Author Archive
I grew up believing that proper English distinguishes the educated, the ones smart enough to be heard. The clarity and precision of that judgment fit neatly into my outlook on life: there is a right and wrong, choose the right and all will be well. For me, English is a standard, a measure of value; for Kimberly, English is a function, a measure of clarity. In other words, she values communication as a basis for understanding and relationship. What needs to be accurate is the meaning, not the grammar. She has little patience for my pokes at poor writing since she has regard only for the content, not the wrapping paper. Are the words sincere and true, clear and meaningful? If so, how can they be poor? They are rich and powerful.
I fought a noble fight for years, but I knew I could never win because she refused the correctness argument I spun and made it all about grace. Yesterday I finally conceded. It is one thing to recognize a culture’s values and accommodate them so as to reduce barriers in our interactions–good grammar appeals to Americans, especially educated Americans. But it is an entirely different thing to accept those values as my own. I have had an elitist, unchristian outlook, and I apologize.
The true spiritual journey leads into the depths of our hearts, an excavation, really, since it is a constant breaking through to new levels of realization. That effort takes great courage in facing the intense fear and pain that have held us back, keeping us blind to our true selves. Each new layer of self-realization opens wounds that have been hidden safely away by our mind’s defensive strategies, but we must drop our guard and feel the sharp edges of our suffering if we want our bruised hearts to be truly embraced. The path of growth is strewn with the barbs of truth that pierce our feet each step of our journey home.
Here is where self-compassion rather than self-blame is crucial in working our way through. Healthy transformation is always grounded in grace. Nowhere is grace more needed than at this point of freshly acknowledging our brokenness. This is not avoiding responsibility, but embracing responsibility, since our primary duty at this stage is receiving grace, a bedrock belief that we are loved unconditionally by our heavenly Father. There will come a time to focus on giving others grace–of understanding and forgiving the wounds they have inflicted–but this is a second step. We can only give what we have first received.
To give others grace before it has settled into our own hearts is to try to pour water from an empty pitcher. You will lose sight of your own suffering if you jump too quickly into defending others, which is a reaction forced on you by guilt or obligation rather than a gift offered to others freely from an overflow of grace in your heart. This shortcut is unsustainable and will lead to a cycle repeated over and over of wounding, reaction, and return to the status quo. This quick fix is often accompanied by “forgiveness” or compromise, but the underlying issues are never resolved and so they keep returning without leading to deeper mutual understanding and acceptance. True forgiveness springs from grace, not obligation–ask any child forced to apologize–and grace must first be received before it can be given: “We love because He first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
Self-compassion is nothing more than seeing ourselves as God sees us, agreeing with Him that we are deeply and fully and unshakably loved. When we open to, welcome, embrace, trust, relish this love of God for us, we are living by faith, faith in God’s grace and love. We live in the reality that we are supremely loveable because God himself declares us to be, and none of our failings makes Him value us less than his own eternal and perfect Son.
But so many Christians fear grace, caution against its freedom, worry that self-love will lead to spiritual neglect or self-indulgence by those who think their screw-ups no longer matter. In fact they matter even more because the relationship we now damage is one of supreme value and importance to us, our life-sustenance. If true value comes from God, then our relationship with Him is our vital force. Imagine a deep-sea diver saying, “Well, now that I know my oxygen comes to me regardless of how I behave, I can cut my own hose and it won’t matter.” God does not turn off His grace towards us or close His heart to us when we turn from Him–the oxygen keeps flowing–but we can no longer access that vital source. He wants to grace our relationships, but when we take advantage of others, He is blocked from gracing that relationship until we turn again to His loving way. When we neglect or belittle others, when we are greedy and demanding, His grace is restricted from flowing into our daily interactions, and life sours around us and in our hearts, which are now being overgrown with the deadly effects of godlessness (having less of God). Grace is the door into life and relationship with God, not an escape hatch from all that is good and beneficial. If we seek for life by pushing God and His truth away in “selfishness”, it is rather an act of self-abuse–like a drug fix. This does not spring from too much self-compassion, but too little; it springs from a doubt in God’s love, not a confidence in it. Everything that leads us away from the supreme beauty and goodness of God into our own self-destructive way is self-hatred, not self-love.
Every year Christmas is a cultural blitzkrieg of celebration, carrying many along in its triumphal sweep while capsizing in its wake those who cannot keep up with its jubilant spirit. Be happy or be left out. In our chipper American culture, that is the flavor of the year, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox so aptly described it:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Even those who are forgiven for a downcast spirit on an average day are expected to step up to the occasion when the band starts playing, which it does ceaselessly from Thanksgiving till the last relative shambles out the door and the long, bleak, cold winter blows inside.
