them.
Wow and then superwow on wow, wow, wow! To experience the me and the not me! I am an awareness, which is different from what I am aware of. How good is that, to be separated, like that, and yet to know, like this? Good and very good! I am sentient! I am conscious of my consciousness. And I am conscious of my memories of my consciousness. And I am conscious that I can retain a consciousness of my consciousness. And I am conscious that I can enter into the deep consciousness of someone else. Whoooohoooo! How good is that? Write a consciousness psalm! Read it every morning to the world. This is smart and mouthed, “Sing praise, for consciousness!”
When my wife and I got home we ate lunch and cleaned up the house and sat close. I leaned over and kissed her. I had spent the morning interacting with her and then I had the time alone with myself on the bike, and now I was shifting back toward the with-her awareness. I felt myself unbordering, as I sometimes do, when I am with her, relaxing into her green tea perfume, the clean smell of her hair conditioner, the lovely scented safety of her skin lotion – and at that moment, I asked her: “Am I you?” It seemed like the thing to say. It could have been meant romantically, but I was thinking about it epistemologically and she took it so.
“”No,” she said firmly, and then threw down her own opinion on the ontological table. “Sometimes you edit my decisions too much, and tell me what to do, and I don’t like it.” My wife went to Smart Mouth College. She should read the Psalms more. Me too.
That morning, she had wanted to buy the bike lock at the bike shop, “but Target” I had suggested, was “cheaper,” and so this was not the rhubarb pie and the ice cream on top that we used to share at Marie Calendar’s, close and sugary and funish. No Eastern universal cosmic soul with us. No Nirvana. I’m not her! She said so.
I agree. I resolutely agree, that I’m not her when she, as she is want to do, is not thinking clearly. The problems with some of the classic literature on the self – Aristotle, Hume and Freud — is that they when they talked about the self they forgot about — wives. Intellectual discussions of the self have too often gone on holiday, disconnecting from smart mouthed marital repartees and mid-morning bike rides and sexually abused grandmothers and love. Wittgenstein, the language philosopher, astutely pointed this out and it is worth remembering.
After my wife brought up my faults, I thought a moment and said, ”The way I see it is that I have good ideas, and sometimes I share them with you, and you can benefit from them if you so choose, so I’m just basically helping you.”
“You’re not,” she replied.
So I know who I am. I’m not her, or him or them. Good. Done. I have a self. This thought, now in my mind, is mine, and that thought, now in hers, is hers, so, I am in this way, not her way. Kick it; it’s so delicious; so fine. I love having my own observations, experiences, opinions, awareness of my own awareness. This at least in part, what it means to be a conscious self.
And yet, not so fast, like that and this; my edges smear, fuzz and blur, especially when I cry. And I know that as tightly as I’m woven by my opinions and experiences and choices into a unique and personal self, I will, in times of pain, unravel again at the intellectual door. I think again about my grandma, and I know and always have, and will and always will, come to times when my carefully stitched up edges unravel – I hope. I am and yet am not a separated self, and now perhaps more so not over time. If I have to live alone someday, I will, if needed, but I won’t like it, especially at night. I hate to sleep alone. And I hate to go through hard things alone, and I hate for anyone to have to suffer alone.
I will merge again, I will deframe, and I will unhook from self and time and space and enter someone else’s reality, my wife, my two daughters and my friends, and I will not be alone with my self so that they will not be alone with themselves. I don’t have to do this, but I will choose to do this because this is how I want to live, and I will have a shared consciousness.
It’s interesting, how this extends outward into so many other intellectual concerns. Take the idea of God, a big idea, huge in the history of ideas, and much thought about and written on. Sometimes I think of God and how different he must be from my self, and far off, it feels sometimes like there is this vast space between us, and I think, there really is. Anyone who doesn’t know this is, I believe, somewhat dishonest about their experience. I’m not God, and he is certainly not me. And I don’t apprehend him well, and it is easy to conclude that although he might be here, “He isn’t here, not now, not in this harsh reality that I am now in.” I doubt if my grandma felt God when she was being sexually abused.
A lot of people say they believe in God, most people will say that really, but they won’t say that they know what he is feeling or thinking or doing at any one given moment because they don’t. Consciousness doesn’t unborder to the divine often, or does it?
What is the deal with the self and the divine? Can we know God as we know our wives and grandma’s and friends? Can we detrailer from the self and hitch a ride on God’s consciousness?
