Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Yesterday Kimberly was reading to me from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea,” a breeze of calm and insight from the ocean by way of the author’s soul. Anne spoke of the slow drift between spouses and the need to restore the purity and simplicity of the first wave of love. Berly and I are coming up on our fifth anniversary (May 10), and neither of us want to return to those early days of our relationship. Folks remember the romance, the excitement, the uncomplicated acceptance of one another, the overlooking of each other’s faults and feel sad that those intense feelings and sense of inseparability are gone.
Kimberly and I feel sad rather for a culture that believes romance is the fullest expression of relationship. We would never want to trade what we have now for what we had then. It was pure and simple then because it was so superficial. We spent many hours every week for two years sharing openly with one another about the things closest to our hearts, so we knew one another fairly well at a basic level before we married, but knowing the basic truths about someone is so far short of really knowing them and connecting with their heart, which is why the first year of marriage is often so hard. I know it was for us.
Like marriage, a sailboat on her maiden voyage looks sleek and beautiful, there are no rents or dings, and she slices effortlessly through the water. But it is only after years of riding with her through the storms, risking life and fortune, and recalling the story of every rattle and dent that the captain knows his boat as no one else ever will, and the bond is deep and fierce. As we share life with mutual understanding and love, the original beauty and delight I found in Berly fills with meaning and substance. For me, every line of her face is an etching of her soul. The roots of our hearts grow ever deeper and more entwined. To pull us apart now would rend our vitals.
I can’t do another thing!
The Lenten season is past, but not my Lenten blessing. I committed to fasting from haste and hurry, and this became a remarkable source of peace for me, as I eased back on my sense of should. I started this process over the last decade as I gradually realized that most of the duties to which I felt driven were not from God, and that I could choose grace over obligation. As I ignored these duties, I felt the sting of shame and clung to grace rather than works as a remedy.
But my Lenten exercise did something very unexpected for me. Since I committed to the spiritual exercise of slowing down (and therefore accomplishing less), I was struck by the conclusion that God wanted me to rest. It was not only that I could choose to ignore the pressure of obligation, that God would be patient with me in doing less, but that God wanted me to do less, he willed for me to offload these unnecessary burdens. Grace demanded that I stop forcing my soul and start listening to it and choosing for its needs. God was not impatiently waiting for me to “hurry up and get with it,” but he was calling me to be as patient with myself as he was with me. For some time my mind has been convinced theologically that God is more patient with my rate of growth than I am, but after focusing 40 days on rest as a direction from God rather than a concession to my weakness, my emotions were also convinced. God has designed growth as a life principle to go at a slow pace, and if I try to push harder and faster, I will make things worse instead of better, like too much water and fertilizer on my squash. I have always been an overzealous fellow.
No doubt many folks go too easy, and would help themselves by picking up the pace, not on the trail of duty, but of grace, stirred by the anticipation and joy and wonder of being transformed, of discovering how rich and full life can be. Grace removes the drive of obligation not to make us spiritually comotose, but to set us free to find and embrace the richness of grace, its inspiration and glory and power and freedom and joy. I still have a long way to go, but I am laying one more foundation stone of grace in making this my Year of Rest.
I did not mean to suggest in my last post that our long, long lists of good behaviors are not in fact good. I simply want to point out that they are not paramount. Brushing our teeth, paying our bills on time, making soup for our sick neighbor are all good things, but the phrase, “the good is (sometimes) the enemy of the best,” comes to mind. This aphorism is usually used to promote even higher, more taxing behavioral standards for ourselves, but I would use it to change the value scale altogether, to set a higher value on heart issues than behavior.
When I stop to compare how I treat friends with how I treat myself, I am often dumfounded at how disrespectful, rough, and unsympathetic I am to myself. I would never tell a friend what I tell myself. If a friend called me and said, “I’m really hurting right now, do you have time to talk?” I can’t imagine responding, “I’m not free right now, I have to cut the grass,” or “Really the only time I have to talk is Thursday 6-7.” But that is exactly what I used to tell my own soul many times every day. By the way I treated it, I was basically saying, “Shut up! I don’t have time for you! The dishes are more important.”