I’m no sour-puss. I like celebrating Christmas if I can bring all of myself to the party–the sad parts as well as the hopeful parts, the tears and smiles, winces and hugs, serious and silly words. When my uncomfortable emotions are welcomed, my winsome emotions have room to express themselves genuinely rather than as a pretense. Let me weep freely with you, and the laughter you hear will be deep-hearted as well. My soul is chilled when I’m pressured to be false to myself, to express inflated or deflated feelings to please others who care more for an acceptable presence than a true presence. Of course some contexts call for safe, superficial connections, and in that sense every office party is a masked ball, but then everyone enjoys it for what it is–play acting–and does not confuse it for genuine connection.
But even “genuine” can be a canny facade. Many folks who think they are being real are so cut off from their own heart that they are simply reacting, sharing the surface emotions they feel in the moment that serve to disguise–even to themselves–the deeper underlying emotional currents, the submerged rip-tides that are too threatening to acknowledge. Under the intense pressure of Christmas conformity, these can burst out suddenly and without warning. Anger can cover for shame, tears can hide anger, cheerfulness can mask fear. The underlying emotions which are unacceptable or painful are transmuted into acceptable or comfortable feelings. The intensity of those feelings may wake us to some deep lying issues but will fog up our skills for interpreting them.
The inflated expectations of the holidays is not a safe harbor to dry-dock the soul and begin to scrape away decades of clinging barnacles. Sometimes the best any of us can do is try to ride out the storm of cross-current conflicts that arise. But these family gatherings are rich with telltale signs of underlying issues, and once we get enough distance to look back with compassion and insight, we may be filled with fresh personal discovery. Next year we can bring more of our true selves to the party and welcome the true selves of others as we grow into the grace of understanding and accepting ourselves and others more fully.
As Kimberly and I walked our dogs yesterday, I shuffled through my disjointed thoughts and feelings, arranging and rearranging them, trying to sort out with her the contours of my despair. For two weeks I have felt crushed by the racial divides in our country, but unable to speak, silenced by the angry retorts that always come. “Why do I feel such deep despair in hearing that dissent?” I asked Kimberly. “It’s natural to be discouraged,” I went on, “since I smart when my thoughts are rejected and I grieve for those condemned by the critical reactions. I can see a handful of reasons to be disheartened, but my anguish is so much deeper than that and crushes me at hearing just one or two retorts. Why do I despair?”
After an hour of trying to fit the emotional pieces together it became clear that I was suffering from the collapse of my worldview. I have struggled for two decades with my own impotence to change the world in some small way (as I mentioned here), but I faced that personal uselessness by clinging to a broader hope for the world–that others would bring the change I could not. If I was not a player on the winning team, I could still cheer on the good guys from the bleachers. This year it has slowly been dawning on me that my hope is misplaced. My team will not save the day, we cannot save the day, we are not saviors. In fact, we are all in as much need of a Savior as the rest of the world around us. We are all broken. And along with our broken world we await the day of redemption.
I don’t mean to suggest that we can bring no good to the world. We must work to bind up our little tattered corners of society, but ultimately it is a patchwork affair, a jerry-rigging until the Great Healer comes to bring us true and full peace at last. As grace-infused people, we do not offer a resolution on this day, but a resolve until that day, we hold up a light of hope in this dark, troubled world. That doesn’t seem much like the “Christmas spirit” of sleigh bells, bright lights, and belly-laughing Santas, but perhaps I misunderstand the true meaning of advent hope.
“Oh, come, oh, come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lowly exile here until the Son of God appear.” Those words rang so true to my forlorn spirit, that they brought me to tears this week, tears of heartache but also of hope: “Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” We cling to the first advent in expectation of the second.
“I’m sorry for being impatient with you Sunday night,” I told Forest, one of my student workers, as he sat down at the circulation desk. “You were doing your best, and that is all I can ask of anyone.” I am not a patient man, with myself or with others. I “came by it honestly” as my mother would say since Dad was highly committed to efficiency and raised us on the double: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing quicker. “What took you so long?” was cliched into the moral soundscape of our lives, a diagnostic metronome to gauge our pace in life. I never earned my efficiency badge, so it became an obsession of sorts as I chased after the qualifying time that kept eluding me. Life was a race and I was losing, but instead of quitting, I just ran harder.
My hopped up need for hustle exalts efficiency over more Scriptural values like patience, and even when I demote it, it still mucks up the works by prodding me to bark at consequences instead of intentions. That is, if you get in my way, I’ll get hot whether it’s your fault or not. Forest is diligent, but learns slowly. Impatience (if ever legitimate) must burn at his negligence, not at his learning curve, over which he has little control. Scolding a slow person for being slow is abusive, and the first step down that harmful path is expecting too much of others… which usually springs from demanding too much of myself.
