Anderson, South Carolina
An oft quoted verse in the Old Testament, one meant to offer encouragement to haggard parents is “Train up a child in the way He should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The good intentions of those quoting it is to offer conservative parents in moral conflict with the larger secular culture the hope their spiritual and ethical values will ultimately hold sway over their children’s lives. Alas, this is true in ways undreamed of, ways we perhaps wouldn’t wish on anyone.
In the past several decades the environmental influence of parents on emotional and physical health of their children has been proven nearly limitless, for good and for ill. The youngest infants are prodigious students, learning from their parents or caregivers about the friendliness or hostility of the world, the rules of engagement insuring the arrival of food, clean diapers, and emotional presence. Even with abundant food and clean clothes, infants often die or at best are emotionally shipwrecked if parents or caregivers don’t provide emotional nurture and presence. The emotional wreckage suffered by children in orphanages operated by totalitarian states is legendary.
Children learn all too well what is acceptable behavior. Fear of rejection often drives them to compensatory behavior rendering them unable to function well in society. Self-denying self-protective behavior in childhood can lead to a lifetime of tentative reclusive non-engagement with others. Loners often live unhappy disconnected lives, starved for a sense of belonging.
Ancient Jewish writings provide unsettling promises. “That will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” Another suggests bad karma will pass down through the generations, even to an entire city. “Because for our sins, and for the inequities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people have become a reproach to all that are about us.” Traditionally, interpretation of these declarations has typically been theological in nature, indicating some kind of sin contract which must be paid off. The insights of John Sandford in his The Transformation of the Inner Man and Gabor Mate’s ongoing work suggest there’s far more to it than this. Spiritual realities give rise to psychoneuroimmunological realities often manifesting in destructive behaviors and emotional and physical disease.
Reading the work of Sandford, Mate, and others suggests there’s almost an immutable determinism for which there is no recourse. Mate states “Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next.” Some years ago I read Lance Morrow’s Heart. This unsettling and forthright account of his journey through catastrophic cardiovascular disease declares in non-theological terms the curse of the generations. “The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but do not know), you will find another box with some such black, secret energy – stories within stories, receding in time.”
Mate adroitly states: “Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations.” He cites John Bowlby, a noted British psychiatrist who observed dryly, “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain.” Our parents and grandparents whom we tend to blame are merely caught up in a stream of Morrow’s black secret energy going back into the dim recesses of time.
There’s been a tendency in recent decades to assign our griefs to genetic bad luck, medicalizing our circumstances, behaviors, and propensity to contract catastrophic disease. Medicalizing our lives absolves us of personal responsibility, suggesting we are victims of a bad hand in life. Mate comes up against this directly in his view of the Genome Mapping Project. “Contrary to the genetic fundamentalism that currently informs medical thinking and public awareness, genes alone cannot possibly account for the complex psychological characteristics, the behaviors, health or illness of human beings. Genes are merely codes. They act as a set of rules and as biological template for the synthesis of the proteins that give each particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself ... Genes are turned on or off by the environment. For this reason, the greatest influences on human development, health, and behavior are those of the nurturing environment.”
A crack in the determinism? More than a crack. Mate and Sandford didn’t spend lifetimes doing research and clinical work just to tell us we are toast. They suggest we don’t have to remain victims of genetic bad luck or unpaid spiritual sin contracts. Mate pushes further. “The genome hype is not only poor science, it is also suspect as theology. In the Book of Genesis creation story, God fashions the universe first, then nature, and only afterwards does He shape humankind from the substance of the earth. He knew, even if Bill Clinton did not, that from their earliest beginnings humans could never be understood apart from their environment.”
The century-earlier work of Williams James in his Varieties of Religious Experience and James Lawson in his Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians clearly indicates spiritual interventions in our lives can override any possibility of genetic or spiritual determinism in our lives. No matter how challenging our environments of origin may have been, there is a way out if we seek it. Those of us who never had fathers, never experienced emotional attunement from a parent, and were subjected to all manner of abuse can rise above our circumstances.
As Mate articulates, “Fortunately, human experience and the ever-unfolding potential of human beings ensure that the biology of belief, though deeply physiologically engrained, is not irreversible.” What we came to believe about the world as infants does not have to hold sway over our lives any longer. We are able to have what Carl Jung called a vital spiritual experience. Such an experience was had by all of the subjects in Lawson’s work, usually in the context of severely challenging life circumstances. James suggests there are many ways one can arrive at such an experience. What I can be certain of from evidence revealed in many lives around me is that Jung, Lawson, James were not writing works of fiction. Neither was the Apostle Paul.
“Therefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”
Thursday, October 27, 2011
What Do You Do? 10-25-11
Anderson, South Carolina
We are a society of great pretenders, actors on stage directing our own plays, acting out roles of great wealth and influence. Multi-level marketing schemes thrive in cultures of ‘fake it till you make it.’ We’re told Diamond Directs garner incomes of $100,000 a month, if they get enough people below them selling soap. We pretend to be selling mountains of soap. Ultimately someone has to actually sell soap rather than cheap promises. Millions have become disillusioned with multi-level marketing, once thinking it the fast track to financial Nirvana. Several times I’ve tried this financial Eight-Fold Path, only to end up with a garage full of over-priced inventory.