The guys who wrote the canonized Christian literature on this thought so, writing about being personally formed inside their mothers by God himself, writing philosophically that, “In him [God] we live and move and have our being,” saying that our bodies are like churches that God comes and lives in, and that if we open self’s door, God comes inside us and lives in us, and even getting to the radical point where they say that we can come to the awareness that we no longer live our own lives but that God lives out his life in us. It sounds like soft borders again. God merging with the self? Christian orthodoxy says so, and sees God as what is called, ”incarnate,” meaning with us, present, close, in the flesh, or not at all. But enough of this ; too much talk like this and we are on holiday again.,
I don’t know exactly where I stop and God begins, but here too, the lines begin to disolve in the details of everyday life.
God, like the birds, exisits in odd and unexpected moment of consciousness, seen or not. I like it. I’ve experienced it. Consciousness of literary consciousness, consciousness of past consciousness, consciousness of things universally conscious, consciousness of the consciousness of others, consciousness of God — this is what it means to be a conscious self.
So I think about this, as I sip my coffee this morning, and I sense the divine consciousness in me and everyone who has ever lived in it all, and as I do, I hear my unseen birds yacking it up in their tree again.
And riding past the tree, my eyed-consciousness in tack, I see my bike shadow running along with me on the walk, and then no-eyed conscious, I see my mom, lying in her dark bedroom as I hold her hand, and I see my grandma sitting on a chair in a room that my grandpa is painting and she is smiling at him, her house painter, the renewer of her own renewed spaces, and I sense that this safe man was someone who was given to her as a gift of another self to shelter in, and I see my wife ahead of me on the bike riding with me to Target, my own other self and yet not, and then I hear, oddly enough, in the shifting range of focus, King Lear yelling in my ear, ”A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.” And I turn my consciousnnes on the crazy king, the self of the moment that is not me, and see him there, insane before the storm. I take him by the arm, this wacked out old king, and I lead him home with me, into me, a piece of my slowly developing self, and find a safe place for him within me, as if he were me, as he really is. He needs a good, long therapeutic nap.
And I call out to no one in particular but anyone who might be in earshot, “The guy has been out there alone for too long. Help me bring him in, and go get his daughters, please — now.”
.
my little sister
i woke last night at 2 am
breathing audibly
heart pounding inside me
it’s my beautifully wild little sister
she’s punctured somewhere far from me
bleeding hard and i can’t reach her
if you only knew how i love her
she wears her blue green and silver dresses tight and shimmery
filling the room at every crazy bluesy party she puts on
fast and fun until she rises from her couch late and scares the hell out of all her guests
i love the things she loves
her white flyers skimming
her black and white giants leaping
her vibrantly hued darters schooling
her long brown tresses waving
her radiant edges glowing
but now
in the night
i am angry and lonely over those who have attacked and left her there
she bleeds internally
fouling brown blood squirting into her clean pure blue
the goopy flopping things at the edges dying with her
my little sister if I could only reach you and hold you
i would heal you if I could
i’m punctured too
Failure
We deal with failure differently.
Some failures we laugh off. An older lady told me yesterday. “I was trying to read in a group recently, and I couldn’t seem to read the page I was on, then I figured out I had my glasses on upside down!” We both laughed.
Some failures can’t be laughed off. A person told me with great pain recently, “I never thought I’d be divorced.” No humor in this moment.
It’s interesting how we process failure. There is actually controversy about this. Some people take an aggressive, positive approach. They fight against things; they pray against things; they refuse to accept defeat. They may say things like, “There aren’t any failures; there are only learning experiences.” They give examples of those who have been healed, who have risen above loss, who have made a come back, who have reinvented themselves. They are believers in power. They speak of post-traumatic growth.
This response has value in that it is positive, it sometimes wins the day, it works well to motivate reform; it preserves self-esteem; it uses failure as nuclear fuel to energize a new future. At its best it is a plucky, hopeful, can-do approach to life. At its worst it is an arrogant triumphalism, fostering a sense of superiority and the over-expectation of ultimate triumph.
Some, on the other hand, take a more accepting, honest-about-loss, humanized approach. They say things like, “It’s important to face the reality of loss. To do that we need to grieve. We need to feel.” This approach embraces loss and failure as deep learning experiences that help us gentlize, become more human, more relational. The interest isn’t in winning something, defeating something or healing something. The response isn’t interested in becoming a dynamo of success fueled by a devastated past.
The interest is in becoming an authentic person, an emotionally intelligent person, a more aware person. This person leans into failure, learns to listen to the rumblings within. This perspective is good in that it clearly identifies a legitimate failure. It often leads to appropriate expressions of grief, to deeper empathy, even perhaps to a few much-needed apologies. It is good; it is emotionally healthy, but taken too far it may become defeatist, overly emotional, giving up on reversing declines, not tapping into the power to heal or reform, not pushing ahead and winning victories that could yet be won.
