Not pushing the envelope (edited)

One of the ways that an abuser or other addict perpetuates their cycle is the fool's quest for the point of no return. (Sing it, Steve Walsh, though Kansas used a play on words.) "Where was it that I went wrong?" we ask, never learning (because, unlike WOPR, we can't set the number of players to 0) that the only winning move is to not play.

So the (substance- or behaviorally) addicted person convinces himself that the first step is harmless. We deprive ourselves of the gift of getting beyond the whole environment/dynamic because of the harmless part of it we don't want to give up. Or we don't recognize the earliest indicators, the first red flags (the tension at the base of my skull, the emotional triggers, the key aspects of our personality, the (even unavoidable) environmental factors) that form a key part of the cycle. And we keep playing the game and losing, over and over. Learning and breaking this pattern is what lets me put the word "recovered" in front of abuser, but the motivation for that was so strong: I never wanted to hurt anyone else like that ever again. I didn't hate my own remaining impurity, though, enough to address it with the same intensity, or maybe clarity.

Maybe I'm getting free from all of that now, but it's too early to be certain. In fact, it could well be that certainty is the enemy of freedom. If a benevolent king has brought me victory from my oppressor, I probably shouldn't be seeking to be out from under his influence! I've long been cognizant of a too-common approach to Christianity. It's objective is not to improve us to some point at which we no longer need a Savior because we have "arrived" at a sufficient level of wholeness. Rather, we need to recognize that we are only whole in relationship with Him, and our weakness then becomes a reminder to always stay close to Him.

More follow up

Or: An area of weakness, humble faith, and fear of failure

One of the realities that Neal Lozano describes concerning deliverance, in the context of the Unbound model but also of deliverance in general, is that it "moves us from an area of bondage to an area of weakness." He says that this sounds bad, and he's right, it does, and he's right again: it isn't. When we know we are weak and we depend on Christ in those areas, then we are actually strong.

When we've struggled in an area for decades of our life, it can be a challenge to have faith that God will really provide victory in the long term. This is an additional reason why faith (along with repentance) is the first key to spiritual freedom: we must believe that God loves us and wants us to know the victory He has won for us. But this victory is different from everything we have learned about winning in our physical and professional lives. We learn that we are victorious when we work harder than our opponents and make our own skills stronger than theirs. It's Fr. Spitzer's "comparative identity" again: we know most of our victories in comparison to others' defeats. (I suppose that this previous post contains my best description of Fr. Spitzer's concept.) Our pride can come into play here, too: most of us want the affirmation that comes from knowing that we have accomplished what we set out to do.

Conversely, we may also need to renounce the spirit of fear - fear of failure - that can further complicate the dynamics of any area of our lives over which we have struggled unsuccessfully. Yielding to this fear can provide an entryway for a spirit of anxiety in our lives, as well. All of these things can be ours to deal with in the flesh, but they can also have a spiritual element that comes to inhabit them and hold us in bondage to our shortcomings. As I write about this, I feel the tension at the base of my skull building, confirming that these weaknesses and spiritual influences have been at work in my life for decades. And now I also recognize them as the schemes of my adversary to keep me from living in the power of Jesus' cross and resurrection in this area of my life.

When I trust that it is better to allow God's victory to have its way in my life than it would be to have any victory on my own, and I truly believe in God who truly wants me to know the joy of leaning on Him each step of the way, then in the Name of Jesus I can renounce the spirits of pride, doubt, fear, anxiety, and impurity, break the hold they have had over my life, and command them to go, and they have no choice but to leave, because I have both revoked the authority I may have previously given them to stay and embraced Jesus' authority over them, under which I am now living.

It may take some time for my own behavioral habit or tendency to fade, but as I turn to God in these moments of temptation, I trust that I will find that His strength will overcome my weakness. Indeed, I must never long for the day when I don't need Him for victory in this area, but rather desire to be more dependent on Him rather than more independent. In this way, I will develop a different habit and tendency to replace the one to which I have been bound for so long, which is a mere side effect of the greater gift of walking more closely with the One who loves me perfectly.

A physical/emotional response

I just noticed a strange and revelatory response I had (have, I'm pretty sure; it felt familiar) to a frequent thought. I was setting aside a temptation to engage in an impure thought process that leads me to sin, partly because I just received prayer for this area last night in preparation for this weekend's Unbound seminar. It was the most subtly sublime moment of grace-filled, Spirit-driven self revelation, concerning a physio-emotional response that I have to temptation. As I decided to not engage in this thought process, I felt the muscles at the base of my skull contract, and I noticed that I thought of why I don't want to engage in that thought process right now, as if I was reserving it to return to at a later time.

As I say, this felt familiar, and I considered other recent times that I have felt this physical sensation. It turns out that it has never been so much a rejection as a postponement of my tempting thoughts, and it is a reason I have not been able to persevere in purity in this area. I then considered when else I have felt like this: it also turns out that this response was seared into me when I was being sexually abused. It is directly related to my resignation to my physical inability to ever force my way past my stepfather to escape from the room when I was a teenager. It became part of the inevitability of my submission to him sexually, and subsequently of my submission to sexual impurity in general.

Wow. This is exactly the sort of red flag I should have learned about in one of my rounds of therapy. It's a question I would now ask of anyone who shared that they struggle in a given area: go back to the beginning of the latest incident, and let's go through how your body physically responded before you realized you were responding. Then: when is the earliest time you remember feeling that way?

I'm not going to assume that the battle is over now. But I understand something about it that I never did before, a physical and emotional and thought process that ties in with the spiritual aspect that I've tried to invoke previously. Perhaps, now that I have all four pieces, I can have lasting victory in this area.

Reforming (phase 1), Hell and Mercy (step 6), session 4

In today's reflection on hell, I find myself thinking about our tendency to long for things that can never fulfill us. We might think of these as addictive thought patterns, and sometimes these are part of actual addictions which bind us spiritually as well as psychologically and physically. We can become fixated on what I want, what I don't have at present or long to have again, and it can keep us from entering into the love and the abundant life that is waiting right before our eyes. We believe that the object of our obsession will make us happy, and might even bask in it when we have it for a time, but it doesn't fulfill us, it merely consumes us and keeps us from the abundant life to which we are called.

How appropriate for this reflection is the scripture reading for this session (I should probably explain that, for this step, I haven't been reading the scripture for each session until after I reflect on some potential aspect of hell), Lk 15, 11-32.

