Darkness into Light brings its own Pain

This morning's reading was John ch 3, and Jesus spends a long time speaking with Nicodemus about what it means to be born again. That is, not born of flesh, but of water and spirit. I guess the apt comparison would be Adam born of flesh, and Jesus born of spirit (and flesh). Jesus, or rather John (the apostle) makes a big deal out of light, and darkness, and he picks up on Jesus' convo with Nicodemus about evil likes the dark, but to be born again, that is grow closer to God, trust him as a baby does its mother, you must come into the light.

That journey is not without pain. There are times, especially in church when my usual crust is threatening to crumble, that I let the tears flow. I wish I could say it is from joy, but more often than not it is from pain, at the memory of yet another betrayal, or mean speech, from my ex-h. Although I was pretty sure for all those years that things were going on, I wasn't prepared to rip the veil off the activity, and find out for sure, because at some level I knew that it would require action I wasn't prepared to take at the time. And so I suffered the insults and shameful behaviour within a cloak of darkness and denial. One becomes immune to this behaviour -- it piles up, without you realizing it, sort of like turning up the heat on frogs immersed in cold water. But now that the cloak comes off, and the crust on the scab is beginning to fall away, leaving behind some pretty raw feelings. Thus the tears.

Likewise my own behaviour, though. I hid in darkness, not being bold, not confronting when I should have, and so layering his sins with my own. Comfort first, even if that comfort was the legitimate kind to protect my kids from a split home. And if I'm honest, comfort for me at my age not to have to struggle along with one income. (As it turns out, I am getting quite good at managing my bills.)

Oh, what a ride!

I've said for a long time that anger is a verygood tool for protecting your inner mushball, and that sadness while it taps into your real emotions can leave you a mess until you work through it. The last week or so has been like this.

And I've had too much contact with my ex-h. Better left alone. Since he had a potentially serious medical problem which needed attending to, I insisted on driving him to the hospital, then driving him to another hospital next day for the emerg laser eye surgery. When I accidentally hit a bump in the car, he asked that I slow down since my driving could hurt his eye. I got defensive, because I had been very mindful, and then the memories surfaced -- having a miscarriage all over the kitchen, and his asking if I needed a ride to the hospital. D'oh. Half hour from delivery of our dd, (while he was engaged in a full blown affair, and being so nasty I'd asked a friend to be my labour coach, then relented, but I digress). There I was, 9 cm dilated in screaming labour, and he accidentally bangs the wheelchair into the wall driving the pain through my whole body. Naturally, I cried out -- he got angry with me.

So as I drive along -- him in the back seat with our dd, and me in the front like the chauffeur I allow myself to be -- and start thinking about all those affairs, and his mean behaviour towards me during them. While I understand, intellectually, that demonizing me justifies or normalizes behaviour, he doesn't want to feel guilty about. And I understand too that I contributed to this by being so effing stupid as to put up with it (what was I thinking? Saving my children's home?) and worse to fall for his mood switches from nasty to sweet -- when I'd start to exhibit signs of kicking him out. Maybe that's why these romantic comedies appeal so much, because they take a Proverbial statement and flesh it out -- those lines ring true, because they are true. My marriage is a combination of Legally Blonde and Jerry Macguire -- only I'm like a pathetic Elle still stuck on Warner.

And when I got home, feeling pretty low, out of the blue appear my two dearest friends (via email and phone), as if by divine conjuring, and made me feel loved again. Cuz it's being unwanted that really hits you most in times of sadness (most other times I feel very content about the turn of events, at least with regards to me). The other thing to watch out for is when one or both of the kids is away -- my tall lanky and handsome son has been at camp for over a week, and that probably accounts for the mood more than anything. I will, with the help of good friends and my faithful Lord, rise again.

Keep on moving, look forward and see what the good Lord has in store for me. After all, he promises to restore the years that the locusts have stolen. But I won't know them if my head is down.