Hans Selye, the bestselling author of several self-help books, once wrote “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.” We lease $150,000 cars with large up-front deposits and poor reliability ratings to convince those around us of our financial wherewithal. More than fifteen million Americans buy new cars every year, knowing these ‘investments’ will rapidly depreciate, wanting to project an image of prosperity. Tens of millions bought into far more house than they could ever afford. The party ended and a third of American houses are awash in unmanageable debt and the auto industry was bought up by the Federal government. Entire communities have washed away in the housing debt crisis, leaving behind ghost towns but five years old. We buy fake Rolexes to reinforce our holographic image of prosperity. Some of us chase prestigious careers.
As a secular consumer culture in a post-Christian era, we keep score almost exclusively by our accumulation of consumer goods. Hugely profitable self-storage facilities suggest hoarding of consumer detritus has gotten entirely out of hand. In my regular visitation to many homes, I’m always astounded at the sheer amount of ’stuff’ in these places. In the 1990s the Sierra Club published a coffee table book containing a single photograph from each of fifty countries depicting the typical contents of the average house, arrayed in the front yard. The mountain in front of the American house made the other piles look like tiny ant hills.
We’ve become tyrannized by the opinions of others, even those of total strangers. “What would the neighbors think” was long a mantra used to contain aberrant behavior. We kept perfect lawns and had to be the first on the block to have the newest consumer gadget. Homeowners associations now enforce acceptable behavior and an ambience of prosperity.
Family expectations are perhaps most toxic of all. Gabor Mate has a rewarding career studying the consequences of being stressed by the expectations of everyone from our neighbors to our siblings, parents, and in-laws. “Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and auto-immune disease.” He further states “It is not other’s expectations and intentions but the perception we have of them that serves as the stressor.” Merely what we think others think of us is the actual emotional toxin that can set us up for a journey through catastrophic emotional and physical illness.
It was made very clear to me in childhood and adolescence that practicing medicine was the only acceptable occupation for me. For decades I chased after that goal, only to learn twenty years too late it was someone else’s expectation for me. I lost thirty years, experiencing no small measure of Mate’s emotionally draining family relationships, only to end up in work for which I was ill suited. The stress of fulfilling others’ expectations led me to a catastrophic diagnosis of degenerative neurologic disease.
The emotional baggage we carry is perhaps a heavier yoke, a greater burden than the mountains in our storage facilities and houses. It takes herculean strength to go to high stress jobs for decades, just to finance a way of life we think others will find acceptable. It may take more strength than we have to walk from them. Many of us, especially men, find identity in our jobs. At retirement, for those surviving that long, the resulting existential crisis can be profound. A large number of men die within a year of retiring; so much of our self-esteem and other people’s opinions of us are tied into our work. The first question usually asked in social encounters is “What do you do?” How much money we earn at that job is nearly as important, allowing us to gain higher scores by accumulating more.
Letting go of a high-profile position in a large hospital was not an easy thing at all. Letting go of robust income, prestige, socializing with colleagues, publishing, and presenting papers at international conferences took several years to accept. For at least two years I was disoriented by the lack of context and structure to my days. Strangers kept asking “What do you do?” I didn’t yet have a clear answer. What was I going to do with seventeen years of medical training? I had no idea.
A foundational truth learned by those embarked on a recovery journey is liberating: a right dependence on God rather than the acquisition of money for financial independence is key to a serene and useful existence. I didn’t have to sell soap. As we grew our dependence on God “money gradually became our servant and not our master. It became a means of exchanging love and service with those about us.” We learned trusting God for our needs and life purpose liberated us from the tyranny of being number one, of ranking first “in the heart-breaking struggle for money, romance, or self importance.” I no longer had to act out roles of great wealth and influence.
Perhaps it’s time to give up pretending; to embrace our own powerlessness, our inability to have it all, to be all. Giving up socially-mandated goals to have the most toys and prestige at death actually liberates us to embrace life this side of the tombstone. It takes less strength and wherewithal to live a spiritually-grounded life than it does to go to a hated job, to lose thirty years of one’s life, to spend years paying off school loans training for ill-suited work. When we transcend what other people think of us we have the possibility of becoming empowered in astounding ways. “Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful and profoundly happy.”
Better yet is this reality: I get His best when I let him do the choosing, even thirty years late.
“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”
We are a society of great pretenders, actors on stage directing our own plays, acting out roles of great wealth and influence. Multi-level marketing schemes thrive in cultures of ‘fake it till you make it.’ We’re told Diamond Directs garner incomes of $100,000 a month, if they get enough people below them selling soap. We pretend to be selling mountains of soap. Ultimately someone has to actually sell soap rather than cheap promises. Millions have become disillusioned with multi-level marketing, once thinking it the fast track to financial Nirvana. Several times I’ve tried this financial Eight-Fold Path, only to end up with a garage full of over-priced inventory.
Hans Selye, the bestselling author of several self-help books, once wrote “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.” We lease $150,000 cars with large up-front deposits and poor reliability ratings to convince those around us of our financial wherewithal. More than fifteen million Americans buy new cars every year, knowing these ‘investments’ will rapidly depreciate, wanting to project an image of prosperity. Tens of millions bought into far more house than they could ever afford. The party ended and a third of American houses are awash in unmanageable debt and the auto industry was bought up by the Federal government. Entire communities have washed away in the housing debt crisis, leaving behind ghost towns but five years old. We buy fake Rolexes to reinforce our holographic image of prosperity. Some of us chase prestigious careers.