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.' And they began to make merry. - Lk 15, 24

Indeed, this lost son had been through this pattern of obsession, and emerged on the other side determined to return to a better life than he had. But his father's mercy proved greater than his own addiction to wild living, and our God's love is greater than our own similar sins.

Tomorrow I believe I will reflect on the older brother, since I am now back on schedule and need to slow down my session frequency a little to remain in step with the calendar.

Today's words

threnody \THREN-uh-dee\ - a song of lamentation for the dead : elegy

I recognized this definition when I saw it, but couldn't recall it just by seeing the word. I think it was within the past month or so that I first encountered it, perhaps somewhere where it was identified as a synonym of "elegy."

That last word always reminds me of the hilariously awful story in which I first saw it, which I hope isn't true: 

A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell.  She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hofmann, then asked his opinion.

"Well, it's quite nice," he replied, "but don't you think it would be better if . . ."

"If what?" asked the composer.

"If . . . if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?"

A small positive from this story: I have now learned a little of whom both MacDowell and Hofmann were. The latter's life story is another of many that warn of the dangers of addiction; alcohol was his poison.

Then there was this word from today's Dictionary Devil that I also remembered after the fact from a post when it was the WOTD . . .

²imperial noun \im-ˈpir-ē-əl\  3. [French impériale; from the beard worn by Napoléon III] :  a pointed beard growing below the lower lip

. . . not to mention this more-obscure definition of this well-known word, which I must have recognized from somewhere, as it was one of the first definitions that I matched up in the puzzle.

A not-completely helpful theme

Suicide is not a cowardly or selfish act.

This is an important message to deliver. However, here's the dangerous thing about it: for some who walk in darkness, the thought that taking their own life would be selfish - a glimmer of understanding of how devastating it would be for those who love us - is sometimes the one thing that has kept us from actually doing it. That is, this stigma that is traditionally associated with suicide does carry some preventive value.

In my darkest moments, I have found it helpful to think of the effects that my demise would have on the people whom I love - particularly the possible financial, emotional and spiritual ramifications. I was actually encouraged and trained to think this way, particularly in terms of the emotional fallout, by mental health professionals, when I was closest to taking my own life. Having lived in the aftermath of my dad's suicide when I was fourteen, these ramifications are not some nebulous concept for me; I actually experienced the short- and longer-term impact that his absence had on my life. That isn't to say that I think my own life would have been better had he continued to live his life impaired by alcohol and emotionally broken, but it certainly would have been different.

In my adult darkness, the effect that my self-inflicted demise would have on the people I've already hurt so deeply has been a touchstone to help me seek out a better answer. Note that this touchstone was actually a part of that answer; in the grand scheme of a healthy life it should be only a minority part - it is still important to find reasons to live for my own sake as well as for that of my loved ones - but in the darkness of despair it can be a bigger lifeline than an emotionally healthy person might imagine. Considering the impact that killing myself would have on those around me has also been a helpful tool for expanding my view beyond the circumstances that might otherwise consume me.

Now, calling suicide cowardly or selfish in its aftermath - as at least one commentator did in response to Robin Williams' death - is completely unhelpful for the loved ones who are trying to deal with it. It is a useless and misguided judgment of the departed. But let's not take the consideration of our relationship with our loved ones and the effect we have on them completely out of the toolbag, okay?

The Surprising Origin of "Flap"

and Believing One's Own Hype

At dinner Friday night, I mentioned to my youngest (first-) cousin how far back my disillusionment with his brother went. He had already pointed out how, for his siblings and even his mom, it was is if they'd already lost him a decade earlier, when he withdrew from everyone so he could keep spending hours every evening at his favorite bar, drinking and gambling his life away. I could definitely understand how he felt. But when I said that I started feeling distanced from him when he started insisting that he be called Flap, my cousin's eyes lit up.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I'd completely forgotten about that. That came from your father's shirt!" His wife was more confused than I was, so he explained the part of the story that I didn't know. Apparently, after my dad killed himself, my mom passed along some of his clothes to my nephew. I don't know if he was the only one who got them; if so, maybe he was just the one they fit best. At any rate, one of them was a shirt (t-shirt? athletic shirt?) that said FLAP on the front of it. So people started calling him that. "Wow. I never thought about it, but geez, no wonder that would have bothered you," he concluded.

I explained that I was previously unfamiliar with that part of the history of his brother's nickname. I certainly don't remember seeing my dad in that shirt, but then again, if it was something that he wore for athletic events, I wouldn't have necessarily ever seen it. Most of his leagues had been after-work engagements, and we never much attended. By the time he died, his vision problems from his car accident the autumn after I turned 12 had kept him from any further athletic endeavors for a couple years. I think I remember hearing that my cousin's nickname was somehow related to a shirt, but I don't think I ever knew the connection with my dad. How ironic that two tortured souls who ultimately destroyed their own lives in their addiction to alcohol would share the same shirt.

At any rate, when I mentioned that, no, it was just that "Flap" had always struck me as more like a put-on that my cousin engaged in, his baby brother immediately nodded in agreement. "Like a persona that he presented," he completed my thought with precision. What we didn't say was how the distance that this persona unavoidably put between Dave and everyone else in his life was its precise purpose.

Matt went on to mention that he'd always felt a little bad for his oldest brother, who always seemed to be outshined by his next-younger brother's "golden boy" status, using the exact phrase I mentioned in my previous post as being more of a negative influence on Dave's life, a curse rather than a blessing. I think that maybe he shared some of something like that in common with my dad, too, who could never live up to the high expectations set by his youthful athletic success and, I think, became disappointed with the rest of his life.

Forgiveness and spiritual freedom

Okay, there's are vast empty spaces of gray matter over which these thoughts have been roaming, so let's get to it.

To start, let's examine how spiritual freedom compares with how we view personal freedom. The latter has been most simply defined to be the freedom to do as we choose, and many would add the importance of bearing the consequences of our actions; others insist that a yet more mature view is that it is the freedom to do what we believe to be right. We could have a nice ideological argument regarding which of these we should really embrace, but such a debate becomes a side argument distracting us from the matter of spiritual freedom. While this probably lies closer to the second idea than the first, it might be more fully described as the power to choose and to carry out God's plan for our lives.

There are many things that keep us from consistently making this sort of choice in all areas of our lives. One is our rejection of what Scripture and the Church reveal to be God's plan for our holiness. Another is our insistence on seeing part of our lives as secular and separate from the spiritual part of our lives. Either of these may be a matter of freedom rejected rather than unavailable, but either may instead be a result of spiritual bondage. There are many other things that keep us from spiritual freedom, and it is good for believers to strive to live in the freedom which Christ has won for us.

