Our Love

It sounds in my previous posts a bit like I'm placing all the blame for everything in my life outside myself. But this is definitely not the case. I am very aware of my part in it--in fact now more clearly than ever before. But without self-condemnation, because now I see clearly both my fault and that I was not really able to do any better at the time.

If you've grown up in an atmosphere that is relatively "normal", you may find parts of this hard to understand. That is, if you had a relatively decent family who loved, supported, affirmed, directed, corrected, and guided you getting started on the path of life; were part of a community, especially a good church, or perhaps a small town, or a neighborhood, or even a decent school. I know everybody has troubles and nobody's life is perfect, but there are degrees.

But when you grow up, from early childhood, in an atmosphere of negativity--when your home life as well as your life outside the home consists mostly of suffering--then you have a tendency to find ways to sooth and comfort yourself. The animal part of human life needs those comfort chemicals: endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, etc., and when they're not there in the ordinary way, we tend to seek them in other ways. Some of these ways provide "comfort" in the short term, but in the long term are varying degrees of unhealthy and destructive for us. They can be anything, from eating junk food in front of the TV to heroine addiction. Most of them are sins. Well, all of them are, if they come between us and God and keep us from fulfilling our potential.

Over time, these things form habits and patterns in our lives, and these habits and patterns have the potential, if not changed, to derail our entire lives. In contrast, if we have good, loving, attentive parents, they teach us to establish healthy and productive patterns in our lives, which lead to good things, and to avoid the destructive ones because they lead to bad things.

My youthful habits and patterns were established in a negative space, and consisted very much in primarily finding ways to soothe and comfort myself. My adult life, in consequence, has been characterized chiefly by the long road of changing them, of overcoming my Self. I know this is everybody's, or at least every Christian's primary occupation in life. But most don't start out as dysfunctional as I did (although I know some start out more so).

All this so far still sound like I'm placing blame or making excuses. But I'm just establishing the background.

When I really began to come awake as a human being, and take seriously the task of becoming a functional adult, in my mid 30s (yes, that late), these patterns had become long-established and deeply ingrained in my life. None of them was, by itself, anything one would normally think of as "major". No drug addiction, or alcoholism, or promiscuity, or perversion, or gambling, or any of those things that obviously ruin a person's life. All my sins were relatively minor, in comparison with what's going on out there in the world--in fact, they're all what the world would call normal, and not even sins at all. But taken as a whole, they formed a pattern of avoidance, of withdrawal, of escape, and of inwardness (which is a form of selfishness).

Over the last 15 years or so, I have made major progress in changing these things. But not total victory. I keep coming close, then sliding back to varying degrees into the old grooves. I begin moving forward, making changes, doing better, then some stress or hurt or grief will come along and, in a moment of pain and weakness, I'll turn to the things that feel comforting and familiar, and then have start--not completely over again, but further back on the path, re-covering ground that I'd already covered. Like straying from the trail through the forest, getting lost in the woods, and then wandering around until you find the path again, only way back the way you came. Then you've got to walk that same trail again to get to where you strayed in the first place.

I know that this is true in every life, not just in mine. It's just that my forest is darker and more tangled than most (though again, less so than some).

Many people, especially religious and political conservatives, are prone to place all the blame for everything on the individual. Liberals do the opposite, and absolve him of all responsibility because he was a victim of his circumstances. But in reality, both are true. A girl is molested and raped in her youth, and grows up to become promiscuous, addicted to drugs, and ends up in prostitution; a boy is raised in an atmosphere of hatred, rage, and violence, and then himself becomes angry, hateful, and violent as an adult--the truth is that both ruined lives are the result of both the environment and of choices the person makes. A person can be raised in a horrible atmosphere and yet make all the right choices and turn out well. Or be raised in the best circumstances and make all the wrong choices, and turn out a devil. Most of us make a combination of good and bad decisions, and have to then struggle to put the wrong ones right.

Blame is a tricky thing and, in the end, useless or worse than useless anyway. Responsibility is a better thing to focus on. Whoever's fault it is that my life has become what it has, it's my responsibility to take it from where it is to somewhere better. And the other, and most important thing to focus on, is Grace.