Over the last several years, I have worked hard at sloughing off responsibilities that made my soul feel it was of less value than some task. Of course, this list is unique to each person. For instance, skipping a meal in order to finish a project was never a sacrifice for me–but I did often suffer by driving myself to grind through a project when my soul was weary of it. To each his own.
Many of you would be surprised at the things that distress me, and perhaps shocked at some of the things I have chosen to offload from my list of duties for the sake of my spirit. Filing my annual taxes is always troublesome, and while I was still single, sometimes distressing. As April 15 drew closer, my distress increased, but I had no emotional energy to force myself to complete them. So in an effort to give my soul breathing room, I chose several times to file my taxes late and pay the resulting penalty. Poor stewardship? Of my money, yes, but not of my soul, and my soul is more important than money. In fact, what more valuable investment than supporting my soul…so I guess it was financially good stewardship as well. Thankfully, that spring dyspepsia is now eased with the presence of a life partner.
God gives us the strength to fulfill his call, but does he give us the strength to fulfill the calls of social norms or family expectations or friends’ needs? I have too often assumed that my soul’s cries for help were the voice of temptation rather than the voice of truth, the voice of God calling me to rest. Pain is the body’s signal that we should stop. If we listen to it as a practice, then sometimes choosing wisely to override it can actually benefit the body, but if we typically ignore the pain signal, we will tear down our bodies. I believe the same for our souls. It knows better than our brain when something is amiss and needs addressing, and if our inclination is to ignore it, we tear it down.
BE AS GENTLE TO YOUR SOUL AS YOU ARE TO YOUR FRIEND'S
Continued from “Addicted to Effort”
As a boy I believed my worth depended on being good, on meeting expectations, especially God’s expectations. So when my worth seems challenged, I try to rescue it with redoubled effort driven by a sense of should. As long as I keep feeling this weight of duty, I know that below the level of conscious thought, my heart is entangled in fear, and by acting from fear, I strengthen its power over me. It is no use to tell myself, “Okay, regardless of how I feel, I am now going to act out of a security in God’s grace instead of from obligation.” Motivations are deeper and more complex than that, often tied to subconscious beliefs, and so they can’t be controlled directly by an act of the will.
Every time I “do right” from obligation, I feel better about myself and more secure in God’s love, but it is a false security based on my good behavior. Each “good” choice then strengthens my belief that God’s love depends on what I do. As long as law and grace agree on what is best to do, and I conform (successfully meet the expectations), I assume my trust in God’s grace. Just as a rich man can trust God’s provision easily, so I can trust God’s love when my cache of good behavior is full. But an empty account reveals the source of my trust, and failure forces me to face my fears. If failing is my door into self-knowledge and grace, should I aim for it, shirk my duties in order to grow in grace?
Too Much of a Good Thing Is a Bad Thing
That sounded wrong. So I kept meeting all the demands of duty while constantly identifying and challenging my underlying legalism. It was a long, slow process in which my choices to satisfy the should seemed to continually pull me back from grace. Then I started realizing that my perceptions of responsibility were largely shaped by my insecurities and the expectations of others, present or absent. Those who promoted these duties tried to anchor them in Scripture as divine law, but the great majority came rather from culture, family, tradition, personality, and the like—a prescription of what good people do.
Good people get up early, make their beds, take a shower, eat a healthy breakfast. They mow their lawns, wash the dishes, exercise, change the oil in their car every 3,000 miles. They limit their TV viewing, work hard at school and office, live within their means, answer emails and phone calls in good time. They don’t cut folks off in traffic or spend too much on luxury items or make others wait for them. I could go on for 1,000 pages. If I don’t conform, my sense of worth languishes. I spot it in my tendency to deny my own needs in order to meet these obligations, in my embarrassment (i.e. shame) if others find out what I have or have not done, or in my need to find an excuse for my behavior—I didn’t have the time, money, strength, opportunity, support. I could never appeal to my own needs, desires, or feelings as a legitimate reason to ignore these expectations, for that was simply selfishness. Perhaps no confusion has done more damage to us all than equating self-care with selfishness.
