Dealing with the overwhelming

God became man.  We say it trembling.  We say it puzzling.  But more often we say it rotely, counting on routine to buffer what we cannot bear.  - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

There are many worthwhile passages throughout this book about which I have previously reflected and posted, yet my checking always results in the discover that, yes, I've written about this passage, but not about this thought that occurs to me as I read it now.

In this case, Fr. Neuhaus has captured succinctly the idea that I find myself drawn to and expanding on. Our limited minds must reduce the overwhelming to things we can manage.

This is why children of alcoholism or abuse get "stuck," developing and reinforcing and ultimately internalizing the coping mechanisms which suit us for surviving our immediate threats but which serve us ill for dealing with life as adults. All I could concern myself at those times when my dad was raving drunk was being invisible, not becoming the thing he was mad at. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have struck me in his drunken frustration, but it was obviously a thing to be feared. And it worked consistently, just like my dog barking at the mail carrier every day works: just as the postal worker leaves every single day, my invisibility every drunken evening kept the unknown big meltdown from happening, and he was always okay (for at least a while) the next day, and we could both mostly pretend that nothing untoward had happened, and I grew to believe that not making waves was how to survive life.

(I can't remember if I've written, either here or in the book, about the night he lost his balance and broke the three-legged table in our living room. I don't recall if this is a real memory or not, but I seem to remember trying to fit the broken leg back in place so it could be glued, and it not staying in place because we didn't have a clamp handy that was shaped properly to hold it. I think I thought that, if I could just help him fix that table leg, whatever his motivation - the avoidance of mom's ire, for instance; I suppose he was every bit as fear-driven as I was - maybe he would finally be proud of me. I think that it was without any rancor toward me - rather with a sense of his own guilt - that he told me pretty quickly not to worry about it.)

The recurring experience of his inebriation, and that other one from that summer morning, left me with a well-developed "pretend-normal" dynamic when it came time to deal with the repeated sexual abuse I later experienced. (My abuser's skill at redefining what he did to me as something very different played a big role in that, too.) Yes, the brain absolutely does what it has to in order to deal with things that are too big for it to handle.

And God is definitely too big for our finite faculties to handle. Even the (comparatively) smallest parts of our theology can be too big to get our minds around fully or for very long. The Incarnation is a centerpiece of Christian theology, and it is incredibly simple and unfathomably HUGE. We cannot grasp all its implications, so as soon as we get a piece of it we cling to that part as if it's the whole thing, and repeat it by rote - literally, in the creed, "and became man" - without allowing ourselves to grapple with the full truth of what it means. Even the most fervent and studied of us fail to make more than a surface connection between Bethlehem and Calvary, no matter how much we tell ourselves that we get it. Like the Pharisee and the tax collector, when we think we've "gotten" God, we have probably actually moved further from fully entering into the mystery.

Unlike the dysfunction in which I was raised, The beyond-me-ness of God isn't really a thing to be afraid of. (We seem to be back to the idea of the fear of the Lord again, which is a good thing and far different from the things we fear in the normal sense.) Yet we are trained - ingrained, reinforced, internalized - with the idea that things that are so much bigger than us are indeed to be feared in the ordinary sense of the word. Rote minimization of God into a routine we can manage is the natural way of dealing with it, just as it was how I dealt with alcoholism and abuse. But just as I've had to unlearn my thoroughly-integrated ways of looking and experiencing - a process which is doubtless still ongoing - so must we all learn to stop applying our inadequate ways of understanding if we are to fully embrace God with abandon!