And here, at last, I'm truly coming to the point. The journey I've been on has been one of both self-examination and improvement, and one of Grace.

The realization I came to, and/or Received the other night, has been another MAJOR turning point in my life. Suddenly, things look different. Suddenly, I am able to look back on my life, not with torment and crushing regret, but with compassion (for myself), forgiveness (for the world), and acceptance of all of it. Suddenly, it just seems like it's the past, and it was what it was, but that it no longer has any power over me. And suddenly, I am able to look at the future with both hope and the practical realization that I have to go on from here, where I am, and not from some ideal restart point. I can't load a previous save in my video game to undo my mistakes, and I'm okay with that.

And suddenly, now that I've seen what the thing is which has paralyzed me--that is, that overwhelming fear of repetition of the events and patterns which shaped my past--that no longer has the same power over me either. It's very clear now. The reason I couldn't write, or do just about anything else, was that the stakes were too high. Either it had to be accepted in such a way as to completely break the old patterns (which is completely unrealistic and impossible), or I was unable to face it. But now, suddenly, I feel like, "So, I write something and it's rejected. So what? So I meet some people and our friendship doesn't work out. So what?" Suddenly, I feel--almost normal.

I have no illusions that these things aren't going to try again in the future, and probably repeatedly, to raise their heads and regain the power over me they've lost. And probably, from time to time, with some degree of success. This is not the end of my journey. But it is a very important step forward on it. And hopefully, a turning onto a new and better path.

I want to talk more about the point I made yesterday, regarding my troubles interacting with people.

Obviously, I have a social disorder. Obviously. The people who have been closest to me have frequently and independently compared me with Sheldon Cooper, and there is some truth to that. There are, of course, some dissimilarities too. But it is true that, like that character, I have always had great difficulty navigating the world of social interaction. In fact, it's the hardest thing in the world for me. Certain aspects of everyday life which other people take for granted, I struggle with. A lot. But also, like him, I don't mean to be hurtful, at those times when I am. I just struggle, and stumble, and trip up, and frequently say the wrong thing, often the thing I didn't mean to say, or what I meant not to say...it just comes out wrong. I don't know why I was born like this, I just was. We all have our deficiencies. Mine are my weight, and this.

But the fact that I have issues, which I fully recognize and admit, does not mean that the things I've experienced are not real. I really have been treated in the ways I've said. I have been shunned, and ostracized, and rejected, and excluded. I have been called weirdo, and strange, and freak, and creepy, and loser, and probably every other hurtful thing in that category which you can think of. I really have begun, over and over, to form friendships and attachments, only to find before too long that I'm being looked at with strange looks of suspicion, judgment, otherness, and even fear. Because, unlike Sheldon who, though irritating and annoying, is seen as basically harmless, my size and other things about me make people treat me not only as strange, weird, and different, but as dangerous and scary.

As a result of this very real history, I have become over-sensitive to and extremely wary of anything resembling it. And that only adds to my problems. I recognize this.

I've long realized, of course, that the issues are there. And I've worked on them. I really, really have. But it doesn't seem to have made a difference, or at least not enough of one. I had hoped that the fact that underneath my sometimes difficult personality there is a genuinely good, warm, loving, giving, generous, even noble heart, might make up for my deficiencies and allow me to find a place to belong, and some people to love, and to love me. But apparently not.

There are certain aspects of it which I have tried to change. Certain aspects of me. And I do believe that I've genuinely gotten much better at many of those things. But there are certain things that I won't change also. Because it's not all due to my personality deficits. A lot of what I've experienced is also because of my convictions and deeply-held beliefs, and on that I will not compromise, no matter what the cost. Even if you got rid of all the other stuff, I wouldn't fit into this modern society with all its -isms, its intolerant tolerance-mongering, and its ideological fascism, and wouldn't want to. But still, there are enough like-minded people with me out there to call it a sub-culture. But even with them, I can't seem to find a place to rest.

I'm going over this because I realized last night, in the middle of the night, that this is the root cause of my lifelong depression. I crave human connection and community, but have always been denied it. If I was in therapy, we'd call this a breakthrough.