Since my (faulty) conscience cried out against me if I chose my needs and desires over these duties, I found a huge opportunity to face my own shame. I really could “shirk my duties” as a means of spiritual growth! I could choose for myself against these demands, feel the sting of shame, and then apply grace to this fear. The question stopped being “What would people think?” or “What should I do?” and became “What does my soul need.” Unfortunately my soul was so long ignored, that it had no voice. I often did not know what it needed. But I knew one thing for sure–it needed fewer demands placed on it.
The strange path to freedom.
I have many coping mechanisms to protect me from the prickly world, a combination of defenses unique to myself. I was a compliant child, a trait sometimes mistakenly referred to as “good” or “obedient,” so I responded to my insecurites by trying to make the grade (measured by my approval ratings). This was my basis for self-worth: scoring a 10 on my performance. When I was judged as inadequate, my deeply ingrained, almost instinctive reaction was to rachet up the effort. I proved my value as a person by doing more, better, faster, by never repeating failures or mistakes, by meeting or exceeding every expectation that appeared worthy.
CHASING SUCCESS
Perhaps the hardest coping mechanisms to overcome are those which are inescapably tied to the necessities of living. Every addiction has its unique power of control. Bulimics, unlike alcoholics, literally cannot live without the substance to which they are addicted, and that significantly complicates their deliverance. In the same way, I cannot live without doing. I cannot abandon all tasks in order to break free from my addiction to effort–I am forced to keep succeeding at a job, at finances, at relationships, and all the other tasks essential to life. They say success breeds success, but in my case, success breeds bondage (and unfortunately so does failure).
For me, at a subconscious level, every task accomplished inevitably feeds my sense of worth and every task unfinished feeds my shame. I don’t knowingly tell myself, “See what I have done. I am a good person after all.” The telltale sign of this malady may only be a sense of satisfaction, which is natural enough, but the reason for my satisfaction is largely a sense of worth based on my work.
In short: I have an addiction to effort as a means to gain worth, I cannot live without doing, but each time I do something and feel better as a person, I subconsciously strengthen my addiction.
Let me give an example. I have said something that has hurt my colleague Mike. I am afraid of what he now thinks of me, especially because his evaluation of me feeds my doubts of my own worth. Since love is the best motivation, I tell myself to reach out to him in love and concern for his well-being. These are my conscious thoughts, but underneath, my very value as a person depends on his renewed approval of me. My fear escalates as I ask for a minute of his time. Why fear? Because my worth is at stake. If he is reconciled by my apology, my fear turns to pleasure. “See,” I tell myself, “love works!” when in fact I have just succeeded in strengthening a false basis for my worth as a person–I am worthy because of what I do, in this case reconciliation.
The motivation for what I do is the key. I can act out of a place of grace or a place of should and shame, though that makes it sound dichotomous when really my motives are always mixed to some degree. If I complete a chore more out of fear than of grace, I strengthen my doubt in God’s love. If I act more from grace, I strengthen my faith in God’s love. But if I am pressured by ‘should,’ how can I respond out of grace? For me at least, operating out of a sense of should is really responding from a doubt of God’s acceptance, from a sense that his love depends on my behavior, from a fear of being unworthy. I find that if I do not first challenge the should, face it down, call out its lies of conditional love, then I feed my doubt and insecurity with each task I complete. I feel better, but am worse for it.
Back to Mike. If he is unwelcoming, I become defensive–I try to “explain” more clearly, I express my hurt at his response, I point out his matching faults. Unlike my successful attempt, my failure to win him over suddenly reveals my real motivation. It was not love, but insecurity. Insecurity will always be present, but if it predominates as my motivation, it will harm me and my relationships. It may feel better to both of us if it “works,” but it is a sugar high that eventually leads to diabetes. I am most aware of my insecurities when my coping mechanism fails, when my “right” actions for self-redemption flounder. If at first I don’t go to Mike, but sit with my insecurity long enough to find saving grace, to believe my worth has no basis in what I do, then I can go to Mike in a way that leads to wholeness for us both.
In certain situations, this time of processing is effective, but often, the longer I delay acting, the more anxious I become. I am constantly being pressured by a “should,” and this crowds out the emotional space I need to find grace. In the past I often had to go ahead and complete the task (and so remove the pressure), and then try to deal with the shame-based motivation. My grasp of grace was not firm enough to escape self-condemnation if I failed to act, but at least being aware of my true motivations was a fundamental step to addressing them.