To see these approaches in action, consider how persons with these two perspectives might respond to terminal illness. The upside-of-life, assertive, go-for-it person says, “We can still beat this,” or prays, “God, we ask you to heal this.” But the more emotionally focused, reality-accepting person might say at a death bed, ”It is time to let her go. We have to now accept this.” And then this person prays, “God, comfort us as we grieve this.” It’s problematic spiritually; both responses can be seen as spiritual. To look to God for healing shows great faith, but to accept reality when it isn’t what you want also shows great faith.
Such responses are a choice in each situation of life, and we many of us probably go back and forth between these. But some of us have one of these two reactions as a default setting. We tend toward either a triumphalist or a more humanize response to failure and loss. Where this is true this may become problematic for us. Being stuck in one kind of response to every situation many keep us from bringing wisdom to the subtlety and complication of life.
For example, being overly optimistic in some situations can stifle legitimate grief. It can also sabotage a needed apology. It can also run over the top of other people involved in the same incident who need time to process and recover. A downright Pollyannaish outlook can even deny reality.
But being overly “in touch” with emotions, and the past and human frailty also has a downside. Self-confidence can be destroyed if in a time of failure as a person turns upon themselves too much, wallowing in feelings, perhaps over-analyzing themselves for what they think they did wrong. Too much introspection can stifle action, prevent us from going on, keep us from believing that with God’s help situations can be reversed, dramatically changed, people healed.
What to do?
Do both. Engage in both the “I’m looking forward” and the “I’m looking inward” approaches. Reality is complex; so must our responses be, nuanced, intricate, bi-functional.
True, we must move beyond failure, but we while doing so we must not deny the losses in the past. It is good to see the best in things, but not to deny the worst. Praying for healing is good. And when it doesn’t happen it is also good to accept that God had something else in mind.
In short, to be wise we must be human, and more than that.
In failure, we must grieve and then move on and finally know when to do one and then the other.
carotenoids
Two October ago, we trekked three thousand miles to see if the carotenoids and anthocyanins might heal us. The days were shortening. The Pacific Ocean was getting colder. Christmas was months away. None of that would have mattered a bit, if life hadn’t just smashed us sideways and flipped us upside down in a multi-person, relational train wreck. We were reeling through the autumnal equinox, staggering from the scene of a social crime and we needed treatment.
Every year people hailing from sunless, rainy climates migrate to Southern California for light therapy; we were reversing the journey, pioneering from San Diego to Maine for the reds and yellows and oranges of northeastern chromotherapy.
Arriving in the dark, we drove from Portland down to South Berwick. Our Maine hosts, Ralph and Donna, said they preferred to take the back roads and avoid what they called the “turnpike,” so we did. I leaned against the dark car window on Fox Ridge Drive. In the headlights, I could just see the trees starting to blush. We hadn’t come too early.
The pigments were at work. The same elements that color the bright yellow squashes in our California backyard gardens, the purple lupines along our roads, and the red strawberries in our bowls, color the trees in Maine. They are the pigments, the carotenoids and anthocyanins. When they hang out and mix it up with sunlight and rain, heat and cold, place and genetics — and who knows what else — they saturate the world with color. They are a virtual botanical mixed drink. Leaves tanked up primarily on anthocyanins dress up and go out to party in red or purple. Leaves having downed good shots of both anthocyanins and carotenoids parade about shamelessly in pure orange. Leaves drunk with carotenoids but little or no anthocyanins stagger happily through autumn decked out in yellow.
The postcard Donna wrote said, “Please come visit. Ralph will take off work and we’ll go around with you. We’d love to have you as guests at our home.” It was a gracious, welcoming invitation, carrying a faint sense of a sweet-smelling kitchen, a fire heating up the family room, a tail-whopping dog on the rug and hot chocolate in mugs. We were touched by the genuine gesture of hospitality — and the timing. The things that have just happened in our lives affect how we read our invitations.
I recently ran into a friend, Jean, at a party given by another friend who had just gotten back from a summer in Kenya. Our Kenya trekking friend was showing her travel pictures. I’ve been to South Africa. I have friends there, and the pictures brought back vivid memories for me. While standing in the living room watching the photo journal of the trip, the back of my mind ran silent movies of eating with my own South African friends in a cinder block home in Soweto, touring the Pilanesberg Game Reserve with them and traveling across the veld to visit a rural school in Swaziland. My whole trip to South Africa was so much about people. Perhaps healing is pretty much that too.