The Unbound deliverance model promotes five keys to spiritual freedom. Imagine, if you will, a door with five locks on it. Once this door is open, we can choose to walk through it. However, if any of those five locks continue to secure it, we cannot open the door even a little bit. We have no spiritual freedom whatsoever until all five locks have been opened by the Five Keys. These are:

• Repentance and Faith: Until we have accepted that we need a Savior and put our faith in him, we will remain bound to our sin and cannot be spiritually free. To the degree to which we have sin in our lives of which we have not repented, we will not be spiritually free.
• Forgiveness: Mostly of us have learned that holding onto grudges is emotionally toxic for us, but it can be spiritually binding to us, too, even when we have every right to our pain and anger.
• Renunciation: Once we start living in the kingdom of God, spiritual influences that have entered our lives in a variety of ways have no authority to stay except our permission. Yet we often fail to renounce these influences and thereby kick them out of our lives.
• Authority: Renunciation works because we are living under the authority of Jesus, in whose name we renounce those lies and influences that otherwise keep us bound. 
• The Father's Blessing: Our bondage often keeps us from receiving the blessing that God longs to lavish upon us in his boundless love. God isn't a limited resource who disposes of those blessings or gives them to someone else; when we are set free from our bonds, he pours them out to us in abundance.

Again, if four of these five areas are unlocked, we are not 80% free; the door of spiritual freedom remains locked. Each key is important and worthy of further expansion, but the remainder of this post will focus on the key of forgiveness. This is partly because it's the one key on which I've already focused and reflected the most. (Seriously, this will be the 47th blog post on which I've used the Forgiveness tag.)

To counter the mistaken notions that can interfere with forgiving another the deep hurt that they've done to us requires clarity about what forgiveness is and isn't. Generally, my back-to-back reflections from my last round of therapy regarding what forgiveness isn't and what it is still seem to ring with truth and applicability even several years later. Until we get rid of our wrong ideas of forgiveness - or detach it from peripherally related concepts - there isn't any point in further discussing its importance, as there are many reasons why these not-exactly-forgiveness-things may be undesireable, whereas forgiving is always good. And the image in a follow-on post of how we cling to our hurt as if we are thereby protecting ourselves from it also still seems apt. In terms of specific examples, the link to my 47 posts (so far) on forgiveness includes many, many others in which I've grappled to apply the lofty ideals and general principles of forgiveness and mercy practically, toward others or toward myself. But the most immediate reason I find myself writing Yet Another Post on Forgiveness is that it has come up again in a way that makes it worth revisiting and articulating in this fresh context. My Unbound prayer session from several weeks ago is proving effective, and I believe that is in part because of how it helped me recognize new ways in which I needed to embrace and apply this key.

Of course, to tell someone who has been deeply hurt - especially someone who is just learning to take care of themselves - that forgiveness needs to be part of their healing can sound bone-headedly wrong on several levels. First, it can feel as if we're piling another injury onto the existing ones. What do you mean so-and-so did this unconscionable thing to me and to heal from it I have to forgive them? Why don't you just throw another ton of burdens onto my broken back? (S)he's the one responsible for my hurt, so don't tell me I need to forgive. I just need to protect myself from them." This is where understanding what forgiveness isn't is so important; it doesn't mean opening ourselves up to more hurt at the hands of the person who has already hurt us. That primary definition that my therapist helped me reach - making a decision to let go of the hurt (repeat as necessary) - is pretty fundamentally practical, though. Think about it: how do we expect to be rid of hurt that we refuse to let go of? When we add in the related idea of wanting what is truly best for the other and we have a pretty complete way to evaluate whether we're there yet.

There are some things that can just seem wrong to forgive, as if forgiving something is at least partly equivalent to condoning it. The thing is, there are many actions we should never, ever condone. In our unforgiveness, we often imagine that we're merely withholding approval of their actions by holding the person who hurt us bound to their offense. (When you forgive men's sins they are forgiven, when you hold them bound they are held bound - Jn 20: 23). We do not understand that the unforgiveness simultaneously binds us to our own hurt.

But even once we accept, even half-heartedly, that forgiving someone who has hurt us deeply would be a positive thing for us, it can still feel an awful lot like an impossible task. When we've been deeply wounded by someone - in their brokenness, by their intentional choices or, often, both - forgiving them can seem beyond our capacity. And sometimes the circumstances of our lives can make any tangible expression of our forgiveness to the offending person impossible.

Very early in my faith journey I learned of how restrictive unforgiveness can be in our Christian walk. As a result, one of my earliest experiences of realizing there was someone who hurt me deeply that I needed to forgive involved several of the scenarios above. I've previously written about this initial experience of forgiving my dad, who had taken his life a decade before I realized that I needed to forgive his alcoholism and other dysfunctional parenting, as well as his suicide. Over time, forgiving him became possible with God's help (further details are in that linked post). This helped me as recently as last fall, when I was reunited with some of his family and was able to see him through their eyes, which were not permanently filtered by having grown up in his alcoholic shadow. So when no other act of forgiveness is available to us or within our power, the one thing that we can do for someone who has hurt us is to pray in this way, that God will help us forgive and bless them in the ways they most need.

There turned out to be something else for which I needed to forgive Dad. I wouldn't learn this until I was in my mid-thirties and in mandatory therapy. It wasn't a suppressed memory, but as I worked on my own issues I began to see an incident from my childhood in clearer context and in terms of how it helped set me up for the abuse I received at the hands of my stepfather, who was an even greater challenge to forgive.

But despite these deep and long-lingering wounds, the repercussions of which I did not understand for the longest time, far and away the hardest person for me to forgive has been myself. I've used the expression de la mode for this concept; how I've really come to think of it is more like accepting God's forgiveness for myself. One of the things that helps me forgive those who have hurt me is what my therapists made clear from early on: all abuse is, at its root, self-abuse. That doesn't make it okay or excuse it away, but knowing that helps keep me from being harder on others than I should. I've been blessed with a small insight into the damage that sin does to the sinner's soul, and know from my experience that any hurtful act a person does ultimately hurts them worse than those around them. My Unbound prayer session helped me to understand the degree of superiority that refuses to fully accept God's forgiveness because I should have been better than that. In one sense it's true: I knew better. That's what made my sin mortal. But God forgives even mortal sin, and I rejoice when I see a sinner receive God's grace - unmerited favor, after all; do I really believe as I profess that not one of us deserves it at all? Do I think, then, that I could deserve it even less than that? Thinking so was indeed evidence of the arrogance that I renounced, which was a real spiritual influence in my life; perhaps now I am more open to grace because I have rejected the contradiction that I should have been expected to merit the grace that no one does.