To be continued…
I wanted to thank you who read my blog. There are only about 30 or 40 of you out there, but it makes all the difference to have readers. I wanted to say thanks because the writing of these posts are a big blessing to me… It requires me to process and I re-read them more than anyone because I am helped by what I share, but I would not take the time to write without folks like yourselves who read (and occasionally comment) on the posts. So I am doubly encouraged, by the blessing I get and the blessing I sometimes hear that others get. I just feel grateful and wanted to share that.
For the last few days things have been looking up, I have felt more positive than negative, more times of calm than of anxiety. I would even say I have been happy. But I have been reluctant to share for fear that folks will suppose me “back on my feet.” We all give a break to those who are going through a hard time–we give them more patience, gentleness and concern, and a lighter load. But once they have “recovered,” we suppose their strength has returned and put them back in the harness. My personal experience is very different from this picture of energy simply lost and regained.
I once had armor so thick nothing could touch my soul, including real and deep love. Those defenses by which I kept the world at bay I laid aside to seek my true self and connect vulnerably with others. And once I stepped into the wind of my fears, the wounds that had been festering for decades were exposed. I have been attending to them now for ten years, but they are forty years deep and my soul is still quiveringly sensitive to any scrape against them.
Kimberly and I talk about our personal and marital “bubble.” When I am in my own bubble, untouched by the storms of life, I can eventually come to a place of peace as I have in the last few days. When Berly and I are on the same page, which is most of the time, we share a bubble and reinforce that sense of security. I can nestle into God’s love. But the bubble is easily burst as the wind and sleet dash against our nest–a phone call or email, a memory, a bill, a frown… even a sunny day (like yesterday) can depress me, reminding me how dependent we are on lawn mowing jobs that I have no energy to hunt down.
FROM THE NEST LOOKING OUT
I can be content and even happy inside our bubble, but it is a very fragile peace, constantly threatened and often breached. Without some refuge from the world’s criticisms, disparagements, impatience, and harshness, I am simply battered relentlessly. And my spirit can find no air to breathe, no space to move, no pause to rest. I am reduced to emotional survival. So I withdraw to my nest to build up strength to face the next nor’easter. This, to my mind, is the biblical “fight of faith.” Unfortunately, the storm can reach inside my little knothole, and often does. Sometimes all my energy is used to keep it out. It is always threatening to strike, and the closer it gets, the more difficult it is to find a place of peace, a gentle space in which to rest and heal.
But in the last few days, I sense a change. an ability to keep the storm outside and God and me inside the bubble of faith that keeps the shame and doubts at bay, a potential to respond in healthy ways to shame-driven tasks of the past. I am able to see God as on my side regardless of my weaknesses, blunders, myopia, and erratic progress. Perhaps I am finding a new way through the hurricane, though it is a strange direction to take as I will soon share.
In the Shadows
I was pushing my grocery cart slowly down the aisle this afternoon when I felt my soul stabbed. This was one of those emotional spasms that spring without warning or excuse… sudden and sharp, making me feel physically ill or out of breath or as though I need to double over and grab my stomach from a knifing. When your psychic energy is chronically low, even small things can cause a short-out.
Just now as I write, I stop to recall my shopping and identify where I got jumped. At the entrance to Food Lion, I picked up the sales leaflet and wended my way through the produce and baking sections, making the cheapest selections and asking with each item, “Can we do without this?” My conscious mind was sorting through ounces and labels, but down below that, economic claustrophobia started squeezing my heart. Then I saw the ground beef. After 5 p.m. meat is marked down, sometimes as much as half off (depending on how old it is). At a 50 percent discount, hamburger was still $2 a pound.
That shock connected viscerally to my concern over whether I can make enough mowing lawns this spring and summer, whether it really was a good financial choice to buy a truck and mower (what do I know about lawn care anyway?!), whether Kimberly or I might have some major medical issue now that our health insurance has lapsed. These worries intermingle with fears of inadequacy, poor planning, stupidity, limited energy… a hundred whispered concerns babble in the backroom of my mind, and when I don’t recognize the source of my anxiety, it is difficult to calm the muttering. At least now I see what the clammer was about. Why the fear?