So the cure, ironically enough, begins with grace towards myself, even about my abusive impatience towards others. I cannot in any healthy way scold myself into virtue. Being patient with myself is not at all the same as excusing myself or minimizing my fault. Rather, it is fully admitting my faults, but seeking a cure in God’s greater grace rather than my greater effort. Divine grace is key not only because it forgives me, but because it creates a whole context of grace, a circle big enough for all our failings, mine and Forest’s both. Excuses, far from being an expression of grace, are a rejection of it. They are a claim to need no grace since no wrong has been done–I only need your understanding, not your forgiveness. Excusing myself closes the door to grace just as surely as loathing myself. Self-justification and self-condemnation are both blockades to grace–in the first I am too good for grace and in the second I am too bad for it, but both express a legalistic worldview. and trying to validate them by calling them “righteousness” and “contrition” respectively will not change their antagonism to grace.
I scolded Forest shortly before we closed Sunday, and I was already feeling guilty by the time I walked out the door. I wrestled with it on the way home, refusing to play the devil’s song of shame in my head, but embracing my failings and the grace I needed to relieve my shame. Instead of spending the two days till his next shift beating myself–a common habit of mine that is so personally and relationally destructive–I settled into the relief of God’s all-encompassing grace, and when I apologized to Forest on Tuesday, it was not from a shame-induced defensiveness or groveling, but as a fellow recipient of grace. We both fail, we both need grace. May we all learn to grace ourselves and one another more freely.
See, I have a very neat and organized view of life and she is all over the map. “Wait,” you say, “aren’t you weighting the whole thing at the start by comparing life to a map? Maybe life is more like a painting.” Well… okay… now you’ve confused me… hold on! Life can’t be like a painting because you can’t live without following the rules, you have to do things in order–socks first, then shoes; toothpaste first, then brushing; shopping, chopping, cooking, eating, all in that order. Life is like a map.
“Okay, if you lack the creativity to see life as anything but a map, what about off-roading? With the right vehicle, you can go anywhere on the map at any time.” You’re making me very uncomfortable–if you don’t stick to the roads you’ll get disoriented and lost and never make it to your next stop. “Who says there is a next stop, who decides the destination and how to get there? Aren’t you assuming a few things? In fact, what does ‘lost’ even mean?” Lost is when you don’t know where you are or how to get where you’re supposed to go, and everybody knows where you’re supposed to go. “And if Kimberly doesn’t see it that way?” Then she’s wrong!
“Ah, well, that sounds like a good way to resolve differences–declare yourself right and the other person wrong!” Look, I’ve tried seeing things her way, but it’s like looking at a Picasso, it makes no sense. “Maybe that’s the point.” To make no sense?! “That the problem is with the sense rather than the painting, maybe it’s the way you are looking rather than what you are looking at… and by the way, I notice you brought back the life-as-a-painting metaphor.” So you are suggesting the problem is with my mind and how it is structured, that I have to change my mind? “Well, let’s just say broaden your mind–the goal is to understand Kimberly, not abandon your own perspective in favor of hers. But you have to understand her from her perspective not from your own.” You mean I have to see Hip-Hop like Snoop Dogg sees it, not like Julie Andrews sees it? Because I don’t get Hip-hop either… and I’m not sure I want to get it. “Baby steps. Start with Kimberly.”
Yesterday Kimberly and I were walking the dogs in our neighborhood. My brain was stuffed with thoughts that were spilling out everywhere. (This is not as common as you might think since I’m an internal processor.) Towards the end of my rambling monologue I commented that I was slowly coming to realize people are not very logical. She responded, “That’s what everybody thinks. Everybody believes their arguments are more rational than everyone else’s.” With that short exchange our conversation slid into the ditch. It is our most familiar, but still unavoidable, conversational pile-up. We don’t see it coming, we don’t know how to avoid it, and once we’re off the shoulder, we don’t know how to recover. The best we can manage so far is an autopsy after the talk has crashed and the dust settled.
In short, we each hear the other stating an absolute position that leaves no room for our own perspective. In this case she heard me saying that I was smarter than everyone else and I heard her saying that everyone is equally logical. My approach is to try to make some room for my view, in essence saying, “Will you give me this half of the room? This end? This little corner?” It seems to me that I am negotiating for space for my viewpoint, smaller footage with each argument I propose, and after the third or fourth try, I give up, growing silent. There is not even a cubbyhole in her outlook for my perspective (in this case, that logic is important but underused). She, of course, hears something entirely different. For her, every time I give a reason for my view, I am demanding her total capitulation. It seems to both of us that the other one refuses to yield an inch. On this occasion I tried to assert, “Logic is very important… logic is kind of important.. logic has some small role to play,” but each time, she hears me giving one more argument for why logic is king and I am his chief officer.
