Since I have my retreat amid the Spiritual Exercises in step with the liturgical calendar now, and with the holidays coming up, and with the step that I'm currently in feeling as if I shouldn't rush through it, I will be spending some time on related writing between sessions.
Today I find myself reflecting on my lifelong self-indulgence and my daughter's (I don't know, probably daughters') focus on appearance. I can't help but believe that the latter is related to the atmosphere I created around our home when they were growing up, and has become a perpetuation of the former. "I'm a wreck, but don't I look great?" seems related to "I'm a wreck but let me escape it for a few minutes in the endorphines." Neither of those approaches deals with the rest of what's going on in our lives, though, and for me, that can be a scary thing to face.
I know that I am called to love and build up my bride, and I know that our choice of each other has resulted in a couple who share very few interests in common. I have long run from the latter aspect of our reality somewhat, because I have discovered so little that I can really do about it. I can only embrace her interests so much, and I know that it is the same for her, and we have found so little that we enjoy in common. I feel fortunate that we still love each other so deeply despite this, and that the frustration that each of us feels to varying degrees at different times does not overwhelm our love with a desire to turn away, to seek greater compatibility outside of each other.
I suppose it's also helpful that my own interests don't consume my attention to such a degree that I am able to just throw myself into them and let a gulf grow between us. Yet that hasn't kept me from feeling a void in my life that I have, until fairly lately, continued to fill in the same way I have always escaped from the unpleasantness in my life. I may no longer indulge that so destructively as he taught me to, but it has nonetheless remained a way of escaping for a while into something that consumes me.
It seems as if this personal history of salvation step may provide a means to see how my past echoes somewhat in my present, even if far removed from the level of harmfulness that used to be there. I'm grateful that the boundaries I put in place - with my therapists' help - have become so strong that they continue to fulfill their purpose, and I am grateful that God is leading me to progress even further from them as he calls me further up and further in.
The holiness and wholeness to which God is calling me is so much more than I have allowed him to immerse me in thus far. I seem to be finding in these Exercises an approach that doesn't feel like an interior battle.
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