As a secular consumer culture in a post-Christian era, we keep score almost exclusively by our accumulation of consumer goods. Hugely profitable self-storage facilities suggest hoarding of consumer detritus has gotten entirely out of hand. In my regular visitation to many homes, I’m always astounded at the sheer amount of ’stuff’ in these places. In the 1990s the Sierra Club published a coffee table book containing a single photograph from each of fifty countries depicting the typical contents of the average house, arrayed in the front yard. The mountain in front of the American house made the other piles look like tiny ant hills.
We’ve become tyrannized by the opinions of others, even those of total strangers. “What would the neighbors think” was long a mantra used to contain aberrant behavior. We kept perfect lawns and had to be the first on the block to have the newest consumer gadget. Homeowners associations now enforce acceptable behavior and an ambience of prosperity.
Family expectations are perhaps most toxic of all. Gabor Mate has a rewarding career studying the consequences of being stressed by the expectations of everyone from our neighbors to our siblings, parents, and in-laws. “Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and auto-immune disease.” He further states “It is not other’s expectations and intentions but the perception we have of them that serves as the stressor.” Merely what we think others think of us is the actual emotional toxin that can set us up for a journey through catastrophic emotional and physical illness.
It was made very clear to me in childhood and adolescence that practicing medicine was the only acceptable occupation for me. For decades I chased after that goal, only to learn twenty years too late it was someone else’s expectation for me. I lost thirty years, experiencing no small measure of Mate’s emotionally draining family relationships, only to end up in work for which I was ill suited. The stress of fulfilling others’ expectations led me to a catastrophic diagnosis of degenerative neurologic disease.
The emotional baggage we carry is perhaps a heavier yoke, a greater burden than the mountains in our storage facilities and houses. It takes herculean strength to go to high stress jobs for decades, just to finance a way of life we think others will find acceptable. It may take more strength than we have to walk from them. Many of us, especially men, find identity in our jobs. At retirement, for those surviving that long, the resulting existential crisis can be profound. A large number of men die within a year of retiring; so much of our self-esteem and other people’s opinions of us are tied into our work. The first question usually asked in social encounters is “What do you do?” How much money we earn at that job is nearly as important, allowing us to gain higher scores by accumulating more.
Letting go of a high-profile position in a large hospital was not an easy thing at all. Letting go of robust income, prestige, socializing with colleagues, publishing, and presenting papers at international conferences took several years to accept. For at least two years I was disoriented by the lack of context and structure to my days. Strangers kept asking “What do you do?” I didn’t yet have a clear answer. What was I going to do with seventeen years of medical training? I had no idea.
A foundational truth learned by those embarked on a recovery journey is liberating: a right dependence on God rather than the acquisition of money for financial independence is key to a serene and useful existence. I didn’t have to sell soap. As we grew our dependence on God “money gradually became our servant and not our master. It became a means of exchanging love and service with those about us.” We learned trusting God for our needs and life purpose liberated us from the tyranny of being number one, of ranking first “in the heart-breaking struggle for money, romance, or self importance.” I no longer had to act out roles of great wealth and influence.
Perhaps it’s time to give up pretending; to embrace our own powerlessness, our inability to have it all, to be all. Giving up socially-mandated goals to have the most toys and prestige at death actually liberates us to embrace life this side of the tombstone. It takes less strength and wherewithal to live a spiritually-grounded life than it does to go to a hated job, to lose thirty years of one’s life, to spend years paying off school loans training for ill-suited work. When we transcend what other people think of us we have the possibility of becoming empowered in astounding ways. “Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful and profoundly happy.”
Better yet is this reality: I get His best when I let him do the choosing, even thirty years late.
“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”
Prayer – Spot Welding for the Soul 10-20-11
Anderson, South Carolina
A first-line treatment for retinal detachment consists of burning them with lasers. If it were not for the possibility of frying my retinas with argon gas lasers, I would have gone blind decades ago. A genetic curse in my family tree endowed many of us with retinas as stable as wilted lettuce. Lattice degeneration of our retinas causes the appearance of small holes which are eventually penetrated by vitreous humor in the eyeball. The result is spontaneous retinal detachment followed by darkness. Repair constitutes a surgical emergency of the highest order to avoid blindness.
I was in Russia two years ago when I ‘popped’ my retinas for the third time. I experienced much angst in figuring out what to do about my urgent dilemma. Visa challenges and other contingencies forced me to the higher-risk decision of waiting until I got home three weeks later to have surgery. I made it a point to take lots of photographs; it might be the last time I could do so. I had surgery the day I arrived home.
When a carefully-guided laser burns into a retina the result is formation of adhesions. The scar tissue resulting from the heat acts as an effective spot weld, holding the retina firmly in place. There are at least a thousand of these little spot welds all over both my retinas. I’ve had the good fortune to visit ten countries in the intervening two years since my last welding job, taking twenty thousand photographs of everything from the pyramids of antiquity to the most sublime of natural phenomenon.
For nearly four decades I’ve had this genetic eight ball in my life. For the same amount of time argon gas lasers have kept me seeing many of the things that matter most in life; the face of a dear friend, the ignition of a fiery sunset, the shimmering of a platinum moon, where to place my foot on a five-thousand foot granite wall.
In recent years another form of spot welding has proven far more important in my life. Life circumstances far more challenging than my wilted-lettuce eyeballs brought me to embrace the tenets of twelve step recovery, a journey on which I’ve gained life-saving knowledge of how to spot weld my soul.
