Author Archive
My wife passed on to me this letter written by one of L’Arche’s extended family members. I’m sure sorrow is and will be a big part of their journey, but the part described here was uplifting for me to hear.
Hello to all,
It’s funny how people in general insist that they are in control of the direction of their life. We are just as guilty of this mentality as anyone else. Our life might be compared to a car ride – with Patrick driving and Lisa in the passenger seat reading the road map. Should we go North or South? East or West? So we consult our map and make a decision, Patrick hits the gas, turns the wheel, and off we go in the direction we planned for ourselves. How mistaken this view is! The reality is that we are the children in the backseat, playing with our pretend steering wheels, not even able to see over the seat in front of us! So who is driving this car we call life? Our Faith tells us that God is in charge of which road we take. Sure, we might tell him what our plans are, which way we’d prefer to go, but He ultimately decides the fate of our journey. Our challenge is to accept the path He chooses for us, and find peace and joy along the way. So why are we sharing this with you? Well, it seems that God has decided to take us around the bend in the road that we would not have chosen for ourselves.
We’d like to introduce you to our daughter, Annalisa. We’ve attached a picture of our last ultrasound. It was taken on Monday, October 25th and we hope you all will be able to view it. At the time of the ultrasound, Lisa was 20 weeks pregnant. In our eyes and God’s eyes, Annalisa is beautiful and perfect and God has something special in mind for her. With that said, our daughter has a tough road ahead of her. The ultrasound was with genetic specialist Dr. Jane Corteville from Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, and was very extensive. Here is what she found:
Annalisa is very small for her gestational age. She is measuring in the 5th percentile for size, with her head coming in at the 1st percentile. She has a growth on the back of her head, as well as a cyst inside her brain. She has a cleft lip and palate and a hole in her heart. In addition, the arteries going to her heart are reversed, she is missing her right kidney and stomach, and she has club feet. Dr. Corteville suspects an underdeveloped brain and that a chromosomal abnormality is causing all these defects. We’ve done an amniocentesis and are waiting for the results. However, the doctor has cautioned us that whatever the diagnosis, the chances of Annalisa overcoming all these birth defects are slim.
So what can we expect? At this point, it’s difficult to see around this bend that God has guided us toward. Most likely we can expect Annalisa to survive to delivery. Beyond that, the outlook is not favorable. It’s not hard to surmise the life expectancy of a baby with a list of problems like that.
So where do we go from here? There is a freedom in acceptance. We now must put our trust in God. We simply need to sit back, relax, and let Him steer our car around this bend in the road. Our challenge is to find peace with this path that’s been chosen for us. Our way to peace is to celebrate the joy that Annalisa brings to our life now. She is our daughter and she is indeed a miracle of life. When we think of her, we do smile. When she kicks in the womb, we rejoice. We talk about her to others with pride. And when she is born, we will hold her in our arms and love her.
We appreciate your prayers and support.
With love,
Patrick, Lisa, Landon, and Annalisa
I sometimes come across inspirational stories or provocative ideas that I want to share. Check out his website if you are interested.
Ransome lived down the street from me when I was a small boy. He was a friend of sorts. We competed over everything and it must have appeared to onlookers that we were more foes than friends. Ransome was athletic. He could chin himself on a bar fifty or sixty times. I struggled (with sweaty palms) to lift myself over the bar even once. He could run fast, faster than any kid his age. I was slow, a turtle of sorts; the kind of kid who always got caught in a game of tag. Ransome had fabulous eye-hand coordination. He could catch baseballs thrown by older kids and was often invited to join their pick-up teams. I closed my eyes whenever a baseball was thrown too hard. I was rarely asked to join the older boy’s teams (and was usually glad for it). Ransome caught the only baseball I ever hit toward the center field fence. He said I had the weakest swing of any kid in the neighborhood and from that day on, I never wanted to play baseball again.