When the topic is minor, we just let it go. It’s not worth the trouble to sort out. But when it is a personal issue, touches a core value, or has significant practical implications, we are too emotionally invested to welcome the opposing viewpoint. So this conflict pattern that needs a clear-eyed examination arises when the fog is thickest. Initially we don’t recognize it, but the deeper into the conversation we push, the more emotionally invested we become, so that ironically, the more obvious the situation grows the less possible it becomes to resolve it.
All our standard relational conflicts take this path of growth. We start to recognize the pattern in hindsight and discuss it. Then we begin to realize when we are in the middle of it, but we still can’t figure out a solution. Then we take some baby steps that slowly grow more helpful. After falling in the same ditch hundreds of times, we find a way to sometimes avoid the ditch, slowly becoming more adept. We’re still at step one on this particular dynamic. But we’ll figure it out. We always do.
Last night as I prepped for bed, I said to myself, “This has been a good day.” In the last twenty years I must have felt that at times, but I can’t recall any… partly because they have been rare, partly because a depressed mind easily forgets the ups. “Why was it good?” Kimberly asked. Nothing exceptional. I enjoyed my walk with the dogs… and some other incidental positives I couldn’t remember. Incidentals don’t usually change the feel of a day for me.
The things that encourage others don’t sink deep enough to change the life experience of the depressed. We see a beautiful waterfall, earn a compliment at work, or find a love note in our lunch, but like a cold sip on a blistering day, it tantalizes without refreshing. It is the surface waves that leave the depths unmoved. For all of us, emotional responses are spontaneous, unchosen. We can tweak the flow of our feelings–calm a fear or encourage gratitude to some extent–but our influence on them is limited.
It’s the unwanted emotions I’d really like to avoid, but I can’t. We melancholics are highly sensitive to our deeper selves, so we can’t work or play or friend away our feelings. And even if I could snub them, I wouldn’t. I need to hear what they have to say. Emotions are dispatches from our psyche, so killing the messenger simply cuts that line of communication to a huge, vital source of personal insight. In fact, it is to this core place alone that real healing must come. Good feelings are yard sticks, not hammers: you use them to measure your soul, not to fix your soul. Like your spouse, feelings are better listened to than controlled, understood than manipulated. Insisting on positive feelings can be a form of self abuse.
The mundane events of Saturday felt good to me, and that’s a hopeful sign. It suggests that a much deeper good is awakening in some part of my soul.
I’ve been missing lately from my blog because I’ve been mysteriously content of late, and I’m doing all I can to step gingerly and avoid jostling anything that might splash unwanted bits on my day, a very closely managed contentment! It is like having a badly burned part of my body–my most recent bout with serious depression–that is painless as long as I don’t move, and stings a warning if I take any chances… enforced relaxation… sort of like prison… like hiding in the bushes from a stalking bear and bating my breath to avoid detection… very much like that since I don’t know when and from where a new round of aggressive depression might pounce.
A harsh word, a guilty memory, a snub, a glimpse of an unfinished project and depression gets in a quick slap. I feel it, and I will myself to breathe deeply, relax, let it go. At other times it is the slow, almost undetectable drips of growing emotional dis-ease, when I go two days without exercising, for instance, or I avoid dealing with a niggling problem. I can always feel it brushing past in the dark, know that I have a very thin emotional barrier protecting me. Perhaps the clearest evidence is that even though I don’t currently feel bad, I have very little energy to take steps to enhance my life, and pushing myself past my energy level is sure to tip over my precarious detente with depression.
Certain things seem to keep me steady–walking daily for two hours, going to work each evening, talking through stuff with Kimberly, loving on my dogs–and my hope is that over time a steady pace will yield more stability. There are hopeful signs. I am finding some comfort in books as I have not in years, and I catch myself whistling or singing snatches of verse. But all those gradual gains could be swallowed up overnight, without warning, and without explanation. So for today, let me just breathe steady, walk slowly, and hope for the best.
For 45 years B.K. (before Kimberly) I did life on my own. Going from single to couple in midlife can’t compare to marrying young, and though it has big pluses, I’ve felt the loss of her absence from my history: so many key events that are not shared moments, so much of who I am pieced together without her. But after my blog post yesterday, I have to recalculate. Missing those years has given her a clearer sense of who I am now, a view untainted by past distortions. In a way, she knows me better than I know myself because those years marred my self-understanding, not just my spirit. Without that baggage, she can see more objectively.
I truly don’t know how younger couples manage to navigate any sort of major life transformation after marriage if they don’t somehow make those transitions in step. Kimberly and I are both dramatically different people from our young adult selves. Had we met then, our false selves would have been inimical. Instead of helping one another towards genuine self-discovery, we would have driven each other into deeper hiding. It would have been a disaster. Our paths only crossed when our souls were ready. Since most of my life was a quick march in the wrong direction, how did I hit the right intersection at the crucial moment? The magic fingers of grace.
Janathan Grace Reflections 