While photos of giraffes, AID’s orphans and dancing African teenagers scrolled on a flat screen behind her, Jean asked how I was doing. I paused, an African child squatting over her shoulder. I needed a second. The Africans kept moving as I tried to call up what I told her the last time I saw her. I was also sketching out how to respond to her question about my condition. Whenever someone asks me how it is going, I make up a short story, fast. We all do. Even when we offer only a word, or a few words, we play the raconteur, laying out one plot over another, one point of view over another, our story choices made with split second judgments of the social milieu we spin our narratives into. And it’s complicated, how it comes out and how it is interpreted. The story we tell is always embedded within the story happening in the present moment and both those stories interact with a story about us that already exists within the listener.
I said, “I’m recovering. It was tough to lose my job in the recession. But I really like my new place. We are working on social justice stuff, feeding homeless people here in town, helping Burmese refugees in City Heights, working with foster children. I’m moving on, but it takes time, to get over what happened.”
It is awkward, the thing about moving on. I didn’t really want to talk about it. It was way too painful. I really didn’t feel like ripping into some of my former colleagues at a party with unsuspecting friends present. It’s in such poor taste and can upset the host. It’s also bad for digestion. I avoid it, generally. Besides, I didn’t have to go on. She took up the story and began telling me about the church in town she didn’t go to anymore. Stories beget similar stories. She had just been to a reunion. Certain people were there. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t really know what she was talking about. Her voice quieted as she said, “It brought up some feelings I thought I’d worked through.” As she was talking I was thinking about how the craziness beats in on all of us at times, turning boring, commonplace narratives surreal. Homey places where we put our feet up and sip hot drinks become places we run from scalded. People who were safe become people we fear. Rwanda and Burundi, in 1994, come to mind.
At that moment, I didn’t see the African orphans behind her anymore, just her face near me, looking up at me. Our half-veiled emotions riveted us together. I stood there processing the narrative before us, the story I did know within the story I didn’t know, and then I said to her, “It’s okay.” I paused, formulating more words. “It’s okay to have people you don’t want to see. I have a couple of people like that, from what happened to me. Perhaps, in time…” She nodded, silently, looking straight at me. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking. Then she wiped her eyes with the skin on the tops of her knuckles. “Thank you,” she said with a slight smile.”I needed that.”
Maine was something my wife and I needed. I remember standing in the yard at Ralph and Donna’s home watching the leaves fall. It was just what I’d hoped for. The wind gusted in the big tree in the center of the meadow, and a flurry of yellow leaves wobbled down with papery sounds. They fell in slow flutters and occasional arcs toward the ground. Donna told me that when it is quiet in the woods, on freezing winter nights, that you can hear the leaves snap off the trees. I walked up the road with her dog, to the top of the hill where a red maple was on fire with color. I walked back down in the leaves that lay piled at the edges of the road. When a car came by the leaves gusted up, as if raised from the dead for a few seconds only to sink back to a quiet resting place again.
The next day, Donna and Ralph drove us over to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. There is a photo album on the end table in my home where I read that has pictures of that trip to New Hampshire in it, one of a blue stream full of yellow leaves, one of a smooth lake mirrored with vermilion, gold and lime colored trees, one of hill after hued hill, piled up to the horizon with a dusting of orange, brown, green, red and yellow. They strike me as some of the softest and most therapeutic color tones I have ever seen. There is something about the miles and miles of celebrating colors, something festive, party-fun, good. I remember now, looking at these pictures, that the days Ralph and Donna escorted us through the wonders, every turn in the road made me reel one way or another with delight. I was drinking with the leaves, inebriated with color, happy to be alive.
Back at their house, after our day in the White Mountains, I remember sitting at their kitchen table. Donna put a big casserole of shepherd’s pie in front of us. Fluffy mashed potatoes crowned the dish in a flurry of peaks, paprika accenting them with a dusting of red. Tall glasses of white milk sat in front of the plates. We ate and talked.
Ralph and Donna talked about the accident. I had heard them speak about this before. But it was sacred, listening to them again. Their feelings, thoughts and words arced down deep inside of me. As they took turns talking, I listened with the intensity of a soldier with a deep unsown gash, hanging onto every movement and word from the field doctors bent over him.
Their son Josh died in a motorcycle accident. It happened when he was on a trip with their church. He got on a bike in a parking lot for fun, zoomed off down the street, and then they didn’t have their son to hug anymore. His room was upstairs, across the hall from the room where we were sleeping. Some of his things were still there. There were stars on the ceiling.
There isn’t simply one thing that gets at it. The leaves don’t change colors simply because the days get shorter. There aren’t any certain lines on which all leaves fall, neither are there any perfect lines that end our discussions of things. Ralph talked about questions that lead to more questions. He offered me no formula to write in my journal, carry back home, mix up in my kitchen lab and apply to my wounds and bandages.