Ransome was smart too. He knew facts about everything and always managed to correct me when I least wanted to be corrected. I remember telling a little girl (who I secretly loved) that several of the U.S. presidents were born in Europe. He corrected me and called me an “idiot.” In truth, none of the U.S. presidents were born outside of the United States. Ransome was right (again). I was wrong (again). On those occasions when I did know something of importance, Ransome always said, “I could have told you that.”
I was jealous of Ransome. I tried to defeat him on the playing field but he was always one move better, one leg faster. I tried to defeat him in school, but he was always a little smarter. Ransome seemed one better at everything.
And then one day I visited Ransome’s house in the middle of the afternoon. Ransome’s mother was sitting in her night clothes on the living room sofa. She spoke of lewd things, awful things, dark things. It was clear she was drunk. She told Ransome that she was ashamed of him because he had forgotten to clean his room and that his father was a loser. I saw on Ransome’s face an indescribable shame and horror. I saw his head drop and for the first time in my life, I saw in his eyes defeat. From that moment on, I no longer wanted to defeat Ransome. I could see clearly that his competitiveness on the playing field and in the classroom was a way of avoiding his trouble at home. At a very early age, Ransome was trying to answer a question we all must answer: if I am not good at what I do, if I am not successful, will I be loved?
From “The Man with a Black Belt in Intellect” by David Pitonyak
Click to access BlackBelt2.pdf
I often feel as though I am in some information backwater hole. I heard for the first time today about The Book of Awesome that has been on the NY Times bestseller list for most of 2010 and about the author’s related internet site voted international blog of the year. When I heard his TED talk, I found Neil to be quite articulate and funny. It made me think. (I know, I know, dog hair and crumpled paper make me think).
Neil tells us of two huge sorrows that happened a month apart–his wife told him that she didn’t love him anymore and his best friend committed suicide. He became quite sad and needed something to improve his outlook, so he started his blog (1000 awesome things) to remind himself of the good things in life, simple things like naps and french fries. In the face of life’s tragedies, he recommended that we focus more on positive things, even small positive things, to counter-balance the negatives. Though his message was upbeat, I felt disconcerted by his sudden shift in perspective from thousands dying in an earthquake in Haiti to his joy in putting on fresh, warm underwear. I do not fault Neil, who was given 18 minutes to speak on a narrow topic. He had little time to develop or nuance his thoughts. Besides, he seems like a nice guy. Still his talk raises many questions for me. PLEASE give me your thoughts! (If I’ve given too many questions, just pick one or just give your general impressions. My point is to open a dialogue.) My assumption is that thinking about small joys is generally beneficial, but may have limitations (especially if we expect too much of it). Try to be kind and humble in your responses (or pretend to be!). Here goes:
To what extent and in what ways do pleasant thoughts (positive thinking) help or hinder our strength, growth, and relationships… and thereby our happiness?
To what extent and in what ways do unpleasant thoughts (thoughts that come with sadness) help or hinder our strength, growth, and relationships… and thereby our happiness?
Can simple joys (or profound joys) compensate for tragedies or do they just help us not sink too low? What is “too low,” how would we describe it, and why is it beneficial to avoid?
Is it possible to take positive thinking too far? If so, what negatives might result?
If positive thinking is not sufficient in itself to resolve our emotional response to tragedy, what do we need in addition?
And finally a more specific question: how can we tell when a focus on the positive is feeding denial?
I live in constant fear. My closest friends don’t see it… or rather didn’t see it. Now I have no close friends but my wife. I cannot have close friends. I am too vulnerable after connecting with my long suppressed fears. I need real and deep friendships, but the more genuine they are, the more vulnerable I become, and the gentlest touch to raw flesh is shockingly painful. It seems an unsolvable dilemma: my wounds need the healing hands of compassion, but every human touch is imperfect in its love, and that imperfection inflames the wound. Instead of relieving my anxiety, relationships provoke them further.