I know God can be trusted, but living involves my (faulty) input. It seems that however good and great God is, I can screw things up, make bad decisions, miss a turn. God has his hands full to keep me from driving into the guardrails, and I never know when God might see fit to let me “learn my lesson.” I tell myself that God is not like that. He is full of grace and patience and protective care. And I believe it… mostly… for now. I snuggle up next to my wife, scratch my dog’s ears, and find the shadow lifting.
Light In The Forest
Coming from a non-liturgical religious upbringing, I didn’t even know about lent until well into my adult years. As my whole life was lived in self sacrifice, I didn’t feel the need to dedicate one particular season to it, and once I started to heal from this self-flagellating outlook, I could not really practice sacrifice in any sort of healthy, spiritually beneficial way. This is the first year I chose to give lent a whirl, looking for the kind of focus that would be a meaningful blessing to my soul. For lent I decided to give up hurry and haste.
SLOW DOWN!
Driving was my first focus. I have stopped trying to make yellow lights, I leave earlier for work, and I look for things along the road I have missed in the past in my rush to get somewhere… to actually find pleasure in the trip itself. I have started to work on tasks at a more deliberate, even slow, pace. I have given myself the right to accomplish things on a calmer schedule, or even to leave them undone… to walk thoughtfully, absorbing the moment rather than focusing on the goal, destination, or end product. It requires a good deal of trust to depend less on myself, my efforts, and allow God to cover for me. Giving myself permission to rest is a vital spiritual exercise, one of the oldest life principles in the book, the intentional counterpart to creative work (as the Genesis story of beginnings recounts). My guess is that work is neither creative nor blessed (to ourselves as well as others) if it does not arise from a rested heart. Life isn’t waiting for me at the destination. Life is what happens while getting there.
This morning NPR interviewed a man with catalepsy, a cousin of narcolepsy. During REM sleep, our bodies release a certain chemical which tells all our muscles to relax (so we don’t literally act out our dreams). Unfortunately for a few folks, this chemical is released while they are awake, causing all their muscles to let go and thus paralyzing them. The release mechanism for this chemical is the person’s emotional response, and for the man on NPR (Walter?), it was especially triggered by his pleasurable emotions: excitement, happiness, love. 
You can imagine the impact this would make on relationships, especially family relationships. With his wife, think of not only sex, but kissing, holding hands, talking about the children… engaging in any emotional connection. Walter described collapsing at a grandchild’s birthday party and on phonecalls with his children. He spent the whole time at his daughter’s wedding propped up like a bag of potatoes against the wall. Not just happy events themselves, but simply looking at photos of happy events can paralyze him. There is no cure, but he takes a medication which slows the attacks, so it now comes on at a pace which he can recognize and respond to.
On the radio he spoke slowly and with no inflection in his voice, trying to speak of emotional things while blocking out the natural emotions. His speech became slower, with more pauses, he remarked that his eyelids were feeling heavy, and then the NPR interviewer told the audience that Walter had to go lie down because he was slipping into paralysis. The show host went on to describe how Walter could only function in life by avoiding happy occasions, turning himself more and more into an unemotional machine. For Walter, happiness is not a good thing nor is connecting with others emotionally. Such a heavy burden to bear through life.
My struggles in life are much smaller than his, but his experiences had an echo in my own. Those things that once gave me pleasure in the first half of my life–whether great or moderate, exciting or fulfilling–are beyond my reach now. I am always tired, so tired that doing something enjoyable feels like a burden rather than blessing. When I have emotional energy I get great pleasure in so many things–reading, writing, conversing, celebrating, creating. Those are mostly a dim memory now, and I only eke out small, brief pleasures. The more taxed I am, the less ability I have to experience the good.
For the last few weeks, my heart is starting to recover from its latest downspike. The telltale sign of my recovery is that imagining the joys of life feels good rather than painful. Merely the thought of blogging, for instance, has been lead to my heart, but imagining it these days feels more like a little red balloon… even if I still have little energy for actually doing it.
Janathan Grace Reflections 