(I continue to wonder at this approach we have to Christianity: that its goal is to get us to a point at which we become good enough to merit God's love and grace.)

In Unbound: A Practical Guide to Deliverance, Neal Lozano points out a link between forgiveness and blessing that I had never considered before. It is found in careful reading of the familiar parable of the unforgiving servant. We understand pretty easily that the servant did not appreciate the great favor his master did him in forgiving his massive debt, but Neal points out that the servant did not ask his master to forgive his debt; he requested only additional time to repay him. Of course, his master wisely recognized that the debt was too large to ever be repaid, and bestowed upon his servant a mercy for which he did not ask. It is as if the servant asked to remain indebted, and when this request was met with greater generosity than he could imagine, he didn't know what to do with it. He certainly did not receive it with a heart of gratitude. I wonder if we don't often approach God for forgiveness in the same way: Let me make amends, or Let me avoid this from now on or, ultimately, Let me remain somehow bound by (and to) my debt and sin. We don't know how to receive the grace that is greater than we can even imagine (let alone request).

Especially for cradle Catholics, I suspect that this approach to our own forgiveness, and therefore to our forgiveness of others, is rooted in the element of penance which is part of our sacrament of Reconciliation. Our earliest formation in this wonderful sacrament almost invariably omits - or, worse, misrepresents - an important piece of theology. The element of penance is an important one for demonstrating that the penitent is truly sorry for what they have done wrong. The Church then uses this evidence as a condition to declaring that the confessed sins are absolved. Just consider the abuse that could run even more rampant in the absence of such an element in this sacrament. But as a result, from an early age we conclude that God does not forgive us unless we have served our time in the penalty box, and we thereby also learn to expect reparations commensurate with the hurt we have received as a condition to forgiving others. The parable represents what might be the best indicator of whether we have sincerely repented and received the mercy and blessing of God: have we likewise forgiven others their debt to us? But how could the Church ever make this our penance? Doesn't our forgiveness of others need to be offered as freely as God offers it to us?

Oh, but hold on just a second there . . . you might be thinking. Isn't God putting a condition on his forgiveness by requiring us to forgive, and especially to forgive such a great wrong as I have received from whoever it is that has hurt us so deeply? And doesn't that impose an obligation on me to forgive rather beyond offering it freely? There are at least two things wrong with these objections. One is how little we understand the harmfulness of our own actions. I wonder whether the burning fire of Purgatory as we understand it will consist mainly of the pain of clearly seeing for the first time all the hurtful results of our own decisions. But that may not be the biggest mistake we make in considering this parable. I know it concludes with, So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart. (Mt 18: 35). But what if the reality is not so much that God makes the mercy he offers conditional on the mercy we offer others, but rather that the mercy we offer others flows like an unstoppable river from the mercy we accept? I am convinced God is always the first mover of all mercy and grace, which he offers freely and with out any condition to all. Our forgiveness of others, then, is not a condition of God's grace to us but the natural result of our having received it. The degree to which we eagerly seek to forgive others reflects how completely we ourselves have accepted God's grace and mercy.

Now, sometimes the path of wanting what is best for the person who has hurt me - in mercy and grace - includes holding them accountable, not as a condition of forgiveness but for their own sake. In the case of receiving forgiveness, perhaps this accountability is psychologically inextricable from the entire process, but that is a different thing from granting forgiveness to others. And sometimes the only way I can put into practice any desire for what is best for my offender is to pray for them while I also pray for God to set me free from the unforgiveness I bear. And as I've discussed elsewhere, forgiveness is often not a one-and-done deal: the act of letting go of our right to cling to our injury is often a reiterative effort, particularly in response to our deepest hurts.

But above all, we must remember God is patient and loving and merciful with us in helping us forgive, in teaching us to be merciful as he is. We should be patient with ourselves and remain determined to seek his help when forgiveness continues to seem utterly beyond our capacity.

A life without hope and self-respect

His dad and mine were drunk together at every family gathering when we were growing up. He was charming, and fun. But I had at least one advantage he didn't: my drunken dad was not my biological father, so I didn't inherit any genetic tendency to alcoholism.

I think he was lost already by the time he decided to embrace the "Flap" persona.

Beyond the genetics, who knows fully how his own choices played out in his life? What role did his unspeakable act in his youth, against someone who trusted him utterly, have in his subsequent inability to live with himself in the absence of self-medication? (No, it wasn't me. I learned of this only this century, and am leaving it vague out of respect for the privacy of someone I love dearly.)  It's pretty easy to understand why he alone among his siblings stuck by his drunken father side in his parents' divorce; neither of them ever viewed the other's alcoholism as a problem. It's easy to understand why he chose his addiction - insofar as he was able to choose, or "why he couldn't help but choose" - over his wife and son.

And it is easy, in hindsight, to understand that he could not hope to face his life soberly.

I find myself praying for God's grace to reach him in eternity where Dave did not allow it to do so in time. Also, I am praying for all those who have loved him much more closely than I ever had a chance to. I mean, when I was a kid I probably looked up to him more than any of my cousins; he was the most popular and charismatic of them; I believe this "golden boy" status became a negative influence in his life. And he alone of my cousins came to support my mom (his godmother) when my sister died, though in hindsight I wonder how much of that was his mom's instigation and implementation. But it was back around the time - over a decade before - that he transitioned to Flap, that I became pretty disillusioned with what he was about, and pretty disappointed at how those around him, including my mom and uncle, embraced this image he seemed to be trying to create of himself. Still, they are not responsible for who Dave became or how his life turned out, by any means.

How deeply he hurt those who loved him: his mother, siblings, ex-wife, and son.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. May any bonds that have entered other lives through his influence be broken and each person set free, and those who have loved him be comforted in their pain and loss.

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!

A young friend

This young man we've known since infancy, Lord? Please keep hold of him. I know he doesn't want you to right now, Lord, but I also know he is in the grip of the drugs and his other life choices. We stand with his parents in lifting him up before you and entrusting him to your care. Please do whatever it takes to bring him back from the edge.

I'm afraid he hasn't hit bottom yet, Lord. I'm afraid that's what it will take. But you will be with him all the way, Lord. Safeguard him, and those who love him. We trust you.