Evidence is ever mounting for the primary role of unmitigated anger and repressed emotions in the genesis of diverse catastrophic disease and premature death. Seventy-five years ago a group of alcoholics got together and wrote a book on the spiritual aspects of alcoholism, drug addiction, and many maladies of life. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous with its declaration that stuffed anger, resentments, is the number one killer of alcoholics has sold untold millions of copies. Extensive work in the seventy-five years since this declaration was made suggests it’s a small leap to declare resentments to be the number one killer of all people.
Stuffed emotion, especially anger in the form of smoldering resentment is more corrosive and threatening to our state of being than any kind of physical disease. Those enlightened post-Depression alcoholics of the 1930s went on to state emphatically “From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mental and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically ... this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit ... If we were to live we had to be free of anger.”
These alcoholics quickly found that repressed emotions gave power to the people around them. “We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had the power to actually kill.” Seventy-five years later psychoneuroimmunologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have well proven the lethal power of resentment, clearly demonstrating the neurophysiology of it.
“How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered but how?” Medical experts have for decades been declaring the immutable consequences of genetics, the inexorable outcomes of bad childhoods, the curse of toxic parenting, and the hazards of bad environments. Could a bunch of drunks have found the answer, one eluding experts? Time suggests they did.
“This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done’.”
It really is this simple. It’s essentially impossible to hate other individuals while praying for their well being. Recovery is entirely about learning new ways of thinking. From new ways of thinking we learn new ways of behaving. Our emotions line up with our new thoughts and actions. No longer tyrannized by repressed untended emotions, we enter into new ways of living. Rather than harboring corrosive resentments we ask for the blessing of those who would offend us. It’s that simple.
In recovery we often speak of having a simple program for complicated people. As emerging medical research finds out just how extraordinarily complicated we are, how unresolved emotions can generate catastrophic disease, we learn the simple way to spot weld the holes corroded into our souls by anger and resentment. Twenty centuries ago the same message in as many words was written down in Greek.
“Do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you, and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do no turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy’, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
It just might be the most clarifying thing you ever do.
A first-line treatment for retinal detachment consists of burning them with lasers. If it were not for the possibility of frying my retinas with argon gas lasers, I would have gone blind decades ago. A genetic curse in my family tree endowed many of us with retinas as stable as wilted lettuce. Lattice degeneration of our retinas causes the appearance of small holes which are eventually penetrated by vitreous humor in the eyeball. The result is spontaneous retinal detachment followed by darkness. Repair constitutes a surgical emergency of the highest order to avoid blindness.
I was in Russia two years ago when I ‘popped’ my retinas for the third time. I experienced much angst in figuring out what to do about my urgent dilemma. Visa challenges and other contingencies forced me to the higher-risk decision of waiting until I got home three weeks later to have surgery. I made it a point to take lots of photographs; it might be the last time I could do so. I had surgery the day I arrived home.
When a carefully-guided laser burns into a retina the result is formation of adhesions. The scar tissue resulting from the heat acts as an effective spot weld, holding the retina firmly in place. There are at least a thousand of these little spot welds all over both my retinas. I’ve had the good fortune to visit ten countries in the intervening two years since my last welding job, taking twenty thousand photographs of everything from the pyramids of antiquity to the most sublime of natural phenomenon.
For nearly four decades I’ve had this genetic eight ball in my life. For the same amount of time argon gas lasers have kept me seeing many of the things that matter most in life; the face of a dear friend, the ignition of a fiery sunset, the shimmering of a platinum moon, where to place my foot on a five-thousand foot granite wall.
In recent years another form of spot welding has proven far more important in my life. Life circumstances far more challenging than my wilted-lettuce eyeballs brought me to embrace the tenets of twelve step recovery, a journey on which I’ve gained life-saving knowledge of how to spot weld my soul.
Evidence is ever mounting for the primary role of unmitigated anger and repressed emotions in the genesis of diverse catastrophic disease and premature death. Seventy-five years ago a group of alcoholics got together and wrote a book on the spiritual aspects of alcoholism, drug addiction, and many maladies of life. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous with its declaration that stuffed anger, resentments, is the number one killer of alcoholics has sold untold millions of copies. Extensive work in the seventy-five years since this declaration was made suggests it’s a small leap to declare resentments to be the number one killer of all people.
Stuffed emotion, especially anger in the form of smoldering resentment is more corrosive and threatening to our state of being than any kind of physical disease. Those enlightened post-Depression alcoholics of the 1930s went on to state emphatically “From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mental and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically ... this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit ... If we were to live we had to be free of anger.”
These alcoholics quickly found that repressed emotions gave power to the people around them. “We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had the power to actually kill.” Seventy-five years later psychoneuroimmunologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have well proven the lethal power of resentment, clearly demonstrating the neurophysiology of it.
“How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered but how?” Medical experts have for decades been declaring the immutable consequences of genetics, the inexorable outcomes of bad childhoods, the curse of toxic parenting, and the hazards of bad environments. Could a bunch of drunks have found the answer, one eluding experts? Time suggests they did.
“This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done’.”
It really is this simple. It’s essentially impossible to hate other individuals while praying for their well being. Recovery is entirely about learning new ways of thinking. From new ways of thinking we learn new ways of behaving. Our emotions line up with our new thoughts and actions. No longer tyrannized by repressed untended emotions, we enter into new ways of living. Rather than harboring corrosive resentments we ask for the blessing of those who would offend us. It’s that simple.
In recovery we often speak of having a simple program for complicated people. As emerging medical research finds out just how extraordinarily complicated we are, how unresolved emotions can generate catastrophic disease, we learn the simple way to spot weld the holes corroded into our souls by anger and resentment. Twenty centuries ago the same message in as many words was written down in Greek.
