Anger

Obviously, I am on a rollercoaster of emotions these days. Yesterday was sadness, and forgiveness, and today I'm angry. Is it my way of reacting to a situation I do not want to be in? I intended to grow old with this man. I wanted us both to go together to our children's weddings. Why is he so blind?

He has a wife who loves and supports him, children who adore him, work that he really loves to do, opportunities to travel with his work. When he said yesterday that he didn't want to be on his deathbed and say where did my life go? I wanted to say better that than being on your deathbed and saying: what did I do? how could I have lost what I had?

He seems to think that if he takes the kids out for dinner and explain to them in rational ways how this will work, and how we'll all benefit from it (DUNH!) that all will be well.

I'm angry that the entire culture seems to think divorce is OKAY! That everyone will be fine as long as everyone plays nicely in the sandbox. My kids are plenty angry, and hurt. I'm angry and hurt. I feel abandoned.

Can I scream now????

Forgiveness

These have been very heavy-hearted, trying days, as my husband prepares to leave our home -- 15 years in this house, and 8 years in the other. Our children have been raised here, and it's like tearing body from spirit. I cannot bear to tell some people for their reactions: it's not the end of the world, you'll get over it, you'll see that this was the best thing possible.

But it's not, especially for my children.

My nights are like Jacob's Ladder re-runs -- wrestling, crying (I take myself to the basement and try to sleep there). And in the midst of it all is my Lord and my God, faithful to the end as I work through this particular challenge. The book Love Dare (which accompanies the slightly cloying Christian movie Fireproof) is something else I'm working through. It's really quite excellent.

I have never been challenged to love unconditionally, although the Bible is full of examples and exhortations to do so. I am going through the exercises -- not to win back my husband because he won't return after trying for 10 or 20 years to leave -- but because it's good for me.

And guess what? A huge weight is being lifted off my shoulders. I feel free. I feel as though I am solid rock again (until tomorrow when something new will sideswipe me and knock me on my keester). It's the understanding that forgiveness is the act of letting God take over whatever work he needs to do with the person who hurt you. It's also understanding that many hurts that are inflicted are through sheer blindness. Remember Jesus on the Cross? If He could say, forgive them Father, they know not what they do, when his innocent blood has been shed, then why shouldn't I be able to?

communion

Every day the cqod (Christian quote of the day) comes into my mailbox, and it never ceases to amaze me how often it hits home for whatever I'm going through at the time.

Today it's the unbelievable claim that God hears whatever we ask according to His will. And knowing that he hears us, we are assured that we have what we asked! As George MacDonald explains, a child running home hungry actually has more need of his mother than of dinner. Likewise, when we go to God it is communion we seek, not the things that we ask for. MacDonald even suggests that God witholds things from us, so we will come and ask.

These days as I go through the extremely tough stuff of losing my marriage, and watching my children go through various stages of grief, mostly numbness right now, I can easily grow desperate and despairing. I tend to manage things and thus my prayers can veer into the "please fix this for me" arena. The despair leads me to think it's hopeless, the situation has gone on far too long, I've tried everything.

Like Martha who complains to Jesus, I am being told: sit still, and trust me. It is your life in mine that should concern you, and only that. You can pray for him, but you can't fix or change him, only I can do that.

Communion with God is what I need to focus on, and on the rare occasions I can keep from being distracted from it, there is a measure of peace. On the days I go careening off on my own, thinking up methods to shake things up, I am distraught.

I tend to be impatient, and thought that I was very patient the past ten years or so since this trouble has brewed. But I realize now I have just been enduring, and not being patient at all.

Death of a Good Man

That 1960s song “what’s it all about?” plays in my mind occasionally as I think – endlessly, it seems – about this event, or series of events really.

It’s been a week since David Dewees, the Jarvis Collegiate teacher who committed suicide after being arrest on charges of luring, and invitation to touch. He was my son’s section head at Pioneer Camp this past summer.
Aidan, 16, revered David. Such a great guy, a good man, so much fun, the most amazing Bible study leader, a gifted teacher so inspiring that Aidan has started to consider that vocation -- the kudos seemed endless.

The whole affair has taken on huge moral proportions – great men sin (and women) – and where do we find God in it, and where do we find right judgment in it. I bring up the idea of moral dilemma in trying to find ways to discuss this tragic thing to Aidan. The truth must out and yet is the whole truth may be lost to us forever with David’s death. We must protect our children, yes. But what of the hundreds of children whose lives were touched, positively, and changed forever on account of his example? And what of those who will never benefit from his probing questions, his exuberance, his musical genius, his deep and abiding love of Christ? Is David’s life now completely discounted because of his suicide, and even more by what led to it?

We heard things that make for unclear judgments, moral ambiguities, which we aim to examine in both the stark light of God’s truth and the compassion of Christ’s grace. Aidan understands that one must judge another on how he presents himself to us, and not on what others may say. But he and his friends talk and some of them are deeply hurt: “I thought I knew him,” said one. “How could he do this,” cries another.

Aidan has thought about this, and concludes that he can forgive David for being something other than what he may have thought he was. Nobody is two-dimensional, we all have dark sides – witness great King David, who loved God mightily and yet arranged another man’s murder so he could steal his wife.