Silly rhetoric

Scientists feel they are facing a new era of limits even as the universe itself is screaming to be explored. - headline, Washington Post website, December 26, 2013

Really? We're supposed to believe that the universe has lately cranked up its clamoring for us to discover its mysteries?  (And I thought that was just my tinnitus worsening.)

In some ways, though more respectable than most, scientific knowledge is like any other addiction. There is always more, and the more you have the more you want. This is the danger of every false idol we deify.

The Lord is close at hand; come, let us worship him!

Yes, the Lord shall comfort Zion
and have pity on all her ruins;
Her deserts he shall make like Eden, 
her wasteland like the garden of the Lord;
Joy and gladness shall be found in her,
thanksgiving and the sound of song . . . .
Those whom the Lord has ransomed will return
and enter Zion singing,
crowned with everlasting joy;
They will meet with joy and gladness,
sorrow and mourning will flee. - Is 51: 3, 11

It is a comfort for me to think that this prophecy is for my departed loved ones - my grandparents, parents (including the father I've never known, the adoptive one who killed himself in his alcoholic darkness, and even the still-living stepfather who hurt me more than both of the others), deceased friends, and especially my dear sister - as much as it is for me. In fact, it would be little comfort for me at all if "they" who will meet with joy and gladness were not to include them.

There is only one God, brethren, and we learn about him only from sacred Scripture. It is therefore our duty to become acquainted with what Scripture proclaims and to investigate its teachings thoroughly. We should believe them in the sense that the Father wills, thinking of the Son in the way the Father wills, and accepting the teaching he wills to give us with regard to the Holy Spirit. Sacred Scripture is God's gift to us and it should be understood in the way that he intends: we should not do violence to it by interpreting it according to our own preconceived ideas. - from a treatise against the heresy of Noetus by Saint Hippolytus, priest

And here is where the modern world gets it completely wrong. The way in which St. Hippolytus insists we should never interpret Scripture is the only way in which most of us ever do!

The remainder of this wonderful passage from this treatise in today's Office of Readings is an expansion on the first chapter of St. John's gospel. This helps me not resent so much our parish's refusal to use any gospel on Christmas except the St. Luke account from midnight mass. I love the passage from John which we never use, which for me captures the true meaning of Christmas in a far more significant way than the historical details of Jesus' birth does, which serve primarily to give testimony to the true nature of the profound miracle that took place on that night.

I also love the song we'll be singing at the presentation of the gifts:

Come faithful one and all this Christmastide
Come to the banquet hall, enter inside
This is the feast of love Christ has prepared
Holy communion with us is shared

Refrain:
Celebrate His coming
Meditate the cost
Look beyond the cradle
And behold the cross
Drink the cup of joy
Eat the bread of life
Taste and see the beauty
Of this holy night

God clothed in human flesh, Immanuel 
from heav'n descended with us to dwell
Once clothed in mystery, hidden, concealed
Truth in a manger now is revealed
(Refrain)

Coda:
Taste and see the beauty
Of this holy holy night - Christmas Communion Song, Susan Nay Calloway

This connection between the manger, the eternal God who condescended to enter it, and the reason he did so is too often missing from our consideration of this indescribable event.

It probably seems a bit ironic of me to use the word "indescribable" for something I seem to be trying to describe. Yet I believe there is a difference between a description of something and an entering into it. And I do not believe we can fully do the latter without giving it fresh consideration from a deeper perspective. It isn't that we are reaching for its as-yet-ungrasped nuances from an intellectual perspective, but doing our part (by God's grace) to listen more closely to God, to allow him to touch us (by grace) more profoundly, more transformingly, with the ever-richer depths of his unfathomable love.

An expanded moment from prayer group:

I don't know how we even got on the topic last night; maybe it was just as we were thanking God for the blessings of the week which, for me, included our 33^rd wedding anniversary. But I found myself giving thanks to God for the wonders he has worked in my relationship with my bride, in the context of the full arc (thus far) of our marriage. I shared the abbreviated version with the group, but here is a little more history, and I hope that my sharing it does not bring her any sense of embarrassment but rather underscores my love for her.

We were high school sweethearts. Now, I've known some high school couples who (seem to) have had a fairly mature and healthy relationship which developed into an eventual marriage and a stable life together. By no stretch of the imagination were we such a couple. When we entered into our marriage we were both insecure and immature and broken in very different ways. The roots of my brokenness can be found meandering all through this blog, probably mostly under the headings of Alcoholism, Childhood, Family, Sexual abuse and Suicide. My wife's childhood issues would probably appear less traumatic to an outsider, but I'm sure it was no easier for her to live through her torments.

Our relationship in high school was on-again-off-again, marked by emotional neediness and instability. We dated exclusively for the second half of our sophomore year, at the end of which I broke up with her at my mother's insistence that I not commit too closely when I had so little experience of relationships. From that point we resumed and broke off our relationship several times, each hurting the other by our misunderstanding of love and by living according to the world's influence. We split up completely after high school, and she subsequently bore a daughter (whom I would later adopt as my own). I was never able to find someone who wanted to date for very long. In hindsight, I wouldn't have wanted to date a stoner like me, either; it must have looked as if I had no future at all. I did have a couple of close female friends in college, and in both cases developed romantic feelings for them that in one instance were not reciprocated and in the other could not be acted upon. And since the majority of my sexual experiences were warped ones at the hands of an abuser (whatever good might be said about him, I must not allow my brain to reject this thought), dating someone as evidence of my heterosexuality was becoming a great need in my life. And then out of the blue came a misunderstood message from my best friend that my high school girlfriend wished I would get in touch with her. He'd really been trying to tell me about someone else, but I got the message wrong. I called her and we talked; she was dating someone, we wished each other a good life, end of story. Until they broke up a few weeks later. We got together one evening just to talk, started dating almost immediately, vowed to take things slow without having a very accurate understanding of what "slow" meant, and here we are today.

It is not from any current judgment that either of us made a poor choice that I reflect that, had we been emotionally healthy, we each might have made a very different choice of spouses. She might have waited for someone who appreciated her more at the time for who she really is; I might have sought someone with whom I shared more common interests. In this ideal world that doesn't exist, things might have been very different for us as a result.

We have never lived in such a world. Nor am I suggesting that things would have been better for us.

For in the world in which we do live, we reached out to one another in our respective brokenness, and gave ourselves to one another in the sacrament of matrimony, neither of us having the slightest inkling of anything like the concept of God having a plan for us with which we might or might not be aligning our own decision-making. If by happenstance we did so it was by our blind groping, not by our design, as we weren't giving God the slightest consideration. We were plunging forward, convinced that we were doing what we wanted and what was best for our already-growing family.