I am frightened that others will not accept me for who I am, a fear (I might add) that has been repeatedly confirmed. Who I am, as I am today in all my imperfections, is bound to hurt others. I can be critical, impatient, unthoughtful, angry, selfish, unsympathetic. My friends, relatives, and acquaintances don’t like this (who would?–I dislike it myself). They like the good parts, but don’t like the bad parts, and they have many subtle or straightforward ways of telling me to bring the good stuff into our relationship, but leave the rest at home. The more sensitive I am, the more easily my overall experience feels like one of rejection. Even if someone is 95 percent affirming, that 5 percent will scream loud enough to drown out the rest, and my imagination can constantly manufacture clues of rejection when none is intended. To the degree I connect with my own feelings of inadequacy, to that extent I am open to being crushed by conditional love… and all human love is conditional.
Most of my life I protected myself by denying my own distress, which is another way of saying I denounced and rejected who I really was. The less I accepted myself for the flawed person I was, the less I accepted the faults of others, and their defensiveness to this increased my fear, goading me to thicken my armor of denial. I was invulnerable, a sea of fear tightly locked within the dyke… until the dyke broke. Now every relationship is soaked in fear. I am afraid of displeasing my bosses and of displeasing my employees. I am afraid of what all others think or say about me–in the grocery store and bank, over facebook and email, by phone or in person. I constantly second-guess myself. Was I critical, proud, selfish, unsupportive? Are they irritated because I was late or snickered at a favorite TV show? Do they belittle me because of bad grammar or bad breath? Are they offended or bored or burdened by me? How good do I have to be or what do I need to change (or hide) in order to be safe in my relationships, for my heart is so distressed that just a mild poke will close it down.
I want to heal, I want it desperately, and I constantly make choices to step into my fear, to share as honestly as my timid soul is able, but it is such a slow, scary, searing process. If I share with someone what I really think, feel, believe, doubt–the things I am afraid to let out–I give them the power to close me down so that I am even more fearful of sharing with others. There is a very thin margin of error emotionally speaking: avoid the pain of sharing and block growth or step in too far and get singed. Those tight margins, combined with my own frailty and confusion, often leads to faulty choices. I either avoid danger in ways that hurt myself and others or I step into danger and get burned, like learning to be an electrician by working with live wires. Progress comes in this herky-jerky way, and each positive step seems so small and so meagerly rewarded that I wonder if it is worth the effort and pain. But I have no choice. I need genuine relationship and genuine relationship hurts. It seems to me that I can die the slow death of denial or take the path of fear and pain. My courage is small, please be gentle with me.
………
Day before yesterday I wrote this and was going to post it to my blog with a link to facebook, but stopped myself for fear of judgments (spoken or unspoken) as well as misunderstandings. For the first, I will let folks judge as they will and not try to defend my experience to them. But for those who simply misunderstand, perhaps I should provide a bit of balance to what I have written.
When I said I am constantly in fear, I spoke honestly and without exaggeration, but I am sharing my experience from only one perspective, which may be misleading if it is taken as the whole. I was not suggesting that I am constantly conscious of my distress. I have very well-developed defenses to protect me from feeling scared, so well-developed that I was completely unaware of my own anxiety most of my adult life. Even then I realized the tension that criticism, blame, or failure created, but I thought it was a healthy stimulus to better myself, not realizing how deeply and harmfully it affected me and my relationships.
For the last ten years I have been on a journey of self-discovery, purposely uncovering my many apprehensions, but it is a slow and bumpy road. I am often unaware of the root problem still. In daily interactions I quail and revert to ingrained habits, leaping to protect myself with avoidance, blame or overwork, reacting so quickly that I jump right past my fear. Sometimes I ward off the danger with just a warning glance or tone of voice, an apologetic smile or short laugh. It is over, I shielded myself, and I move on without a second thought. But if I admit my true feelings, my stomach turns queasy and my face flushes, my throat tightens, my mind stutters and I wait for the ground to crack wide and swallow me. Why open my heart to that agony when I can easily deny my fear by blaming my coldness on her touchy personality or explaining my compromise as kindness to a friend? It took me 40 years to discover that buried fears don’t disappear but thrive in the dark like fungus, while bringing my anxieties out into the light with compassion, understanding and acceptance fuels my insight and growth and transforms my relationships over time.