Aidan doesn’t really understand what made Yukon (Dewees’ camp name) take his own life, but I can imagine: despair, shame, humiliation and the weakness we all suffer from – disbelief that God could possibly bring any good out of this mess.

Getting Up and Going On

I could make excuses, and some of them sound and legitimate, for not keeping up with this blog. The past several months have been extremely stressful for family reasons. The situation with access to my elderly father deteriorates, and there is nothing we can do legally -- my brother manages to keep just one inch above the law on this. The marriage teeters on the edge of nothingness and many days I just feel like giving up. Freelance work has come to a standstill and my income is half what it was last year, which wasn't any great shakes then.

Lo, the many times I've been lying awake at night feeling completely overwhelmed by the problems, and feeling I can't find a way out of this. I start dragging up things from childhood, and mistakes I made, and dwell in a constant whirlwind of self-doubt, self-recrimination, and sense of hopelessness.

Payer is the only thing that drags me out of it. And that usually prompts me toward thanksgiving: how my children thrive, with Aidan reaching new levels of relationship with God, and Anna dealing with anxiety and perfectionism; and also to view how blessed I am compared to about 97% of the population.

I try to remember what Harriet Tubman always said to herself: "Just keep on goin', Harriet, keep on goin'." And she did it with Christian love.

And then today's cqod (Christian quotation of the day) came to my inbox and knocked all that sheer determination on its head:

To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do-- to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst--is by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your
life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.
... Frederick Buechner (b. 1926), The Sacred Journey, San
Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1982, p. 46


Yes, we've been given a brain to think through things, a will to carry out what we think is right, and even a heart to temper it all with compassion. But this quote talks about obedience, I think -- that we must wait on the Lord and remain open for Him to do His work. I have failed to obey this in my quest to fix problems.

Acedia & Me

Having not slept well last night, I took to my bed this morning as soon as Anna was out the door to school, and snuggled up with Kathleen Norris’s latest book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life.

In between fits of catnaps, I read it, and it struck a deep chord, echoing my own faith (or faithless) journey in her biography of churchgoing childhood, to adolescence and young womanhood of agnosticism, and eventually back to the church, to faith, and one hopes into the love of God. But no journey is so simple, especially one beset by the sin of acedia, sloth, lassitude, listlessness, despair, depression, or whatever you wish to call your own noonday demon.

It’s this acedia I have been suffering with the last several months, and possibly for much, much longer. I wish I could find something funny to say about it, but in some ways humour can be an effective shield against honesty, and losing faith, in yourself if not in God, requires no small amount of self-reflective honesty. And it’s not all that funny, either.

So far, about a quarter of the way into the book, it does seem as though Norris is suggesting that the antidote to acedia (for it is truly as poisonous as a serpent’s bite), is digging in deeper to commitments – to one’s self, to life, to your spouse, your friends, your vocation, your God. It seems to be a complete cessation of desire – which is a sickness of the will and consequently the heart – and in modern Dr Phil terms, the prescription is fake it til you make it.

Of course Norris is much more eloquent that Dr Phil, and one sentence in particular seemed to sum up what I have been feeling much of lately. Listlessness has a seductively soft sound, but at root, it means being unable to desire, which is a cause, and a symptom, of serious mental distress. What most of us do is delve deeper into distraction – the worst thing, Norris says – because it makes us “in danger of becoming immunized from feeling itself.”

the silent scream revisited

Bernard Nathanson’s book, The Hand of God, should be on every young person’s reading list. He describes his own journey from a broken childhood with a dictatorial doctor father, who was verbally and emotionally abusive to his mother, into his own medical career, and the pathways that led him to become one of the leading early abortion doctors, who was also a leader in the pro-choice movement. He performs 60,000 abortions over the course of his career – including that of his own child – and only when ultrasound becomes standard use, does the veil fall and he sees that the fetus is life. His arguments rest on that fundamental principle, not in all the bafflegab of pro-choice proponents who have fairly sophisticated arguments for when and how a fetus is human, and whether there’s a moral absolute, and whether a fetus can feel pain (yes, it can). He stops doing abortions in 1979, and at one point even asks one of his colleagues if he minds having the ultrasound machine on while he conducts an abortion. When his colleague sees the ultrasound results, he is sickened, and stops doing abortions himself.

The strength of Nathanson’s book is its honesty, how he became pulled and lulled into the pro-choice movement, and with good compassionate reasons. He also supports it all with some pretty shocking stats – especially gruesome are the deaths of some women seeking abortions from bad doctors. He discusses how the cream of medical crop bypasses this as a career choice, because of its scummy aftertaste, leaving the doctor dregs to perform abortions – some of them doing 30 a day.

Ironically, it is his pro-life about face that eventually leads to his conversion to Christianity. He witnesses the quiet, deep of the pro-life vigils, and prayers, and holding the mirror to his own soul, finds it lacking. He eventually becomes Catholic.
The other strength in the book is his prescriptions: prayer is vital, non-violent vigil, too – as he points out, no one was ever convinced of God’s unbounding love or of the personhood of a fetus by argument alone. It is love -- relayed through visual and emotional means -- that can successfully grab one in the gut and demonstrate the reprehensible act of abortion.