Yet God is not surprised by any choice we make, nor any pain we experience. He has seen all of our decisions and is now in his love for us making provision for those we will make tomorrow.

Along came: an Air Force career with both hard-earned successes and crushing setbacks beyond our control; infidelity of heart, mind and flesh; mistrust; judgment; financial irresponsibility; abuse; in short, all of the brokenness that two emotionally unhealthy people should expect to reap from building a life together while continually hoping that things might get better but without actually each working on their own deeply-buried issues. There was also spiritual conversion along the way, but not as yet the emotional healing that we both needed.

Had we actually taken the step of divorce - which we once chose during a brief time when we could not afford to carry it out - the world and indeed our very Church would examine a broken couple like us and determine that there were clearly such profound impediments to the spiritual consummation of our marriage that no marriage had actually occurred and that ours could be annulled. And yet God's plan for us was greater all along than our brokenness; indeed, God's plan was to use our respective brokenness to pour healing and love into each of our lives.

So today we are two individuals bound together as one flesh, a couple that is in love with each other in many ways similar to how God loves us, seeing our shortcomings and loving each other deeply despite them. We also know that there are many aspects of our relationship together that do not yet reflect the way God loves us, self-centered concerns and approaches to our life together that he is still in the ceaseless (in this life) process of converting to holy matrimony. And while our life and our love is not without conflict and frustration, I am grateful - and it is important that I be grateful - for this bride whom I love so much and am growing to love so well, and for the love which he pours into my life through her.

Autumn 1972, and so on

Dad had a business trip scheduled to Pittsburgh, and for some reason it made more sense for him to drive than to fly, I guess. He never completed the business he was going there for. At some point as he neared his destination, he lost control of his VW bug and drove off the road. Only the combination of a guardrail and the rear-engine weight of the bug kept him from careering down a tall, steep cliff-side embankment to his death. I remember very clearly the adults discussing afterward that a normal car would have gone over the side. He almost died anyway.  I don't remember anyone saying so, but knowing him I can say that he was certainly not wearing a seat belt, and I'd be stunned to learn that he was totally sober.

Mom went to to the hospital in Pittsburgh to which Dad had been transferred due to his life-threatening condition to tend to him, leaving us in the care of her aunt, who was in her late sixties. She ended up being gone for about a month. This was my first year of junior high, and I was having no difficulty at all adapting to the tougher level of classwork that kicks in around that point. I had considerable problem, though, with one of the junior high teachers, a nun who was either in the wrong profession to begin with or who had stayed in it too long, in my now grown-up opinion. She taught reading, and in my personal disdain for her I didn't do a bit of homework in her class while mom and dad were gone. She sent several notes home to my parents, but they grew increasingly crumpled in the bottom of my bookbag until mom brought dad home, at which point I was in the most trouble I'd ever been in.

[Until the following year, I was always in the more advanced of the two classes in each grade in my Catholic grade school. That would end because of this stubborn personality clash with this particular nun. Our classes split up differently for Math/Science versus for English/Reading, with the music and PE classes being all together (I think). My English teacher was so frustrated with the way things worked out with my "demotion" that he took me somewhat under his wing, and I became the first student from the "lower class" to receive the English award at graduation. One more junior high note: I'll never forget our excellent math teacher, who drilled the commutative and other properties into us by verse: "The ORDer of the ADDends, does NOT afFECT the SUM," is the only one I can recall now.]

Dad lost muscle control of one eye because of this accident. It was a strange introduction to the precision of legalese: he had an accidental death and dismemberment policy that would have compensated him for a loss of sight in either eye, but not for the use of the eye. (Not that that would have made his life any better.) He wore a patch over his glasses' lens for the rest of his life. As it happened, we got at least a few months respite from his alcoholism, as our family doctor told him that his chances for recovery might be better if he didn't stifle his healing through the continued presence of alcohol in his system. He'd eventually see a neurologist who would tell him that the nerve was permanently damaged and would never recover no matter what he did, after which his drinking resumed with a renewed determination over what he viewed as his lost drinking time and his now crippled life.

Two autumns later, during my freshman year of high school shortly after Dad died, I'd develop an unbearable unrequited crush on a classmate who would later become, in college, my closest friend for a while. Three years after that crush, my H.S. senior year, was that Thanksgiving weekend. In another two years, my then closest friend and I would turn back from the precipice of a developing set of feelings for each other, out of respect for a relationship she was already in - which was the right decision for both of us, btw. More recently, my mom (2001) and both of my wife's parents (2008 and 2010) died in the fall.

Whenever I make even the most laudatory of observations about the season of autumn, these types of memories and feelings are never very far from the surface.

(way) More on Monday (edited)

Caution: probable megapost ahead, with links to previous posts.

I was as nervous as I was excited to see them again, for a combination of reasons. But first, why these relatives that I saw only a half dozen times in my youth mean so much to me.

Well, that will take sharing some more details related to this post. Yes, I was finally going to be reunited with the people that I was with when my dad died. That trip would have been quite memorable for other reasons had it not ended so catastrophically. The idea was to go by train. I don't know how Amtrak pricing compared with flying in those days - it can be significantly more expensive today - but the cost wasn't the main issue. Mom wanted us to experience the country by rail. Dad couldn't go, as he didn't have enough vacation left: he had a Sunday package of Orioles' season tickets, and he never felt good enough to get to work on Monday morning after a game. By then I had come to understand why that always took so much out of him, why my mom objected to my going along with him very often, and why I was forbidden to tell her about the stop that he made just down the street - what was in that odd shaped bottle wrapped in brown paper from which he drank on the way to and throughout the rare games I was allowed to attend with him. (That was by no means the worst thing that I was never to share with her, but it was the most frequent.) Anyway, for this trip it was just the three of us, Mom, my sister and me, with none of dad's alcohol-fueled complications..

The rail station was a different experience, but not that different in nature from an airport. We had dinner in the dining car, and I seem to recall going back later for a snack before it was time for us to sleep in our semi-reclining coach seats. Along the way I developed a crush on one of our fellow passengers who, like most kids my own age, was way less naive than I was. She tried to convince me to let her paint my fingernails with clear polish - lots of guys do that, she assured, and no one will be able to tell because it's clear - and the only reason she didn't succeed was that I was too tied by the apron strings to not check with my mom first - so I guess that wasn't entirely a bad thing. I think we had only one overnight on the train between Baltimore and . . . I can't remember . . . Topeka?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't Kansas City. From there we transferred to a bus - this was the second night of travel, I think - to ride to Dodge City (another "I think") where my dad's brother and/or sister-in-law was picking us up.