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.

Spiritual Mismatches

I’ve always had a soft spot for Hosea – that nice prophet commanded by God to marry a prostitute. He entered this marital union with eyes wide open, knowing life would not be all wine, roses and connubial bliss. He accepted his role as picture of God’s forbearance with Israel, as they willingly threw themselves on the altar of a pagan culture.

Life as metaphor is as effective today. Living in a secular world, it’s inevitable that some Christians will fall in love and marry non-believers. I know because it happened to me, and while I may not be God’s chosen metaphor for life today, I do inhabit a strange border between faith and culture.

My atheist husband and I have had many heated discussions – me dodging potshots intended to blow my beliefs out of the water, all the while lobbing a few defence-of-the-faith salvos of my own.

Add the challenge of trying to raise faithful children who will able to walk the line in a problematic culture and it makes for an interesting life, indeed.

Of course, it’s not all bad – being held accountable makes you either cave or get serious.

I chose the latter, though my choice of methods was probably not all that wise. Assuming that dealing with an intelligent academic required rigorous intellectual apologetics, I took a religious studies degree, volunteered for every social justice activity going, taught Sunday school, and boned up on every issue facing my evangelical church, from gay marriage to creationism and intelligent design, from stem cell research, to abortion.

While it accomplished exhaustion for me, it resulted in an intellectual impasse for us. Until my husband’s mid-life crisis hit, that is. As my honest, gentle man turned into a narcissist and worse, there was little I could do but sit by and watch our marriage unravel.

Pain is a mighty teacher, though, and after 40 years on intellectual autopilot, I learned to let go of the strictures around my heart. After indulging in many of my own narcissistic tears, I got real – about my marriage, myself, and God.

Can our attitudes be an obstacle? My pastor seems to think so:“If they’re aggressive about their own faith, the believer can prevent the spouse coming to faith.”

Take the example of Sarah Ruth in Flannery O’Connor’s short story Parker’s Back. A chapter-and-verse quoting evangelical, she marries OE Parker, a tattoo-covered transient who has avoided God all his life. After a tractor accident results in a burning bush/tree, Parker gets his last tattoo -- the face of the Byzantine Christ gracing the whole of his back. Furious, Sarah Ruth beats him with a broom and sends him away.

I have read that story many times, always gleaning something new. Recently it occurred to me that maybe my metaphor is more Sarah Ruth than Hosea. So angry about an unbelieving husband, and forgetting all about joy, we overlook the signs of God’s grace in our other’s lives. Like my husband and his work with the poor, homeless and marginalized.

I am now wondering what kind of Christ I have painted on my back. As Donald Miller puts it in Blue Like Jazz, “nothing’s going to change in the Congo until we figure out what’s wrong with the person in the mirror.”

My pastor advises mixed marriage couples like us to “aim for mutual respect.”

He had a good point – I’d never considered my husband’s perspective of being married to a Christian. So I asked him. Initially he tiptoed through his answer, but after warming up and seeing it wasn’t coming to verbal blows, he was blunt: “It’s weird. And irritating – that whole notion that everything is God’s plan and people have no choice or say in their lives.” There was more -- much more -- and mostly fairly common liberal views, but I'll stop there.

Except to say that his view of me surprised -- and hurt. I thought that his objections were mostly control issues: God as “puppet-master”; pushy evangelizers; the church “club” for special members who’ve passed the test.

Then something my six-year-old daughter said gave me pause. She asked why Daddy didn’t go to church, and I explained he didn’t believe in God. After an incredulous “How could he not believe in God? God is everywhere,” she added: “Daddy doesn’t believe because he can’t see God.”

If our lives are witness to God, then maybe Daddy is blind to Him because Mommy’s been so busy trying to be perfectly moral that she’s forgotten how to be the face of Christ. Like Sarah Jane, I’d been holding up a God more closely resembling an orderly control freak than a welcoming servant king. As such, maybe my faith is not all that different from Daddy’s progressivist atheism.

