I was raised in an environment of revivalism. My grandfather taught a spirituality called “the victorious Christian life” which asserted that a Christian could surrender so fully to God that they would stop sinning. He died well before I was born, but my father carried on that legacy, shaping all of my childhood environment through his presidency at the Christian college campus where we lived as well as the all-summer camp and private high school we attended. My father, who was more aware of his shortcomings, could not live up to his father’s standards and trimmed the spiritual expectations down to match his own sense of moral accomplishment: living without intentional sinning. He continued to call it “the victorious Christian life” and constantly challenged others to recommitment to this higher level at his college and summer conference center (similar spiritualities were labled “higher life,” “deeper life,” and “Spirit-filled living”) His reimagined theology commonly resulted in followers either doubting often their status as a victorious Christian or downplaying their failures as unintentional (so it didn’t “count,” and they did not lose their status or need a life recommitment). Dad had various ways to label a failure as unintentional. So if he were wrongfully angry, he marked it unintentional until he recognized it as sinful, then he could choose to stop being angry and keep the status of “victorious Christian.” He could snap at his children unintentionally (“in the heat of the moment”), but then “come to himself” and make it right and so not lose his standing as a victorious Christian. Lack of self-awareness in this framework became subconsciously a bonus rather than a flaw. Making right choices was naturally core to this theology as was the laser focus on right behavior rather than the underlying causes over which one had little direct control.
My father was quite limited in his self-reflection, both by temperament and by choice–I expect that was necessary for maintaining his sense of spiritual success. However, I was born with a reflective temperament. I had no means of escaping deep self-awareness. Knowing all that went on below the surface, I had no way to separate “intentional” from “unintentional.” When I was angry, I was fully aware from the start that I was angry. Respecting my own feelings would have required me to regularly choose for myself, which was called “selfishness.” I therefore had to learn to ignore, minimize and override my feelings, to basically learn to reject and hate who I was. God who created my feelings judged me for having those feelings–fear was a lack of faith, sadness was ingratitude, anger had to be “righteous.” This was terribly dis-integrating for me, but with many years of intense effort, I finally pulled it off, successfully outrunning my shame… until it finally caught up with me. The fake god who shamed me overplayed his hand, crushing me, and so drove me into the arms of the God of all grace. I finally realized that “growing in grace” was not about meeting higher standards, but about embracing unmerited love.
But one’s childhood is not so easily outgrown. I know this from the judgments that still claw at my heart after 25 years of opening myself to grace. Naturally my temperament (what the old Greeks would call melancholy) inclines me towards this. It is a long journey of learning to foster the unique beauty that springs from this DNA, to embrace what troubles me until it rises into the glory of its creation. I wish us all hope on this difficult, rewarding journey and may whatever spirituality you embrace be a sail and not an anchor.
Recently our beloved dog Mazie refused to eat for two days. Kimberly needed to talk about arrangements for her death because Mazie is old and has health issues. I tried to feed Mazie breakfast, and when she turned away again, I started crying heavily. She has been a precious part of our life our whole marriage. This is the third time we thought we were losing her, though she pulled through once again. How will I bear it when she is gone? The next day I wrote the following reflection.
Death came knocking yesterday. He did not stay. just tapped twice and peered inside, because he is concerned for me and does not want to shock me when he comes for his appointment. He wanted to get acquainted, to let me know he is in the neighborhood. He is much more gentle than I feared and more understanding. He does not want to shove me suddenly into the dark river unexpectedly but hopes I will hear his reassurance that I will not drown, and that life itself is richer and fuller when I remember that all blossoms die, and in their passing leave behind their rich fragrance while making room for new life to spring up. Living awake to certain loss widens my heart, breaks it free of its defensive, guarded posture, helps me breathe in deeply the goodness of today so its fragrance in its passing lingers full in my heart, blessing it and opening it to the hope of good to come.
I later rewrote the poem in metered rhyme, but I like the rawness of the original. Here is the edit
Stark death came knocking yesterday. He just tapped twice and did not stay But gently smiled in real concern That coming suddenly would turn My heart to ash and crush all good. So being in the neighborhood He wished to get acquainted now, Prepare me for his scheduled blow, As not to double pain with shock And slash before I’d taken stock. He’s much more gentle than I feared, And moved with understanding cared That I not unexpectedly Be swept away so tragically. He hoped I’d see his real intent To help me be more confident That life itself is richer by Remembering that all blossoms die, And in their passing leave behind Their fullest fragrance in my mind while furrowing new life to bring, from torn up soil fresh buds will spring. If I can live awake to loss, Expand my heart, and breaking toss away its guarded, armored stance, It helps me breathe in deep and long The good today before its gone. The fragrance as it slips away Fills up my heart, opens its way To hope for all the good to come. The good that’s passed is always home.