There are other details I remember from this trip. It seems to me that this was the year we went to the Seward County fair, which I thought was way fun. We had fairs in MD, but I don't think I'd ever been to one. In the ensuing years I'd go with my high school girlfriend (now my bride of 32 years) to the Glen Burnie carnival, but hadn't been as of yet. Anyway, I remember on that trip and the next playing baseball with my cousins and their friends in the field behind my aunt and uncle's double-wide. When there weren't enough friends around for a game, my cousins and I had plenty of games of catch and rundown - though for the life of me I can't remember the different name they had for the latter. I've finally figured out why I've been remembering them as closer to my age than they really were: they were at least my equal in sports ability, even though Bill and Mark were two and three years younger than me. I can't remember which of the years it was that I helped with the mowing at my grandparents' house, taking a little bit of flack from my cousins and then my uncle for not "following the pattern."

I'll spare the reader (and myself) the details of my clearest memories from before The Call. They happened at night, in youthful ignorance and curiosity. I may not have understood the nature of what we were doing, but I knew it was forbidden. We weren't trying to be naughty, yet I knew we were. And I'm remorseful about it now, but will probably never get a chance to tell them so, because it isn't the sort of thing you raise without it being clear that the other person hasn't already moved past it on their own. I talked about it in therapy, but am not completely without difficult feelings about it. This was the biggest reason for my nervousness about visiting this week.

The power behind those lingering feelings is undeniable. We were in the latter days of the trip, preparing to retrace our steps back home, when The Call came one evening. Some time later, our mom called my sister and I together (I thought I was remembering, though now it is occurring to me that maybe she told me but not Karen?) to tell us most gravely that dad had become very suddenly and seriously ill. It wasn't at all clear that he was going to survive. We were going to have to fly home the next day and pray for the best.

Pray I did. I remember my cousins praying the rosary with me, under the impossibly starry rural Kansas sky. As we offered our repetitive, ritual prayers, I silently begged God to answer my prayer for my father in spite of the bad thing I'd been doing. I was afraid that if he died it would be my fault, because I'd learned that God doesn't answer the prayers of a sinner. We were up, praying and afraid, for most of the night, though I suppose I must have slept for at least several hours.

The seriousness of his condition was underscored when Grandma and Grandpa made the trip back to Maryland with us, too; I can't remember for certain who else came along. We drove to Wichita to catch our plane, but the rest of that part of my life is a distant blur, starting with the flights home; I think I slept through most of both (?; I'm sure it was at least two, even in the "pre-hub" days of air travel) of them. Once we were home in our own living room, Mom told us that Dad had already been dead when she'd gotten The Call before we'd left Kansas, and that she'd wanted to wait until we were back in familiar surroundings to break the worst part of the news to us. She explained that he'd died of a sudden, unexpected cerebral hemorrhage, saving the rest of the truth for some day much later, when I was older and she'd had a chance to deal with it. (That would be after she revealed that my dad wasn't my biological father, I think.) One of my uncles - I'm thinking it was my Kansas uncle, but I just don't remember for certain - dropped the "man of the house, now" line on me, but it didn't seem like the unreasonable burden that it might have been had I been younger. I remember the funeral home behind our school, run by the family of a grade school classmate. I'm pretty sure I had been in it before, but it's way different when it's your own dad and you're there for the duration rather than just to pay your respects and leave. There were a few of his friends from work with whom we'd visited over the years - always at their homes rather than ours - who came for the viewing or funeral. Our pastor led a service at the funeral home and prayers at the gravesite; he was a bit of a rebel, honoring my mom's request that he preside despite my dad's professed atheism and undeniably non-Catholic status. My clearest recollection is the tender moment back in the limo at the graveyard when, remembering my uncle's admonition from our arrival home, I asked my tearful mother if she was okay. She seemed legitimately bolstered and comforted by my asking. Grandma and Grandpa stayed for another day or so, I think. In just a few weeks I started high school, from which there are all sorts of memories that are part of my whole story but are well beyond the scope of this post, even though emotionally some of them might be considered part of a continuous weaving.

The following year we had our big road trip, which included a side trip with our Kansas aunt, uncle, and cousins to the Ozarks (though I suppose it's possible this side trip was the previous year). It was the only time in my life I've ever enjoyed fishing, though I think that maybe I enjoy it more in the memory than I did in the moment. I remember very clearly, though, how patient my uncle was with me, very different from how my dad had been.

So the family members with whom I was reunited on Monday, for the first time since I was fifteen years old, are very dear to me. I was surprised when we got there with the chance to also see the ones who'd almost let my paternity cat out of the bag 38 years ago. My secretive, overprotective mother was so mad at them that day she could have spit fire, as she told me the day she finally revealed my paternity, but then, "Spitfire" did become her nickname. Now, it was nice to visit under these circumstances when there was no longer any need for there to be such secrets between us, and I found myself caught off-guard by how nostalgic I felt toward them despite having only met them on the one previous occasion so long ago. It was wonderful to hear their stories of my dad, who over sixty years ago lived for at least one summer in that small town. I had a short moment of panic near the start of their visit when his aunt looked me in the eye to interrogate as to whether I remembered breaking her ribs, until my aunt reminded her that that had not been me but my dad. It was great to hear stories from before he'd become enslaved to the bottle, when he was once just an enthusiastic kid, too, struggling to find his place in this world, which apparently ever eluded him. The years seemed to contract as I shared with my aunt and cousin how much my late uncle had meant to me, too, and some of what I had learned from his example. His generous spirit lives on in his son who, when showing me his memorabilia room, would not allow me to leave without two baseballs autographed by famous Orioles from the '66 championship team. "They'll mean way more to you than they will to me," my cousin insisted, perhaps not understanding that the biggest reason for that is because of who gave them to me and the renewed relationship with him that they represent.

A cry, a response

What I read: 

My mom divorced my dad in 2007. I never talked to anyone except him, at that time. She got cancer in 2008, and fell into a state of alchoholism to escape her depression, her actions affected everyone. By that christmas, my dad killed himself, he blamed it on her, but we don't know if that was true or just meant to hurt her. I spent one week losing my mind, and when I came out, I was alright. I lived my life. I grew up, I found reasons to live, and even though I'm terrible at socializing, I began to do it.