“Do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you, and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do no turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy’, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
It just might be the most clarifying thing you ever do.
A Cure for Loneliness: Telling our Stories 10-17-11
Pickens County, South Carolina
Throughout much of humanity’s unwritten history, collective wisdom was archived in oral tradition. Stories containing their imperatives for better living were shared frequently with most members of the community present. Many indigenous societies built their culture around the telling of story.
In recovery we often hear reminders to share experience, strength, and hope with each other. We gather daily to share story. Telling stories provides a form of healing sometimes astounding in its efficacy. We share stories of shipwrecked lives, spiritual transformations, and the good, productive, and purposeful lives we now live. Often slack-jawed in awe, we embrace the possibility life can get better, inspiring us to not give up a day before the miracle.
Yesterday I was climbing a thirty-two-hundred-foot granite outcropping of rock here on the Blue Ridge Escarpment. On an expansive October Sunday, Mary and I spent seven hours covering about eight horizontal miles and two thirds of a vertical mile. We saw a happy collection of Sunday afternoon hikers with a fine assortment of grand dogs and large cameras people were not quite sure how to use. As we progressed on our journey the crowds thinned considerably along with the thready light found in mountain valleys at dusk. In dim light Mary noticed a curious tree root on the trail, with diamond patterns on it, wondering if autumn leaves had fallen to create this pattern.
Tree roots with diamond patterns on them, able to move of their own volition don’t make for happy endings. These mountains are replete with copperheads and rattlesnakes. Some nearby logs cut in trail management proved efficacious in prodding this snake to move on. The last crowd we had seen earlier was a platoon of fifteen rescuers heading up-mountain to take off a woman injured three miles above. They did not need to be stepping on sluggish rattle snakes in total darkness.
Mary’s story was at least as interesting as that of mountain rescues and rattlesnakes. It contains a profoundly important imperative of the wisdom in waiting for the miracle, not taking matters into our own hands. We get God’s best when we let Him do the choosing. When we take matters into our own hands we often exile ourselves in decades of empty living, devoid of purpose.
At a young age Mary met Jerry and enjoyed eleven years of happy marriage, little money, and two fine children. As was the case sixty years ago, young couples learned to have rich happy lives despite the absence of money, credit cards, and SUVs filled with consumer goods from gray box retailers. Mary described happy moments when a fistful of ordinary wildflowers said it better than vast arrangements from a florist. Alas, this happy chapter came to an abrupt end when Mary was barely thirty. One May evening after making a fine meal, Jerry took their nine-year-old son and his younger sister to the lake for a brief swim. The spring waters proved surprisingly cold. In short order Mary found her husband and son floating face down in the small lake. Mary entered into the darkest possible of human experiences.
Time healed, sort of.
Two years later Mary met Bill and they were soon married. For the next two miles of our ascent she described an empty loveless marriage spanning thirty years offering little more a roommate, a difficult one at that.
Incredulous, I asked her what Bill had or said that enticed her to say “I do”.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“He brought nothing to our marriage.”
In his immensely successful The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm described our desperate bid to ‘belong to the herd’, to achieve union, to avoid the acute anxiety which derives from separation. Separation is seen as a great existential evil, one to be avoided at all costs. Loneliness is the great bane of an individualistic competitive consumer society.
Mary described having no meaningful opportunity to meet men, no opportunity to rejoin the herd. Fearful of never meeting another man, when Bill came along on a chance encounter, she decided any man was better than no man. As she was to discover, “There’s no loneliness like the loneliness one has inside an empty marriage.” Eventually Bill died after decades of self-induced bad health. How I wished I had three decades in my pocket and could offer them to Mary with the imperative “Let God show you how to use these well.” She gave up the best years of her life.
I hardly know Mary, having only seen her twice previously in the context of two formal events which afforded little opportunity for conversation. What proved wondrous was her willingness to share story with a near stranger as we literally made an uphill journey through life. Somehow Mary’s sharing her story made our mountain journey much easier, even with its snakes and snares.
In recovery rooms we luxuriate in stories, even those that don’t have happy endings. So often these provide a needed measure of caution, temperance, reminder. We speak of forgetting those things we need to remember. Even here in the autumn paradise of the Blue Ridge, caution and temperance embedded in story imparts wisdom. Those of us on recovery journeys embrace the concept of learning hard lessons from others who have already paid often exorbitant tuition. Under the first crimson and cadmium leaves of a newly crisp fall, I find myself grateful for the wisdom Mary offered me, wisdom which cost her dearly. It’s my choice to learn from her experience or to pay the high tuition myself. I was powerfully reminded that when we let God be the foundation of our lives, when we turn our lives and will over to His care, we get His best.
Interestingly, after seven hours of story, we were no longer near strangers and I found myself forgetting my loneliness. Regularly sharing our stories and God’s story make us part of the herd, never required to be truly lonely again.
“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”
Throughout much of humanity’s unwritten history, collective wisdom was archived in oral tradition. Stories containing their imperatives for better living were shared frequently with most members of the community present. Many indigenous societies built their culture around the telling of story.
In recovery we often hear reminders to share experience, strength, and hope with each other. We gather daily to share story. Telling stories provides a form of healing sometimes astounding in its efficacy. We share stories of shipwrecked lives, spiritual transformations, and the good, productive, and purposeful lives we now live. Often slack-jawed in awe, we embrace the possibility life can get better, inspiring us to not give up a day before the miracle.