God: “Who made dogs to have such intense joy in their owners? Who made them to bond so deeply that even a few minutes separation is cause for dancing delight at the owners return? I just molded my heart for you into a creative expression so that you could see me reflected in my creation. You are my delight! I watch you with delight as you sleep as any mother of a newborn, and my heart jumps when you awake, longing for you to find the good in the day that hides like little Easter eggs all around.
“I ache with you with every fear and burden you face. I feel more pained by your pain than even you feel. I agonize with you and long for the day when I can take it all away. I hate that your healing and growth requires so much suffering. I know you are doing your best even if you doubt and judge yourself. And really there is no “best,” no perfect response to life, no path that is better than all other paths. It is like an art gallery that can be explored at any pace in any direction. Each path has its own experiences that offer its goodness and pain. I wish you could worry less and trust more, but that cannot be “fixed” any more than spring can skip to fall without passing through summer. It is a long, twisting journey and I only hope you can find me along the way to walk it with you.”
The Author’s love story of me is beautiful, but there is still an inner resistance to that narrative. My brain accepts it, but my feelings cannot. I believe enough to choose grace, but I cannot relax and rest into it as something settled, reliable, and safe. Why is my own narrative so much stronger than God’s? Because it is not my narrative, I suddenly realize. This storyline I have always believed is so deeply rooted because it did not spring from me as I supposed but was handed to me fully developed, like an owner’s manual. I see now my trust in an overriding love is not so much thwarted by the harm I did (see my last two posts) but the harm done to me, the disapproval stamped on my heart, the disappointment leveraged against me in childhood and beyond.
My identity was fashioned by my parents as surely as my language was. My mother tongue is English. I was not given an option to speak in Chinese. I did not know Spanish existed. A tree was “tree.” It was not up for debate or question. It was so settled that doubting it would only show my ignorance. My parents knew language and I simply had to learn it from them. As everyone agreed on “tree,” it was a universal reality. In the same unconscious, inescapable way, I absorbed my sense of myself from my parents. I was who they said I was. It was no more up for question or doubt than my being a son, but it was rooted more deeply than language because their beliefs about me were handed down by God, they said, and how could I ever question Absolute, Eternal Truth?
My parents actively judged themselves and ran from their own shame, so they were poorly placed to teach anything else to their children. They believed about God what they were raised to believe just as surely as I did, and it shaped their whole view not only of themselves, but of me. When I disobeyed, my father grew stiff and cold. Even after I showed my shame and remorse, he slow-walked warmth and affection, as though acceptance shown too quickly would undermine his pressure of disapproval. He was suspicious my shame was not deep enough to make a change. This created the meaning for me of “repentance” towards a God who was often disappointed and aloof because of my behavior. My mother’s response was not cold, but hot, quick anger. And so I grew up believing that love and acceptance is a reward for good behavior and that I often was unworthy of it.
How incredibly difficult, after this molding, to grasp a grace that is never conditional. How could I even begin to construct such an imaginary world? No one I knew spoke the language of grace fluently. How can I now settle peacefully into a life built on grace when I am surrounded by a world of people who see unlimited grace as dangerous and delusional if not incomprehensible? The religious in particular persuade me to distrust grace. Seeing the universe through the eyes of grace changes everything. It not only fundamentally changes my perception of myself and everyone else and God… it changes my perception of “tree”… of “spider,” “comedy,” “hot,” and “superfluous” since it changes at core how I am present in the world and how I see the world.
It is a slow work to learn to see myself as graciously as God sees me, but he is the true Father who declares me precious beyond all counting. My work to redefine myself must begin where it first got derailed as a child, to challenge that origin story with a new way of being fathered, almost like an adolescent suddenly discovering they were adopted and needing to rethink their whole history. May I let go of my allotted image given by shame-reactive parents and see myself as beloved beyond all comprehension.