The question, then, is what to do about it? I honestly have no idea.

So the question now is, what to do with my life? It's not a new question; it's one of the primary things, along with healing, which I set out on this journey to find. But it has acquired a new importance. Spending two months quite convinced that one is dying sort of sharpens one's perspective.

Of course, it's not entirely certain that the diagnosis is correct, and that I'm not. Doctors do sometimes miss these things, and misdiagnoses are common, especially with the type of cancer it seemed that I had. (Pancreatic, which my uncle died of. That's actually how my uncle died: they missed it. And my father too, come to think of it--heart disease misdiagnosed as emphysema.) I have a collection of symptoms which fit that quite well, but are quite odd, to have all occurred simultaneously if not that, and require three or four other conditions to have begun concurrently. Which is what they told me at the hospital day before yesterday and which, though not impossible, is rather suspicious. But I will proceed on the assumption that they are, in fact, correct and that I am not, in fact, dying, except in the Tibetan philosophy/Sylvia Plath sense, in which we are all dying.

So then, what now? When I thought my time was short, I was not at all sad to be going Home. But I was burdened with a terrible sense of having wasted my life--of not having accomplished the purpose for which I was born, or anything much worthwhile, really. Except that I do feel quite good that I have done as much good, in the small ways of which I have been capable, as I have been able. I have sought and known God, and I have been as kind and helpful and honorable to others as I could. But it doesn't seem like quite enough.

But what exactly is that purpose? Again, that's one of the things I set out to discover. There are several things I've always wanted to, and felt I should, do, but circumstances and my own deficiencies and doubts have always kept me back. The most obvious is writing. It's something I have the talent and ability for, but every time I try to really get serious about it, I'm stopped by two things: 1) Some sort of attention/focus/concentration disorder which I still do not clearly understand. The self-critical, judgmental part of me says that it is simply because I never developed the focus and self-discipline to just do it; to get the work done, be diligent at it, and persist until I succeed. But this, while possibly partly true, does not provide an adequate explanation. I am, for instance, quite disciplined and diligent in other areas of my life. The other, more sympathetic and forgiving, view, is that it has something to do with the stress, grief, depression, anxiety, and uncertainty which have characterized my life. The kind of state of being which one must be in to accomplish that sort of thing--after all, writing is actually very profound and very hard work (at least, good writing is), requires one to be at the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I have consistently and continually been further down, in a place where the basic needs of human existence are unfulfilled. Specifically, in my case, it is the need for human acceptance, attachment, and belonging, which has always been so conspicuously absent from my life. And the actual facts of my difficulty in getting my work done bear this second view out very neatly. When I think about, or plan, or even start, to do some real work, the anxieties and insecurities which assail me are questions of who will ever publish, or purchase, or read what I'm writing? And memories of all the many, many, many times when I, my ideas, my views, my speech, have been met with rejection, hostility, ridicule, condescension, patronization, and even hatred by others, including those I thought were my friends and were sympathetic. This has occurred so consistently that I cannot seem to convince myself that it will ever be any different, and I am therefore unable to make the required investment--of time, of labor, and especially of emotional vulnerability that it takes first to do the actual writing, then to go through the trauma of trying to get it published and then to wait for it to either fail or succeed. Good writing is no guarantee of great success, as my friend Maggie can tell you. And in a life whose chief wound is rejection, I have been unable to summon the courage and fortitude to open myself up to more of it than any private person will ever experience. When you write and publish, or create any artistic work and send it out into the world, you bare and expose a very dear piece of your soul, and open yourself up to being hurt very badly.

So then, what else? It's too late to pursue other things I had the talent for, like acting and singing. I had the makings of quite a good teacher, but that was derailed. I even tried to give it another shot, if you remember, a couple of years ago when I was going to go back to finish my post-graduate work. But I was shot down in flames because of the injustices which I've suffered in my past. Perhaps I should have lied and tried to hide them. There also has always been the possibility of clerical ministry, but again, that history of rejection, suspicion, exclusion, and judgment bars my way. I had an opportunity once, a decade or so ago: a very good man, a bishop, who really believed in me, but I failed to take it as I thought I was not ready, practically and morally, to start down that path.