But of course, I didn’t want that. I have had the privilege and burden of teaching writing at the college. I have sat at home reading papers that only a teacher could, should or would read. Over time I have come to see that a formulaic interpretation of psychologically painful events is much like an amateurish freshman paper critiquing a novel only partly read. It is a thing awkwardly cobbled together late, under the disabling influence of a deadline — a hodgepodge of unsupported quotes, blown transitions and an unproven thesis.
But that is not what Donna and Ralph offered. As I listened to them story their life, I was struck by a scenic beauty that acted as a backdrop to everything they said. There was a soft shade of gentleness behind every question and commentary. In all their thinking, in their psychology of loss, in their sociology of survival, in their theology of pain, ran a dusted hue of kindness. I noticed that Sunday, when they took us to their church, as they spoke to friends there, they were as tender with them as they were with us. And in these interactions something unexpected began to happen to our stories. Ralph and Donna’s story began to intersect and merge with my story and the stories of all my friends and their friends. A kind of narrative fusion began to take place — all our terrifying experiences, our tragically lost relationships, our agonizingly arranged interpretations blew from the road to the air again, to lift and turn and arc down, to settle and to rest where the pigments cover the rising mountains to the horizon.
People think of the Jewish story teller, Jesus as primarily a great teacher; he is known for his sayings, parables, stories, but he was as much a healer as teacher. The accunt of Jesus reports that once when Jesus saw a man with leprosy, he was “filled with compassion.” I think his compassion was not justfor the physical problem, although I believe he must have cared much about that, but also for the man’s damaged sence of self, his lost connections, his broken relationships with family and friends. To be a leper was to be a pariah, to be separated from hugs and kisses and sexuality and love. It was brutal and agonizing, the distancing factor of having scary skin. And we are told that Jesus had compassion. In other words, Jesus felt the deep pain of the man, the loss of his identity, the loneliness of his existence, the anger he had inside, the stunned confusion, the cry of injustice. “I am left out,” cried the leper and Jesus said, “Be in.” The account reports that Jesus healed him.
Make what you might of it, not much beats compassion when you are suffering. A daughter rubs her father’s feet on his death-bed, saying by touching him, you are still a person, worthy of attention, deserving to be touched. Touch, compassion, psyche healing even when the physical deterioration cannot be stopped, is eloquent to a watching universe, a shout int the dark, “I love you!” When I was so sick after a surgery, lying in the bathroom alone one night on the floor, one of our small kitten came and lay down with me. The gesture, from an animal, the soft warmth close — I haven’t forgotten it. Not being alone in that isolating moment of suffering — significant! The color of compassion is shifted toward the warm, fallish end of the light spectrum.
It always astonishes me, how close truth hovers in the backdrop of life. On the day that we went driving in the White Mountains we came to where the “old man” had fallen down above Profile Lake. The old man had been a series of five granite ledges, that when viewed from the right angle, looked like a man’s face. He was a state emblem, but a fragile one at best. During much of the 20th Century he was held in place by cables and spikes. Between midnight and 2 am on May 3, 2003, with a rocky roar, the old man just slid down the mountain. People were so dismayed they left flowers at the bottom of the cliff.
The time goes so quickly. We are back from Maine. Southern California, along the coast, is such a beautiful thing. The palms here stay green and bright all year long. One of the many lantanas in my yard is always in bloom — purple, yellow or orange. But I don’t need seasonal reminders that things change because I know they do. And when that change is for not for the better, I am of the opinion that the carotenoids and anthocyanins are among the things that heal, and love.
When I go shopping at the grocery store, I pick out the small orange and red and yellow peppers. At lunch, I sometimes edge my plate with them. And when I make smoothies in my blender, I dump in the bluest blueberries and darkest red strawberries. They are rich with the pigments I love. They sooth me, but I know what they are and what they aren’t. I know that they aren’t a spike or a cable, certain to hold me up forever. It’s not a dark perspective, just true: the bottom of the cliff waits.
But so do other things — friends yet to travel to, places yet to surprise, narratives yet to be shared. We have been through a few things that have changed us very much, my African friends, Donna and Ralph, Jean, my wife and I. And for some of us, there may be places that we are not quite ready to visit and people who for now are perhaps best not seen. But we know that in the fall, the hills change. They brighten with the therapeutic pigments. And lately, I have been hearing more and more stories of loss that sound, at the emotional core of the narrative, similar to mine.
I lean toward the voices that tell them and hope to grow more gentle, like other story tellers I know.
