Reflections

  B e still and know that I am God  ~God Do you ever feel like you are in the air on a seesaw, waiting for the heavier person to get off first so you can come down?  That is a nervous-system metaphor for how it feels when another person controls a relationship through gravity and inertia. It can feel extremely disempowering when you are the one waiting, maybe worrying, for the other person to do something so you can, literally, come down. It can be a kind of frustrating battle of wills. It is tempting to do something to get things rolling but then you just set yourself to play the same over-functioning role on the seesaw while the idler is just too content to do nothing. When you stop pushing, managing, anticipating and absorbing the consequences of this unilaterally controlled motion, you wait without hope  as TS Eliot would say. Without expectation, without directing an outcome or suggesting a direction, you allow the other person to  feel their own weight . ...

.... Will my life, O tyrant master, be the miserable victim of these wretched chains that clasp me; Since in them, I vow to God, I will tear myself to fragments with my hands and with my teeth ....   Pedro Calderone de la Barca   The origin of the word chastity is the same  as the word caste:  to cut off.  It shares the same meaning as the Hebrew word for holy (kadosh):  to set apart.  By s eparating oneself in order to be better aligned with a higher power,  spiritual consecration involves setting oneself apart from the secular.  Unfortunately, this  kind of holy often also implies judgement and/or condemnation of the profane, precursor  to the holier-than-thou attitude we despise in martyrs who do violence both to their own disavowed parts and to their narcissistic extensions which unfortunately almost always include other human beings. It is noble to aspire to holiness but this can turn rapidly into spiritual bypassing when...

  Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. ~Romans 7:9 I am often asked by addicts "why" they struggle with addiction. (A better question might be "how did I get here?" which helps point to the solution: "how can I get out?") This is an attempt to answer that question. Addiction is the insidious pattern of seeking to infuse ourselves with our drug of choice (sex, substance, gambling, food, etc.). At the root of this pattern is not attachment to the drug per se, powerful though it may be, rather it is the unbearable feelings of want driving the search for their obliteration. Current research indicates that dopamine release actually begins prior to administration of the "fix", in anticipation, reaching its peak in the moments just prior to satisfaction of the want.  An addict does not suffer from weakness of will or unbridled lust (a belief often held by addicts themselves). An addictive per...

  ~ forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it (Mark Twain) When it comes to loss or terminal illness, we say that acceptance happens gradually, in  stages  known as "grief". The stages we go through, however, are not just steps we simply go down. They are an uphill battle to let go of something cherished, a process far more arduous than what is implied in the somewhat placid emotion "grief" which, true to its etymologcal orgin ( gravitas ), is thick with a sorrow evoking images of weeping and wailing clothed in the heavy black garments of wet renunciation. Loss, on the other hand, triggers anything but a passive response from the loser. It sparks an agitated wrestling against reality, a complex process that is totally counter-intuitive to human agency culminating in the bittersweet acquiescence to an undesired fate. That is letting go. The first stage is  denial : No. This is not happening and I will have nothing of it! The s...

But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness;  and all these things shall be added unto you (Matthew 6:33) Lately I've had a few hopelesss conversations with frustrated friends who are struggling to find their way out of addiction. One of them recently threw his hands up to the heavens and begged for mercy over his alcoholism, shrugging with tears in his eyes, "I am waiting on Him." While it looked like an act of surrender, and I felt sorry for him, I recognized this kind of waiting as too passive to be called seeking. I have seen him walking to the corner store for beer with more enthusiasm. I know how he feels. When I quit smoking 15 years ago, I had no idea I was quitting an addiction. I thought I loved cigarettes; and that made it very hard not to pick one up. The first days were almost impossible and, if it weren't for my 6 year-old daughter urging me to soldier on, I might have thrown in the towel on day 2. I kept going for her sake, not wanting to...

And I will restore to them the years that the locust has eaten  (Joel 2:25)  I write this as a Christian disappointed that the scriptures supporting my faith do not explicitly encourage the most important act of restoration I can think of. And that is saying sorry. Many of my brothers and sisters, when asked about scriptural support for apologizing, will cite passages about forgiveness, restitution, redempton or atonement but none of these mention saying sorry to the people we have harmed. The scriptures (both old and new) invite humility, contrition and repentance in various gestures of sacrifice and reconciliation. But these are   directed toward God rather than toward human beings. Perhaps that is why religious people will bypass an apology and go straight to requesting forgiveness. They seek absolution for themselves but not necessarily the restoration of those against whom they've sinned. Jesus was clear about placing the love for another right up there with the firs...

~ Wherefore all these things are but the names which mortals have given, believing them, to be true (Parmenides; On Nature) As a psychotherapist, I regret that my profession has drifted from its original vocation as a study of the soul/mind ( psyche ) to become an "evidence-based" discipline founded on scientific knowledge ( episteme ) of the mind/brain.  We cannot gain insight into the mind using science. Though we may be able to see or measure behavioural or cognitive phenomena and infer correlations with the brain, we cannot present these as "evidence" of what goes on inside the mind. The mind remains invisible to itself, its inner workings elusive. The mind is real in a way that is very different from the empirical data we may collect trying to understand it. It has a metaphysical reality that cannot be grasped by verifiable facts, a reality that is unfortunately dismissed by contemporary psychology for lack of evidence. That is what I regret. When science is th...