I offered a sweet retelling of my story in the last blog, but I am still snagged on the tragedy of the harm I have done. I can’t rewrite that. Love embraces me in my failures, but how can I feel relief when I know others still suffer for my failings? Even were I faultless, doing the best I could with my limited capacity, others are stabbed by my inadequacies… and can I ever claim to do my best—using every ounce of energy and intensity of focus and purity of motive? How can I be at peace in the face of their pain? I realize now that I have been secretly writing their story as well as my own, controlling the narrative, telling myself that the harm I did or good I failed to do is irreversible, scribbling whole chapters describing their continued suffering. In fact my suffering continues long after theirs is over–Taiho died many decades ago. Quite possibly I have suffered more from my harming others than they have suffered from my harm, and my self-torture has helped no one. It drains away my energy to do good. But how can I be okay if they are not okay because of me?
I can only trust a loving retelling of my story if the Author of my story is busy writing everyone else’s story as well. Grace must be not only big enough for me, but big enough for them. What if the Author took the harm I did to others and rewrote it for their good as only grace can do? Then I would be free of this weight of regret. Might I believe that grace is constantly at work reclaiming their hearts and lives, that their story is one full of grace, though not painless as no one’s is? What if I really believed that my wrongdoing was not simply overcome or counterbalanced by grace, perhaps by a kinder, healthier person in their life, but that my harm was actually leveraged into goodness, an instrument of grace to awaken or enlighten or invite into a more beautiful story in their lives? After all, this is my core belief, that Grace is always at work through all the ups and downs to invite us into deeper places of the heart.
Perhaps many through hurt have closed their hearts to grace, but I believe that grace will keep chasing them, even passed the veil of death, for love’s longing is never abandoned. Our evasion may be tenacious, but grace is more persistent still, never giving up until it has won us over. All that we suffer is an invitation by grace into deeper healing, understanding, and relationship. Pain will come. I may cause it. And grace turns it into a pallet to paint something amazing and beautiful, not only in me but in all those I touch. I may not yet see it but grace is always vibrantly present and at work. We cannot escape grace. It is the river we all swim in, immersing us from birth, surrounding all we do and fail to do with love. I write a false narrative of others when I leave out grace. I need to put down my pen and listen to grace’s telling.
All my life my mind has secretly been constructing an autobiography, pulling together all the tangled pieces of my past and turning it into a coherent storyline that defines me. Sadly, I am not kind to my protagonist. My mind narrates the time I joined with neighborhood kids in grade school to call our friend Bobby “Roto-rooter,” laughing at how mad it made him, and I wince with sadness and shame. I recall scolding my dearly loved collie Taiho, who had done nothing wrong, just to see the cute look of remorse on his face, and it seems so mean. The older I got, the worse I did, and in my retelling, the good that I did weighs lightly against the heaviness of my perceived failures. I become my story’s villain, a cautionary tale.
Most novelists are kinder to their protagonist. As I read, I find myself hoping good for the main character, even if she is a scold or he is a criminal. I am sad when she loses her best friend or when he ends up under a bridge in the rain. I am sympathetic to their failures and losses, understanding of their vices, and whispering to warn them against harmful choices. Just show me their humanity, and my heart is all in for them. What would it be like if one of these writers told my story? If they showed the good generously and the faults compassionately and made the reader love me like a dear friend? Would I be able to accept such a telling of my story or would it feel undeserved, even untrue like the overindulgent words of a doting mother?
Just yesterday it occurred to me that I do have a flawless Biographer of my story who writes with the kindest, most gracious heart ever known, a retelling of my life that is perfect and trustworthy in a way my own memory and judgment could never be. Imagine if my life were told from the perspective of boundless love–every failure told from pure sympathy, every wrongdoing wrapped in understanding, every flaw traced with caring fingers. What if the Author of my story, while clearly seeing my shortcomings, was my cheerleader who found deep joy in who I am in every moment of my life. What if Love defined me? That is the story I long for. I believe, help my unbelief.
*This post was written 2-3 years ago and never posted
The evening after Christmas, we arrived home from a beach trip, and as we were unpacking, there was a knock on our door. A young woman stood there in tears and told us her sister Jiselle, our duplex neighbor, tried to kill herself on Christmas eve. Savannah had just flown in from Pennsylvania but Hertz cancelled her car reservation. Jiselle was in a care facility 1 1/2 hours away and Savannah was going to miss the one hour of visitation that was allowed. I immediately offered to drive her there.