Yesterday I was climbing a thirty-two-hundred-foot granite outcropping of rock here on the Blue Ridge Escarpment. On an expansive October Sunday, Mary and I spent seven hours covering about eight horizontal miles and two thirds of a vertical mile. We saw a happy collection of Sunday afternoon hikers with a fine assortment of grand dogs and large cameras people were not quite sure how to use. As we progressed on our journey the crowds thinned considerably along with the thready light found in mountain valleys at dusk. In dim light Mary noticed a curious tree root on the trail, with diamond patterns on it, wondering if autumn leaves had fallen to create this pattern.
Tree roots with diamond patterns on them, able to move of their own volition don’t make for happy endings. These mountains are replete with copperheads and rattlesnakes. Some nearby logs cut in trail management proved efficacious in prodding this snake to move on. The last crowd we had seen earlier was a platoon of fifteen rescuers heading up-mountain to take off a woman injured three miles above. They did not need to be stepping on sluggish rattle snakes in total darkness.
Mary’s story was at least as interesting as that of mountain rescues and rattlesnakes. It contains a profoundly important imperative of the wisdom in waiting for the miracle, not taking matters into our own hands. We get God’s best when we let Him do the choosing. When we take matters into our own hands we often exile ourselves in decades of empty living, devoid of purpose.
At a young age Mary met Jerry and enjoyed eleven years of happy marriage, little money, and two fine children. As was the case sixty years ago, young couples learned to have rich happy lives despite the absence of money, credit cards, and SUVs filled with consumer goods from gray box retailers. Mary described happy moments when a fistful of ordinary wildflowers said it better than vast arrangements from a florist. Alas, this happy chapter came to an abrupt end when Mary was barely thirty. One May evening after making a fine meal, Jerry took their nine-year-old son and his younger sister to the lake for a brief swim. The spring waters proved surprisingly cold. In short order Mary found her husband and son floating face down in the small lake. Mary entered into the darkest possible of human experiences.
Time healed, sort of.
Two years later Mary met Bill and they were soon married. For the next two miles of our ascent she described an empty loveless marriage spanning thirty years offering little more a roommate, a difficult one at that.
Incredulous, I asked her what Bill had or said that enticed her to say “I do”.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“He brought nothing to our marriage.”
In his immensely successful The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm described our desperate bid to ‘belong to the herd’, to achieve union, to avoid the acute anxiety which derives from separation. Separation is seen as a great existential evil, one to be avoided at all costs. Loneliness is the great bane of an individualistic competitive consumer society.
Mary described having no meaningful opportunity to meet men, no opportunity to rejoin the herd. Fearful of never meeting another man, when Bill came along on a chance encounter, she decided any man was better than no man. As she was to discover, “There’s no loneliness like the loneliness one has inside an empty marriage.” Eventually Bill died after decades of self-induced bad health. How I wished I had three decades in my pocket and could offer them to Mary with the imperative “Let God show you how to use these well.” She gave up the best years of her life.
I hardly know Mary, having only seen her twice previously in the context of two formal events which afforded little opportunity for conversation. What proved wondrous was her willingness to share story with a near stranger as we literally made an uphill journey through life. Somehow Mary’s sharing her story made our mountain journey much easier, even with its snakes and snares.
In recovery rooms we luxuriate in stories, even those that don’t have happy endings. So often these provide a needed measure of caution, temperance, reminder. We speak of forgetting those things we need to remember. Even here in the autumn paradise of the Blue Ridge, caution and temperance embedded in story imparts wisdom. Those of us on recovery journeys embrace the concept of learning hard lessons from others who have already paid often exorbitant tuition. Under the first crimson and cadmium leaves of a newly crisp fall, I find myself grateful for the wisdom Mary offered me, wisdom which cost her dearly. It’s my choice to learn from her experience or to pay the high tuition myself. I was powerfully reminded that when we let God be the foundation of our lives, when we turn our lives and will over to His care, we get His best.
Interestingly, after seven hours of story, we were no longer near strangers and I found myself forgetting my loneliness. Regularly sharing our stories and God’s story make us part of the herd, never required to be truly lonely again.
“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”
Finding God, Finding Ourselves 10-13-11
Anderson, South Carolina
By the time we arrive in kindergarten our brains and nervous systems are nearly finished works. Extensive evidence suggests by the age of five our personalities, coping mechanisms, and ways of relating to the universe are not unlike clay subjected to the high temperatures of a ceramic kiln, fixed and immutable.
Legions of professionals have made careers of exploring the ways troubled childhoods create legacies none of us would want to inherit. Maladaptive coping skills, compromises to our immune systems, the advent of catastrophic disease are nearly part and parcel to growing up in troubled families. It would seem those of us raised in toxic environments are doomed, consigned to a constellation of consequences making for a mid and late adulthood colored by significant emotional and physical challenges. The work of many investigators strongly suggests many cancers, degenerative neurological diseases, arthritis, and dementia find their advent in individuals who experienced profound emotional challenges early in life.
Years ago, those who wear starched white coats at their day jobs told me I would never get better. A physician, my best friend for decades, even suggested I might consider going into a group home, perhaps making crafts a couple days a week. He went on to be chief-of-staff of a great medical center; I haven’t heard from him in years. The emotional and physical challenges of mid and late adult life which are almost de rigueur for those of us passing through turbulent families of origin seemed to be coming to pass for me in a powerful way. For a season I was even unable to live in my own house.