When I said I can have no close friends, I meant the kind of friend with whom I can share deeply about myself in vulnerable ways and still feel fully accepted. I can have friends with whom I share many things, but as long as I feel the need to hold back any significant parts of who I am, their acceptance seems conditional, and that often feels worse to me than no friendship at all.
For a close friendship to be genuine requires a mutuality of sharing, and few folks are willing to share with me that vulnerably—perhaps for good cause since all acceptance is deficient (certainly mine is) and each of us has unique needs for safety. My insecurities are different from yours–the harbor you crave and offer me can blow against me like a hurricane (and my kindnesses can also wound you). Even when folks are willing to share deeply and honestly, they are stymied by lack of self-knowledge, and I feel as though I am risking much more than they are. Any effort at genuine relationship (the disclosing of the true you to the true me) is fraught with complications, and it takes a great deal of courage to face into the storm.
Yesterday I told my Facebook friends that I was thinking of fighting winter doldrums by concocting a month long birthday celebration for myself! I had fun last night brainstorming about all the things I would really like to do. Imagine my dismay to find myself depressed by those same ideas this morning. Everything last night I pictured enjoying now seemed burdensome since most things I find really pleasurable—reading, writing, conversing, creating—can be reframed as duties. I am a master at taking the things that give me joy and reducing them to obligations, draining them of any gratification. Doing things for sheer delight and living from that motivation seems hedonistic. Surely duty is a much godlier partner to holiness than pleasure.
As you can see, I have a serious problem with being responsible. A sense of duty weighed me down all my life, and nothing I did was ever done well enough, never accomplished to the point of satisfaction, but could always be improved. Each task done inadequately nailed down another proof of my failure and inadequacy as a person—I was not diligent enough, patient enough, thoughtful enough, committed enough. I was not enough.
Responsibility was the driving force of my life—its energy, direction, cohesion, and measurement—and to its cause everything was sacrificed, even my self. What I wanted, what would give me joy, was of no consequence, or worse was a temptation against the unending and uncompromising call of duty. It was God’s will versus my will, and my only choice was to squelch my desires. It seemed to me clearly taught by Jesus in Scripture with the motto “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” What I wanted didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to God and shouldn’t matter to me. I had a job to do, and that was all that mattered. This I believed wholeheartedly: my task is more important than me (and so I am only valued as a person to the extent I fulfill my calling).
Of course, I was reassured that God really did want me to be happy, but on His terms and not my own. The remedy to my unhappiness was not to be free of duty, but to take pleasure in it. This seemed less like a solution than an additional problem—not only was I bound to live for God’s satisfaction against my own, but I was also obliged to make this my source of pleasure. It felt as though I were locked in a sweatshop and ordered to picture it as a cruise in the Caribbean. I’ve been sitting in this same position for 12 hours: “No, I’m on a cruise!” I just whacked my thumb with a hammer: “No, I’m on a cruise!” I don’t know if I’ll get paid enough to buy supper: “I’m on a cruise!” If this was God’s view, the right view, my only hope was to make it mine as well. From an early age I tried desperately to make this work, fighting hard against opposing feelings which apparently sprang from the blindness of my sin nature. In the end, my emotions mutinied.
Depression, four years of profound and unremitting depression, finally drove me to question the very foundation of my worldview and to discover that God is the God of all grace. God wants the fulfillment of my desires, not their repression. But discovering a broken foundation is one thing; removing and replacing the foundation and rebuilding the structure is quite another (especially when your subconscious keeps sneaking in to replace the old blocks). 40 years I shouted at my desires, “Shut up!” as an act of submission to God’s will. For 10 years I have been learning to receive the grace of God. As you can see, I still have a long way to go.