We do not know Jiselle or her husband Jonathan very well, having only met a few times in our shared parking lot. Most of what we know we guessed–that she babysits, that he is currently deployed on a Navy ship, that their friends who sometimes stayed over were also in the Navy. They were polite but distant, so we supposed they had no interest in connecting with us socially, which is understandable as they are young enough to be our children.
As I drove Savannah to the in-patient facility, she shared with me how Jiselle felt bad for inconveniencing Savannah, asking her “Was I being selfish to try to kill myself?” Savannah was unsure how to answer, not wanting to make Jiselle feel guilty. I responded, “So do you think she was being selfish?” “Well, yes.” she replied. I tried to think of an analogy to help her see the situation more graciously.
“Suppose Jiselle was beaten brutally every day and you knew her only chance of escape was to flee the country and never see her family again. Would you think she was being selfish to run?” “No, of course not,” she answered. “Well, emotional trauma is more painful than physical trauma, and Jiselle was beaten by it every day,” I said.
Perhaps we should be praising Jiselle for hanging on as long as she did. It seems she was finally broken by her continual rejection of her own needs in order to satisfy others, especially a family who demanded she keep suffering so they would not suffer the grief of losing her. Who is truly selfish with that worldview? In light of this, I was troubled by an internet meme that has been circulating on Facebook:
The sign uses guilt and shame to stop someone from jumping from this bridge. Instead of understanding and empathy it offers judgment. Suggesting that the pain of bystanders is more important than the pain of the sufferer is untrue and deeply devaluing, and it exacerbates the ache and isolation of the one suffering. Perhaps the message intends to redirect the jumper to another solution, but it doesn’t offer one, so it comes off sounding like “You must keep suffering so I don’t have to.” Suicide is the last, desperate solution to other failed fixes. Jiselle was in counseling and on meds and still felt too awful to live.
The real question is not, “Does she love others enough?” (as though her burden was not already too heavy) but “Have we loved her enough?” Why is the pain “passed on” at death? Perhaps the bridge meme should read, “Pass some of your pain to us now, so you won’t have to end it here” or “Shared pain prevents suicide” (posted in the church bulletin board instead of the overpass railing). May we embrace one another’s pain and offer to share the suffering rather than scapegoating the one who has run out of all hope.
I’m often plagued by insecurities, inadequacies about work, relationships, income, decisions, indecisions, and forgetting to put the wet laundry in the dryer. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a rugby pile on. I think I’d be okay if there were no people–no one to impress or hurt or misunderstand or fear. Hermits must be the happiest folks on earth… except the people they carry around inside their heads. Many think well of me, but that’s no reassurance. Their approvals are light as air–they’re nice, but they don’t decrease the heavy weight of judgments (imagined or real). If you do everything right in a surgery, but make one mistake, you screwed up. You don’t get points for the positives. Success is what ought to happen, so there are no accolades except for super-human efforts. I can’t beat the game by having more wins than losses because the losses always blot out the wins.
The worst is when I feel I’ve hurt someone, whether I’m guilty or not. Even their forgiveness does not relieve my self-judgment if they are still in pain… in fact, their kindness can make me feel worse still. So feeling bad about their hurt as well as my guilt makes it twice as hard, and I feel guilt even if my motives were good and my effort strong. I could have done better–I know this is true because I look back and see it. I can point out each misstep. I should have known, should have expected, should have listened, should have should have should have. I need to stop shoulding all over myself… yes, I should stop that!
My father tried to save us children from this stinging shame of not being good enough by giving lots of advice for improvement. He was just trying to help us be better… always better. He wasn’t harsh or mean about it, but he was relentless. So I learned from childhood that if things go badly, it was my fault for not thinking or planning or performing better. The only smidgeon of relief was to figure out how to make sure I didn’t screw up again. Failure feels terrible and any means to escape it feels intensely important, and our strategy was to try harder.
The only other way to relieve my sense of awfulness was to blame someone else. I learned as a kid that someone is always to blame for a failure, because if no one is to blame, it can’t be fixed. and fixing it is an urgent necessity. We had the wrong address… whose fault was it? The bill was paid late, who was to blame? If the fault was someone else’s, it relieved my shame. It was then my duty to make the guilty one see their fault and take ownership so we didn’t have to face this shame again. How well I remember the hard-faced disappointment of my father who was waiting for me to express the intensity of my shame through hanging head and muted words with a promise to never repeat the failure again. Even then he expressed coldness and distance for some time, perhaps to let the full weight of my failing settle into my determined commitment to never repeat that wrong. It felt like forgiveness was earned by self-abasement. This particular memory, common enough, came from my sneak-reading a book in class the teacher had told me to put away and who called my father to complain even though I had apologized to her.