Little was offered to me by medical professionals other than assorted forms of chemical restraint which nearly killed me. So often the stock-in-trade psychotropic drugs of the Walgreens and CVS’s of America made me wish I were out of this world. I already was nearly out of my mind.
At the insistence of a dear friend I joined a YMCA during the worst part of my journey. Leaving the illusions of safety on the east end of my couch in a darkened house, I went to the gym and spent an hour on a Stair Climber, every day. I then walked an hour on the indoor track, wondering about the vibrant healthy people around me. They had no concept of the darkness I walked in.
For some days I was entranced, watching a 6’8” giant of a man tending to the rehab of young man catastrophically injured in an auto accident. Small tentative efforts on my part to make conversation eventually led to our sharing #6 combination plates at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Over a few weeks I was exposed to some extraordinary wisdom; to not give up a day before the miracle, to believe it could get better, to believe God could restore me to sanity, to believe the toxic realities of my origins don’t have to be a life sentence.
Bill soon invited me to join him in a small dumpy cinder-block building in town where dozens were assembled, individuals buying into the same ideas he shared with me, to not give up a day before the miracle, to believe it could get better, to believe God could restore me to sanity, to believe the toxic realities of my origins don’t have to be a life sentence. Was it possible these people had something to offer me, something more than ‘modern’ medicine? They showed me how to leave the darkness behind. I left behind my psychotropic poisons and entered into the sunlight of the spirit.
Some two hundred forms of twelve-step recovery believe it possible to enter into the sunlight of the spirit, to have a radical change of life. Carl Jung, the father of modern psychiatry, went so far as to suggest individuals previously declared hopeless could in fact be restored to good health by virtue of having what he called a ‘vital spiritual experience.’ He described individuals having huge emotional displacements and rearrangements, so large as to completely alter their emotions, ideas, and attitudes. The possibility I could break free of my childhood legacy was captivating. After being told I’d never get better, of being hopeless, the possibility of having a huge emotional displacement for the better was enough to ignite the luminous wonder of hope in my darkness.
In 1902 William James, a distinguished psychologist articulated in his Varieties of Religious Experience, the myriad ways individuals come into contact with God. Some have instantaneous life transformations, so called burning bush encounters. Most of us have slowly developing spiritual experiences of what are called the educational variety. Often these are grounded in what many have described as the dark night of the soul.
In his Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians, James Lawson in 1911 described radical transformation bringing men and women into places of great spiritual effectiveness and influence, in turn guiding millions of others into effective spiritual experiences for themselves. In nearly every case, great spiritual transformation took place in seasons of great despair, at times when these individuals had hit bottom.
One only has to read Story of a Soul, short autobiographic writings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, to be in wonderment at the spiritual power manifested in a cloistered young nun who suffered a long struggle with tuberculosis before dying at the severe age of twenty-four. Since 1899 her words have given evidence of a life lived far above circumstance. One can only wonder if Lawson had opportunity to read of her life while assembling his biographies of famous Christians.
The possibility I could leave a drug-induce stupor and torment behind and embrace a life of confidence and usefulness was nearly more than I could imagine. I wondered how Lawson’s dusty old text from 1911 could so fully inform my life; informing me with hope. Williams in 1902 provided assurance through his lectures there’s no one magic way to have spiritual transformations. Therese spoke from the late 19th century of living above life’s circumstances, of trust and acceptance of God’s care despite life’s turbulence.
The past several years have proven the veracity of Jung, James, Lawson, and Therese’s writings, their ability to fully inform my life here in the distant future. Their message is the same simple one millions have found in recovery. If we seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will and the ability to carry it out, we find ourselves living lives beyond imagination.
“I know the thoughts I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you hope and a future.”
By the time we arrive in kindergarten our brains and nervous systems are nearly finished works. Extensive evidence suggests by the age of five our personalities, coping mechanisms, and ways of relating to the universe are not unlike clay subjected to the high temperatures of a ceramic kiln, fixed and immutable.
Legions of professionals have made careers of exploring the ways troubled childhoods create legacies none of us would want to inherit. Maladaptive coping skills, compromises to our immune systems, the advent of catastrophic disease are nearly part and parcel to growing up in troubled families. It would seem those of us raised in toxic environments are doomed, consigned to a constellation of consequences making for a mid and late adulthood colored by significant emotional and physical challenges. The work of many investigators strongly suggests many cancers, degenerative neurological diseases, arthritis, and dementia find their advent in individuals who experienced profound emotional challenges early in life.
Years ago, those who wear starched white coats at their day jobs told me I would never get better. A physician, my best friend for decades, even suggested I might consider going into a group home, perhaps making crafts a couple days a week. He went on to be chief-of-staff of a great medical center; I haven’t heard from him in years. The emotional and physical challenges of mid and late adult life which are almost de rigueur for those of us passing through turbulent families of origin seemed to be coming to pass for me in a powerful way. For a season I was even unable to live in my own house.
Little was offered to me by medical professionals other than assorted forms of chemical restraint which nearly killed me. So often the stock-in-trade psychotropic drugs of the Walgreens and CVS’s of America made me wish I were out of this world. I already was nearly out of my mind.
At the insistence of a dear friend I joined a YMCA during the worst part of my journey. Leaving the illusions of safety on the east end of my couch in a darkened house, I went to the gym and spent an hour on a Stair Climber, every day. I then walked an hour on the indoor track, wondering about the vibrant healthy people around me. They had no concept of the darkness I walked in.