My mind keeps bouncing with thoughts of what it means to support others. It is difficult to be a strong support without a deep, well established relationship, one in which each person is known genuinely and accepted for who he or she is. My wife and I do this for each other, but neither of us has experienced it fully in any other relationship. We have both had very effective counselors who understood us and accepted us fully, a rich and rare gift even among therapists, but the client-therapist relationship is limited by its professionalism and lack of mutuality.
My relationship with Kimberly is not perfect by any means. We regularly have to deal with issues that cause tension and distance in our relationship, but we do deal with them fully, which is unusual. We talk through our problems, each of us discovering and sharing our true fears and hurts, and return to a place of trust and acceptance with deeper self and mutual understanding. I tend to forget how unusual and valuable a gift Kimberly is to me and I to her.
We each wanted a spouse that was completely supportive, supportive (it turned out) of our coping mechanisms. Instead, we found the person who continually challenges our pretenses by simply being themselves. Since I am insecure, I wanted a wife who is always affirming so as to shore up my sense of worth. In other words, I don’t feel okay about myself, but if my significant other constantly tells me I am okay, it helps me ignore those gnawing doubts. Instead, I got someone who, although affirming, refused to play the role of “Worth Giver.” Rather than being saved from my insecurities by lavish reassurances, I was forced to acknowledge and deal with them. But when I admitted my issues, my wife accepted me for who I really was (instead of affirming the person I really wasn’t).
We expressed this to each other in our wedding vows. Mine read in part, “God has used you to set my soul free and alive in truth as I never imagined. You see me for who I am and who I can be and accept me as I am while believing with me for who I am becoming. I am safe with you, even my deepest, most vulnerable parts, but you also encourage me and challenge me to grow.” Just now my cheeks got damp reading that again and remembering the incomparable blessing of having a wife like her. Such honest and accepting relationships may grow also between friends and relatives, but I think few people in this life ever find it.
Fibi responded (on facebook) to my blog post “Let Me Be Weak” with some interesting questions, including the thought, “Of course it is such a natural tendency for one to try to lift you up and encourage during these low times. I think it’s a way that others try to show they care, but I almost hear you saying that it’s not possible … One has to walk through the sad times.” It set me to thinking.
First of all, let me thank you for listening, Fibi. You really listen, and that is a gift. There are few things more encouraging or affirming than to be really heard. I think everyone is unique and so benefited in different ways, and even receive different gifts from different individuals. So one of the best ways to learn how to support is to ask (as you did). I naturally imagine that what helps me will help all others, but that proves to be a false assumption on my part. I first learned from Kimberly that trying to ‘fix’ her is counter-productive (and then to my surprise found the same to be true for myself—I was more benefited by those who listen than those who try to solve).
When I am depressed, I want friends to simply be sympathetic to my situation. If I sense they need my feelings to change or expect that their sympathy should make me happy, I don’t feel supported in my present experience, but feel pressured to cheer up (which would require me to deny or suppress my true feelings). In turn, that pressure feels like a judgment against my depression or against my depression continuing–I am not only sad, but guilty for my sadness. I realize I may misread others’ attitudes and shouldn’t assume that they are critical of my feelings. On the other hand, we all have blindspots, so I may accurately sense in others attitudes of which they are unaware.
I have found great encouragement in the sympathy which says, “I feel sad for you, it must be really painful and difficult. I understand why you would feel depressed. Share with me how you are feeling.” In other words, I want my friends to accept my feelings fully as they are. Instead of trying to get me to join them in their happy feelings, they join me in my sad feelings, not in order to make me happy, but simply to be with me, to identify with my pain, to perhaps share or carry some of my burden emotionally.