In my dad’s dedicated campaign of betterness, the key ingredient missing was grace. In my family, grace was the leniency offered the weak. You did as much as you could, and if you truly were unable, grace was offered… somewhat grudgingly. It was basically pity… a suspicious pity, concerned that you were “taking advantage” of grace, pretending to be unable to do something you were quite capable of doing. By its very nature, pity is demeaning, which is the opposite of grace, thinking badly of someone because of their limitations. This pity was grudging because if I couldn’t pull my weight, he had to pull it. If mom couldn’t remember, he gave her suggestions for remembering, but in the end, he had to remember for her. If I did it wrong, he corrected me repeatedly, and then he had to do it for me. It didn’t really matter how big or small the matter was because a failure is still a failure, and often the failure was simply doing it too slowly. The impatience at someone’s shortcomings always proved that “grace” was not really grace.
This week as I reflected on this deeply hurtful upbringing, the reason for my sense of inadequacy became clear to me once again. Of course I struggle with this! How could I not find myself in this continual battle against the deeply engrained views and values of my childhood? It is like my mother tongue–if I speak, it is in English. Heck, I even think in English and feel in English. “Just Do It Better” was more deeply taught than colors and shapes and I learned it before I learned the alphabet. I am on a slow and staggered journey away from this land of betterment into a land of unconditional acceptance where love is no longer a reward for beauty but a nurturer of beauty. Love comes first. Always. I am fully embraced with all my shortcomings.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
“I wrote [this poem] down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayán, Colombia. And my husband and I were on our honeymoon. We had just gotten married one week before, here in Texas, and we had this plan to travel in South America for three months. And at the end of our first week, we were robbed of everything. And someone else who was on the bus with us was killed. And he’s the Indian in the poem. And it was quite a shake-up of an experience.
“And what do you do now? We didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything. What should we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us; I guess could see our disarray in our faces and just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him, and he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” in Spanish. And he went on, and then we went to this little plaza, and I sat down, and all I had was the notebook in my back pocket, and pencil. And my husband was going to hitchhike off to Cali, a larger city, to see about getting traveler’s checks reinstated.”
New Year’s is the traditional annual reboot from lives bogged down by unused, open tabs–plans to exercise, eat healthy, journal, clean out the garage, read a book. We keep glancing at them, annoyed and guilty, but won’t close them down as we sit down to watch The Queen’s Gambit with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. But the heaping plate of happy indulgences at Christmas make us wince at the memory of our good intentions. And as we stare into the bleakest part of the year, we plan again to wrangle by willpower and shame a new routine of supposed goodness. It won’t be fun, but with discipline and determination we can make this happen. And while that initial energy lasts, the sheer accomplishment feels nice, like maybe we’re not the useless lumps we feared.
Sadly, willpower, like jumper cables, is not a fuel to keep things running. It must be motivated by something else–usually fear or shame or a sense of obligation, all of which are miserable motivators. No wonder it doesn’t last. We truly live when ignited by joy, hope, fulfillment, passion, awe–in short, what is life-enhancing rather than life-draining, what we are drawn into rather than what we force on ourselves.
Yesterday I went hiking with my two dogs on nearby trails that are also open to motorcyclists. With my dogs out in front, coming suddenly on a dirt-biker is a fright. I thought the rainy weather would be in my favor, and I picked a trail that was opened only a week or two before, hoping others were unaware. As I entered, I could see only one bike track, a good omen, but within 20 feet of the entrance, four bikers came careening around the bend ahead. I quickly dragged my dogs into the heavy undergrowth as the engines swept passed. I was quite agitated as I hiked for a mile up the trail, muddy from churning tires, though we met no one else. As I turned around to head back, I realized the unfortunate timing of the encounter. Had I hiked those two miles and only run into the bikes at the end, I would have had a great hike and thought myself lucky. It suddenly occurred to me that my outlook was shaping my unhappy experience and I could turn my mind towards enjoying the beautiful trail instead. This came not from a place of obligation “I should be happy,” or of shame, “I shouldn’t be angry,” but simply from a desire to enjoy the hike, to lean into the good that was already there for the taking. I really enjoyed the rest of the hike. What good might you embrace in the New Year?
Janathan Grace Reflections 