So basically, I'm waiting for two things: 1) for God to speak to me, to show me a specific path to take. And 2) either a) to provide me an opportunity, an open door to walk through to start on that path, or b) to heal the disorders of my heart, mind, and life which keep me from being able to do what I want and feel called to do, that is, the writing. I mean this, too, when I say I have gone out in search of healing, in addition to my physical healing. If you care about me, and I assume you do if you are bothering to read this blog, you can pray for these things for me.

It's not cancer.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know if I'm more relieved or disappointed. On the one hand, I do feel like I haven't accomplished my purpose here yet. On the other, it felt a lot like early parole.

The book of life is brief
and once a page is read
all but love is dead
that is my belief

The Four Loves ('Eros' or 'The Love Between the Sexes') by C.S. Lewis

Come, Lord,
whom my soul has longed for
and longs for still.
Come, Solitary One, to this solitary,
for as you see, I am all alone. . . .
Come, for you have alienated me from all things
and made me be alone in this world.
Come, you who have become my desire
and have made me desire you, the Inaccessible One.
Come, my breath, my life.
Come consolation of my poor soul.
Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight.
For I must give you all my thanks
for making yourself one with me in spirit.

-- Symeon the New Theologian

"Nevertheless, not my will, but Thy will, be done." -- Jesus

"Pain is the fuel of passion--it energizes us with an intensity to change that we don't normally possess." -- Rick Warren

Well that about sums up the last decade or so of my life.

"I pour out my complaint before him, and show him all my troubles. When my spirit is overwhelmed within me, You alone know my path." -- Psalm 142: 2-3

I'm still waiting and following up on the cancer thing. It's complicated, because it's the VA, and I'm traveling and away from my usual network.

The first doctor was sure it was cancer. The second one was confident it wasn't. The third one thinks probably not, but we're doing further tests to find out for certain. It'll be a couple of weeks, or maybe a month or two, before I really know.

My prayer is actually only that God's will be done. If he has an important purpose still for me to fulfill here, then okay. If not, I'm ready to go home. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if it is, I'm not going to seek treatment except for palliative care--pain management, that is. It will depend on the exact nature and stage, and some other factors. But I don't want to stay here badly enough to go through chemo and all that. They say that cancer survival is most likely in those with a strong will to fight to live, and I no longer have that.

If it is time for me to go, it's been a pretty good final year of my life. Traveling around the country with an unbelievably loving and sweet, stunningly beautiful young Italian girl, seeing wonderful and beautiful things, experiencing what it is to be loved, is really not a bad way to end one's life. Of course, a pall was cast over our time together by Adina's death. My grief and sadness, although mostly remaining beneath the surface, kept me from being as active and joyful in it all as I otherwise would have been--I didn't even realize how much (although she tried to tell me) until I was able to reflect on it in hindsight. But that's just another reason to be okay with going myself; outliving one's child means one will never truly be happy again.

Once a soul has been consumed

in the depths of God's love

and has tasted the sweet delight

of God's intellective graces,

it can no longer bear to stay frozen

in its own former condition

but is impelled to rise ever higher to the heavens.

The higher it ascends through the Spirit,

and the deeper it sinks into the abyss of God,

the more it is consumed by the fire of longing

and searches out the immensity

of the even deeper mysteries of God,

strenuously trying to come into that blessed light,

where every intellect is caught up into ecstasy,

where the heart knows it can finally rest

from all its strivings

and find its rest in joy.

-- Niketas Stethatos

I Shall Be Released

"When you become aware of the increasing fire

of your love for God and inner faith in him,

then you should realize

that you are bringing Christ to birth

within your soul.

It is He who is lifting your soul

high above its earthly and visible limitations

and preparing a dwelling place for it in the heavens.

When you experience your heart filled with joy

and consumed with yearning for God's ineffable blessings,

then know that the divine Spirit

is working within you.

When you feel your intellect filled with ineffable light

and spiritual understandings of transcendent wisdom,

then recognize that the Paraclete

is actively present in your soul,

uncovering the treasures of the Kingdom of Heaven

that lie hidden within it."

-- Niketas Stethatos