A line from William Edgar’s essay in Finding God at Harvard hit home: “Becoming a Christian means that one's foundation is radically changed. But it takes a lifetime -- and, I suppose, an eternity -- to become fully conformed to what we are foundationally.”

Life as workshop for working out the mess it means to be human -- and perhaps the bridge for better communication between Christians and non-believers.

Finding the common language to express it is a challenge, but I think the answer lies in parables. I’ve seen them work -- during a particularly difficult time in our marriage, a couple of movies deeply affected my husband, and like Adam recognizing himself in Eve, he identified with the tragic depiction of someone bereft of community.

Can my husband and I find a story to share? The Christian story, as simple and obvious as it sounds – an invitation to love and be loved -- might be a good place to start. As the Catholic Catechism states, “sincere married love, the humble and patient practice of the family virtues, and perseverance in prayer” can prepare the non-believer for the “grace of conversion.”

My pastor seconds that: “The top priority has to be that the unbeliever knows they’re loved by their spouse. It all comes back to love.”

Living authentically – to love others, not just our families but our communities, too, to lay the foundation of the Biblical story within our heart, to wear the dark-eyed Christ on our back, to continuously forgive those who wrong us -- is a pretty powerful witness. Going forth like so, can the world dismiss Christians as narrow-minded, pushy, privileged members of some elite club?

That simple love story certainly convicted Gomer -- humbled by lessons learned by her travails in the world, she made her way back to the forgiveness of Hosea.

Will my husband and I ever resolve our differences? Maybe not. But we are learning to discuss them respectfully. And I am learning the simple, but hard, lesson that the picture of God’s welcome, hospitality and forbearance is worth a thousand words.

Sacred Females

It's been almost a month since I last blogged. Too busy finding candidates for a recent TV contract on grooming shaggy men and making them worthy of their women. I am the first one to say my husband could stand some improvement, but if truth be told a lot of the women who nominated their men actually had greater need of sprucing up.

There was the woman who called the show and asked that we do something with her boyfriend of ten years, who has rotting teeth. His breath stinks, she wailed. After he got his teeth kicked in, he's done nothing with them.

What happened -- was he in a fight, I asked innocently.

No, I kicked him in the mouth ten years ago, she replied.

Oh. He must have done something pretty awful to warrant that.

I was behaving badly, she admitted. That's when I was drinking.

Since the producer insisted we follow up on this "love story" I chatted next with the man who said their issues were way deeper than a shave and a haircut and that he wouldn't go back to her.

That's just one example. There were many others.

This brings me to the Da Vinci Code, and the worship of the sacred feminine. And the Last Supper, since this is Maundy Thursday, and Mary Magdalene who is supposedly reclining on Jesus' right side in Da Vinci's Last Supper painting.

The way that Mary M is portrayed in the DVC (da vinci code) is about as conniving and manipulative as the lovely lady who kicked in her guy's teeth while drunk.

The gospel accounts portray Magdalene as worshipful -- not lovesick, not queenly and presiding over the table as the chatelaine -- but emptied out. When women are engaged in an intimate relationship with a man, they simply are not emptied out, unless there's an abusive or co-dependent thing going on.

I have more problems with the DVC than just that, however. First of all, the priory which worships the sacred feminine is ALL MEN! It's a brotherhood.

Secondly, the secret rituals which are supposed to cause the divine spark are ugly romping sex acts -- imagine this: a grey-haired overweight woman astride an old gray-haired man, in the midst of a secret society of folks chanting like Druids.

Contrast that to The Song of Solomon, with its spiritually erotic verse illuminating the heart that pants after its Maker. As a mom, I have never once considered myself the creator of my two kids -- and to confuse the divine spark that occurs when we search for God with the sex act is more than bizarre.

And now to the Last Supper. The metaphysical divine consumed by the merely human. Now that's intimate.