  ~ we admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable  (Step One, Twelve Steps) There is a turning point in the life of every person which involves an admission of powerlessness. After all, nobody escapes the human experience without loss of power somewhere along the way. We lose youth, we lose people, sometimes we lose our hopes and dreams and, eventually, we lose life itself. We tend to mask this painful reality and pretend to be masters of our own destiny. This is called denial, and it is fed by the need to feel in control, by the ego. The stronger our ego is, the more denial we need.  The most perillous and pathetic exhibition of this is addiction. Addicts deny powerlessness over an impulse even when it threatens to consume them and anything else that gets in the way. Unchecked, denial of addiction almost always ends in jail, institution or death. What is one to do? Admit defeat. In the famous story of David and Bathsheba, David had everyt...

~What comes out of the mouth comes from the heart;  Matthew 15:18 Today is the first day of Lent, which comes form the Old Dutch, lentin , meaning spring season . Traditionally, Christians honor this day with prayer and fasting, marking their foreheads with ashes in the shape of a cross to remember Jesus' 40 days of fasting in the desert.  This year, the first day of Lent also falls on the first day of the month of adar in the Hebrew calendar. According to Jewish custom, it was on this day that the plague of darkness covered Egypt before the great Exodus toward the Promised Land. In six weeks, Jews will observe Passover and Christians Easter, a celebration of passing from darkness into light and experiencing the magnificent rebirth of life known as Spring.  Lent is a time of temptation resisted, a wilderness experience or  midbar... If we focus on   deprivation, it can seem  long*  with the days getting longer but not fast enough. But i...

Truth without love has no decency; it's just brutality. On the other hand, love without truth has no character; it's just hypocrisy ~ John F. MacArthur It's been one of those weeks! If I wasn't being confronted, I was the one doing the confronting; either getting hurt, or doing the hurting.  I have yet to learn that , just because something's true, it doesn't mean I have to say it. Conversely, just because I love you, it doesn't mean I have to protect you from a painful truth. T ruth and love, head and heart, need to be in balance!   And I need to consider your head and heart as well; the state you are in to receive the truth I want to share (or withhold).  Finally, there's the productive factor. I can offer a painful truth lovingly but, g enerally speaking, for it to be kind and constructive to you , it also needs to be something you (or I) can do something about. Otherwise, it's just a criticism.  So much to consider before opening my m...

Then Peter said, "Ananias, how is it that Satan  filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and withhold some of the proceeds from the land?" ( Acts 5:3) Set in the midst of a male-dominated financial district in London, Expansion  ( right ) was intended by the sculptor to portray the internal power of "feminine energy".  The streaming light, she says, is like the soul pouring out from the cracks of human vulnerability. I recognize the kundalini aspect in the electrical currents. But, quite frankly, they look to me like self-deception short-circuiting clear thinking. If that sounds harsh, bear with me.  I have been attracted to energy practices as a way to transcend my own brokenness and human condition. I'd hoped they were a way to heal and better myself. But they did not deliver. Sitting cross-legged, baring my soul (though not my breasts) and deep breathing, all I got was more energy. And this should not have surprised me because energy does not conver...

It's trying to go up but it's having a hard time fighting the current ~ Marie-Ève Muller, Quebec Marine Mammal Emergency Yesterday a humpback whale died off the shores of Montreal from, I suspect, spending too much time in fresh water. This struck a chord in me, perhaps because I saw it as symbolic of the solitude, isolation and lostness in our world, a world sorely lacking in salt. I happened to be researching the word "salt". It started by looking into the meaning of the word Salem (root of the word Jerusalem), wondering if, because it started with sal , it was derived from the word for  salt,  and had the same root as the word "salvation".   As a preservative, a spice, a cleansing agent, salt was highly valued for its life-preserving, healing as well seasoning properties. It was traded between Italy and Rome, and offered with sacrifices to priests and kings. Indeed, in the Torah, sacrifices offered with salt were referred to as "covenants of...

I can't breathe ~ George Floyd Resistance means " to take a stand against, oppose ".  In physics, it is a drag force (air resistance) or opposition to the current flow (electrical resitance). Effective resistance requires power. It doesn't just protest what is happening. The person pictured to the right, for example, is protesting but, standing in front of tanks, he is at the mercy of the guys driving them. Brave perhaps, but futile if they decide to run him over. Protest and resistance are both forms of opposition. But only resistance wins wars. Now it could be argued that protest is powerful in that it exerts moral pressure.  This may be so, but it has to come from within the ranks. There is no way, if men don't take a stand against the denigration of women, that women will get very far by protesting it themselves. There is no way, if bystanders don't confront bullies, that victims will be able to stop harassment. There is no way, if white fol...

Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile ~Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost We are seekers of the light!  For guidance, warmth, purpose and direction, we long for the light and are attracted to it. But sometimes, for lack of vision, we cannot see the very thing dividing us from it. Like the poor fly illustrated here, we can get stuck on a window and die there, headed for freedom but never leaving our self-made prison. This is denial.  Like an  inivisible wall (or window) separating us from what we seek, we are drawn to the light without seeing what is literally right in front of our faces. We refuse to try another route, get away, go around... exhausting ourselves by ignoring what our pain sensors are telling us.  It doesn't work. Then there is false light, artifical sources of light that throw lightbeams in every direction, confusing those of us who are phototaxic, that is, who are oriented to light, which would be all of us.  We become like tho...

A little water clears us of this deed ~ Lady Macbeth I'm going to be more careful about spreading my germs. I have probably got others sick by going out when I was unwell. I have probably also got them sick when I was contagious without knowing it. So I'm going to be more careful from now on; staying as clean as I can and keeping my distance. I will undoubtedly fall into careless patterns again. It's the human condition. So, aside from making amends, I'm going to ask forgiveness for not being able to stay clean and for spreading my germs, as well as forgive others for spreading theirs. That doesn't mean slackening a boundary, at least not intentionally. It actually means firming it up while also knowing it's bound to loosen.  I will give and receive compassionate cleansing.

Metanoia is a transformative change of heart.  The term suggests repudiation, change of mind, repentance, conversion and atonement. ~ Wikipedia There's an AA riddle that asks: If there are three frogs on a log and two decide to jump, how many are left on the log?  The answer of course is three, because they only  decided . (They never jumped). A lot of people I know, including myself, get trapped in self-destructive habits. They know what to do but don't do it.  They don't even  feel like doing it, let alone take that leap of faith. In order to break the cycle of passivity, action is clearly required. But where do you get the courage?  How do you go from head to heart?  They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but I think it's  through his feet . In Seligman's experiments on learned helplessness , a group of dogs was yoked to another group learning how to avoid electrical shocks.  The yoked group received sho...

Pray you now; forgive and forget ~ William Shakespeare (King Lear) When a person has been betrayed, it is common to seek transparency and disclosure of the truth.  This appeals to our anxious brain hoping to stabilize disturbing emotions in knowledge and facts. What often happens, however, is that every detail teases out the desire to know more, and the quest for truth becomes a twisted and torturous rabbit hole of unanswered questions.  Rather than putting the pain of transgression behind, it gets fleshed out and remembered even more. The truth can sometimes be liberating. So can telling the story of our pain.  But, in some cases, like when you have been betrayed by a loved one, repeating the story of betrayal over and over is not going to set you free. Only forgiveness can do that.  And true forgiveness entails forgetting.  Not forgetting what is right and just, or abandoning the expectation of amends in your relationship going forward, but ceasing...

What kind of lunatic would come back here once he'd escaped?  There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. ~ Tara Westover; Educated We are empathic to survivors of trauma we can see; to war vets who have witnessed the slaying of comrades, policemen who have found strewn corpses in a murder scene, survivors of acts of terrorism on the ground or in the sky. We feel for them and understand how the pain of regurgitated memories can prick and ruin the surface of ordinary life. But it is harder to feel for those whose trauma is inscribed in the folds of the unconscious or in the collective body of previous generations.  We fail to understand how sexual abuse (no matter how "small") can permanently move the boundary between self and other, or how African Americans, Native Americans, women and Jews can still be impacted by the horror visited upon their ancestors.  Violations of the soul lead to blind spots where a...

Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies ~ Julius Paulus Prudentissimus I am selfish and social. Invisible to how my actions may look to you, I see clearly your every false move And seek justice and revenge Feeling intensely the results of your misconduct Yet knowing nothing of how my own misdeeds affect you. I am the victim, Born to justify and excuse myself, exercising perfect judgment When it comes to my own freedom More than I will ever be able to pardon you yours. I am not pointing the finger at you. I am looking at myself.

When he opened his eyes he was blind ~ Acts 9:8 Shoes on the Danube Bank Why are we blind to those we oppress? How can we be deaf to their cries? These days we seem to care so much about our environmental footprint yet so little about stepping on the toes of people right beside us.  Why? I don't have an answer, but I do wonder if the power of rank and privilege is something to which we cling just because it feels good, and looking under our shoes something from which we run- unless a foot catches us from behind and we *feel the heat*. Saul of Tarsus was a Jew of Roman privilege who persecuted the early Christians.  Heaven only knows what possessed this man, not just to oppress other men, but hunt them down, put them in chains and murder them.  Beyond the thrill of power and privilege, a person has to be deluded.  Utter darkness. When Saul was on his way to Damascus, he had a revelation. The story goes that he heard a voice say, "Why are you persecuting...