I went to college. I liked it here, it got me away from that "Home" I had that had now become a home only to the shell that remained of my mother. My last memory of her was her showing up at my apartment unannounced to collect $20,000 my dad left to me, a fact she found out about by going through my private bank letters. She brought me straight to the bank and then right back to my apartment and then only remembered to save she loved me right before she drove away. And two weeks ago she died. Losing a second parent so early on is a completely different kind of pain than I can articulate, and it hurts to think about how she saw me as a person, if she still even considered me a son when she died. And now, I might be losing that house, but I don't know.

Every time I go home, I don't know. I don't what what of my "home" I'll still have. A brother, my papou, my grandma, and some plaster walls on foundation are all I have left, and I don't know which of those I'll still have in a year. Loss is all I feel like I have left to look forward to.

So, I might seem a little unstable in the coming weeks, and I'm sorry. I'm trying to be "admirable", but all I feel is betrayed, by everything I have ever loved or trusted. I don't want to learn any more life lessons, I just want someone for just one god damn second to hold me and say that it's okay to feel the way I feel. And not judge me when I can't stop screaming.

What I wrote back (edited for his privacy):

Hi Xxxx,
You don't know me from Adam, but I'm a cousin of the Xxxxs, which is how I ended up seeing your post. (To be precise on the relationship: xxxxx and xxxxx were xxxxxxx.) What I already knew about your family can be summed up in one sentence: your family is precious to their family. But that by itself would not have caused me, as an utter stranger, to reply to your post.

I don't know how public you intended that post to be, but having read it I find that I cannot just ignore it without responding to your anguish. You've had more to deal with than a young man should have to in a lifetime, let alone by your tender age. Just surviving it with the good sense intact that drives you to rail against it rather than just shut down is a small victory in itself. When such severe emotional trauma happens to us, whatever mechanisms we have in place by that point have to suffice to help us survive it, and we are rarely equipped for it. How wise it is that you have reached out to the people around you for support, in such an honest expression of your frame of mind. Lean on them, and get through it together. Eventually . . . well, "eventually" is pretty meaningless right now; you'll figure out "eventually" later, with the people you have in your life. But don't dismiss them. Everyone who responds to you is offering you support in the ways they can; please find a way to accept it from them. As for me, I have two specific reasons for writing:

1. Yes, in response to your reply (I don't know why my fingers typed "reply" instead of "plea"), what you're feeling is completely okay. Your parents have hurt you unspeakably deeply; express that hurt as you need to. Your feelings are a normal response to highly abnormal hurts that the two people who should have most protected you instead have inflicted on you in their own brokenness. You deserved - and still deserve - way better. However, don't learn from their example and despair in the midst of your own pain. Instead, reach back out to those friends and family members who are offering to support you. Put them to the test, and the ones who prove faithful in response will be your support network, your shoulders to cry on and to lean on. 

2. If you didn't intend your post to be this public, you might want to change its access settings.

I myself was a son of alcoholism and of suicide, and more. The way you're dealing with it is so much healthier than how I did. Acknowledge your hurt, for there is no other path to being healed from it. Dealing with it now is way better than burying it for later; such profound hurts don't rest well.

May you find the peace and healing that you need, in the loving arms of those who reach out to you in your need. And know that there is a stranger in Ohio who is praying for you.

In heartfelt respect, 

There were a number of other things that I maybe could have addressed. No, no amount of his mom being screwed up makes his dad's suicide her fault. He seems to know this, but perhaps fears that cutting his mom any slack on any front is the road to letting her off the hook. But there is plenty for him to be angry at both of his parents about even without mis-attributing blame. I think he could benefit by taking a few months to talk all of this through with a professional, but that wasn't the purpose of my reply, and I couldn't think of any way to say that without it sounding like "Geez, you need a shrink," which would have been the opposite of what I wanted to convey in response to his plea. Maybe I could have found a way to say, "Yes, what you're feeling is normal, and a good counselor can help you process all of that." Then again, maybe I'll still get a chance to . . .

. . . Please tell me who I am . . . And bad mistakes? I've made a few. . . . I've made a few eternal decisions: marriage, abuse, accepting Christ . . . The nights aren't even cool, though Friday at the ball game had a bit of a nip in the air . . . i suspect i will probably die in autumn.

Through autumn's golden gown we used to kick our way.

sometimes i feel as if i'm living by inertia.

what if this life was all there is? would i still want to live the rest of it?  there has been such great joy, but it seems so far from me.

my dad drowned in a sea of alcohol. what is this sea of mine?

Less disconcerting

In my dream, our oldest daughter called us from the hospital to let us know she had a bit of a crisis that was somewhat sensitive. But rather than share the details, she asked us to talk with her husband about it. It seems that she and the kids couldn't return home while her husband was there. He was back with his parents while he tried to kick his methadone addiction. He was on suspension from his police job until he did.

The weird thing about it is that, in real life, our daughter is the one who has needed methadone as a long-term, low-level narcotic for pain management.

That was then

In the past, my bride inevitably suffered by comparison to, well, pretty much everyone else in my life, but especially my female friends. Always. I'm still chagrined to recognize that a main purpose of these friendships was for my wife to suffer in comparison to them. What I'd share with my close friends was almost never about her, yet that sharing formed the basis for my comparisons. When I would complain about her - with good cause or not - or, more often, simply lament that we were unable to share together in the same way as I could in these friendships, I'd usually find a sympathetic ear, and as a result my emotions often went in a direction that I should never have allowed. This caused my bride much pain in the short term, and myself in the long term the loss of good friends.

The core cause of this dynamic, of course, was my own insecurity. Deep inside, I knew I wasn't a good person, and all of the dynamics of growing up in an alcoholic home and experiencing parental suicide and sexual abuse were at work in me to reinforce that inner knowledge. But it was all a deeply buried secret, most of all to me, so I needed continual evidence to the contrary. This was most easily available in the form of my perceived superiority to my constant foil, my bride.

Today, as a result of a lot of hard work and thanks to the loving grace I've received from so many, first and foremost my dear wife, my own self-concept is very different, which has made all the difference. I still have to be on the lookout against my inferiority/superiority dynamic, because I still deal with a significant amount of self-judgment, but I'm aware of it as I was not before. Since I no longer need to elevate myself at my wife's expense to resolve a cognitive dissonance between my conscious and unconscious images of myself, I'm now able to have a close friend for friendship's own sake, rather than as a means to make up for what I secretly believed to be lacking in myself.

I still have road to walk, but it's a way smoother road.