This is not an easy thing to do. It scares some people, perhaps because they are frightened of their own sad and depressed feelings, which they are trying hard to avoid, or perhaps because they feel unable to be supportive for a variety of reasons. Their fear or inability is quite understandable and legitimate, and when I am “down,” they may need to put some distance between us for their own sakes. What I want to say to them is, “It is okay if you cannot support me. Just please don’t pressure me or condemn me. Let me at least be true to myself and listen compassionately to my own feelings.”
Your response to my blog has set me thinking more extensively, so I think I will have more to say soon!
Kimberly and I took a trip to the NC Blue Ridge Parkway for Thanksgiving weekend. The first day was rainy, and the next two days were below freezing with very high winds, but it was beautiful!
Our dog Mazie (short for Amazing… yes, Amazing Grace 
) loved the walks, sticking her nose into every clump of grass and chasing deer and chipmunks (to the end of her leash). She didn’t have much use for the vistas. Our digital camera has about a 2 second delay, so getting a good picture of her is nearly impossible.
The road names ’round them parts was quite colorful–Racoon Hollow, Lump Road, Ox Cart Road–and for some reason a lot of streets named after naked people: Don Bare Road, Hiram Bare Road, Doyle Bare Road. There was also a Bare Creek, which may have started the whole thing (I mean, you’ve got to bathe somewhere). Speaking of bare… there was a hot tub in our cabin (only half the parties in the tub allowed for picture taking). Oh dear, TMI!
Kimberly and I had a debate about Christmas trees, which were stacked on the roof of every 3rd car on the road–like there was a pine tree fire sale. “I’ve never seen so many christmas trees getting hauled home… maybe 1 out of 10 cars would be reasonable, but this is crazy,” I said. She responded, “Oh, there aren’t that many. Count the cars: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 8,9,10 and only one Christmas tree.” Then the next 3 cars had trees on top! We saw one Christmas tree in the bed of a pickup truck that was bigger around than the truck, quite literally. Other holiday cheer was spotted now and again–we saw 3 Santa Clauses hanging from a fence by the country road. As we got closer, we saw they were stuffed like scarecrows… and were headless. Like a Tim Burton movie.
On the way home we stopped in the little town of Floyd, VA for lunch at a local joint called the Oddfellas Cantina and were delighted with french toast made from homemade cinnamon bread and live music from a local crooner–I’d show you the picture, but I don’t know how to get them off my cell phone. It really was a very pleasurable trip.
I feel depressed today, I’m not sure why. No doubt a combination of things–overcast sky, reading back over my journals from years past, not having the distraction or rewards of work (I’m off this week). I have done little personal processing over the last 6 months, especially recently with life going so smoothly that I am not forced to face and work through my baggage. Perhaps it has been a needed break from the usual emotional storms of life, but that calm can trick me into thinking that I am suddenly stronger and not rather that the waves have died down for the moment. Whenever the winds strike up again, I am surprised at my own fragility–my quick fears or reactive anger and defensiveness.
Most of my life I was not fragile at all. I was the strong, courageous one, and others were weak and insecure, leaning on me for support (or vying with me to be the rock). I did not know that my intense fear of inadequacy drove me, that I dashed into danger to flee this greater terror, that my invulnerability was not a mark of courage, but of cowardice. People cannot understand how emotional fragility, acknowledging and embracing my vulnerability and weakness, can be a mark of growing maturity and strength. Many old friends and even family members wish I were my “old self,” that I would be “strong” once again as I was before, that I would handle my feelings as I once did. They think that when I listen and respond affirmingly to my emotions I am being controlled by them. I find myself put in the strange and difficult position of insisting on being weak.
One of the most common expressions of this dynamic is when friends try to talk me out of being depressed, try to encourage me till I feel better, insist that I think positive thoughts until happiness returns. But I find that depression is always telling me something important, that it has some deep truth it is calling me to discover, and if I have the courage and energy not to run from my depression, but to embrace it, listen to it, dig deeper into its secrets, then I find new life flowing into my soul. “When I am weak, then am I strong.”
Janathan Grace Reflections 