For some days I was entranced, watching a 6’8” giant of a man tending to the rehab of young man catastrophically injured in an auto accident. Small tentative efforts on my part to make conversation eventually led to our sharing #6 combination plates at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Over a few weeks I was exposed to some extraordinary wisdom; to not give up a day before the miracle, to believe it could get better, to believe God could restore me to sanity, to believe the toxic realities of my origins don’t have to be a life sentence.
Bill soon invited me to join him in a small dumpy cinder-block building in town where dozens were assembled, individuals buying into the same ideas he shared with me, to not give up a day before the miracle, to believe it could get better, to believe God could restore me to sanity, to believe the toxic realities of my origins don’t have to be a life sentence. Was it possible these people had something to offer me, something more than ‘modern’ medicine? They showed me how to leave the darkness behind. I left behind my psychotropic poisons and entered into the sunlight of the spirit.
Some two hundred forms of twelve-step recovery believe it possible to enter into the sunlight of the spirit, to have a radical change of life. Carl Jung, the father of modern psychiatry, went so far as to suggest individuals previously declared hopeless could in fact be restored to good health by virtue of having what he called a ‘vital spiritual experience.’ He described individuals having huge emotional displacements and rearrangements, so large as to completely alter their emotions, ideas, and attitudes. The possibility I could break free of my childhood legacy was captivating. After being told I’d never get better, of being hopeless, the possibility of having a huge emotional displacement for the better was enough to ignite the luminous wonder of hope in my darkness.
In 1902 William James, a distinguished psychologist articulated in his Varieties of Religious Experience, the myriad ways individuals come into contact with God. Some have instantaneous life transformations, so called burning bush encounters. Most of us have slowly developing spiritual experiences of what are called the educational variety. Often these are grounded in what many have described as the dark night of the soul.
In his Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians, James Lawson in 1911 described radical transformation bringing men and women into places of great spiritual effectiveness and influence, in turn guiding millions of others into effective spiritual experiences for themselves. In nearly every case, great spiritual transformation took place in seasons of great despair, at times when these individuals had hit bottom.
One only has to read Story of a Soul, short autobiographic writings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, to be in wonderment at the spiritual power manifested in a cloistered young nun who suffered a long struggle with tuberculosis before dying at the severe age of twenty-four. Since 1899 her words have given evidence of a life lived far above circumstance. One can only wonder if Lawson had opportunity to read of her life while assembling his biographies of famous Christians.
The possibility I could leave a drug-induce stupor and torment behind and embrace a life of confidence and usefulness was nearly more than I could imagine. I wondered how Lawson’s dusty old text from 1911 could so fully inform my life; informing me with hope. Williams in 1902 provided assurance through his lectures there’s no one magic way to have spiritual transformations. Therese spoke from the late 19th century of living above life’s circumstances, of trust and acceptance of God’s care despite life’s turbulence.
The past several years have proven the veracity of Jung, James, Lawson, and Therese’s writings, their ability to fully inform my life here in the distant future. Their message is the same simple one millions have found in recovery. If we seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will and the ability to carry it out, we find ourselves living lives beyond imagination.
“I know the thoughts I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you hope and a future.”
Let This Circle Represent What We Can’t Do Alone 10-7-11
Anderson, South Carolina
It would be painful elaboration of the obvious to describe the profound impact to physical and emotional health deriving from social disconnection and loss of supporting and nurturing relationships. The dark side of living in a very large country with high levels of mobility is a growing pandemic of social disconnection. Millions of us find ourselves living as economic refugees in strange cities, hoping to strike it rich. As America’s economy moves into a discomfiting ‘new normal’ the loss of entire cities to financial implosion has driven this pandemic to unprecedented levels. We abandon our histories, neighbors, family, sense of place; reliving the images of the Great Depression. We are little more than 21st century hobos without the luxury of barns to sleep in or the hospitality of a good meal at the back door of a farm house.
Those who’ve survived a common peril experience a bond unlike any other. The lifelong friendships arising out of the trench warfare of WW I are legendary. Those surviving the assault of Normandy’s beaches have experienced levels of camaraderie unknown to the civilian population. Sailors returning for their ship reunions bask in a relational cohesion most of us will never enjoy.
Men and women who’ve become refugees from larger society because of their struggles with alcohol and drug addiction are at especially high risk for losing emotional, financial, and physical ground. As America adapts to its ‘new normal’ social safety nets for addicts and alcoholics are fast fraying. Detox programs, shelter homes, food programs, retraining programs, and jobs become ever scarcer. The economical and relational perils of the present day put those at war with their addictions at special risk. There are no ticket tape parades or celebrations at airports for those coming home. So often, many just get turned out from prison gates at midnight to find their way into an unwanting society with $25 in their pocket and little else.
Strangely, as my own street transitions from a once-vibrant social fabric of friendship, potluck dinners, shared child rearing, and play to a collage of anonymous economic refugees from states with burst housing markets, I become ever more grateful to the small islands of shared support and encouragement I find myself on. Paradoxically, addicted souls scrambling onto the safe shores of recovery experience camaraderie and bonding unlike any other. There’s great celebration for those gaining important beachheads in their journeys towards sobriety and re-integration into larger society.
As dissimilar people found themselves on the battlefields of Europe or Afghanistan, unlike people find themselves on the battlefields of addiction. People who’d never cross paths find themselves sharing in a mission-critical journey towards sobriety. “We are people who normally would not mix. But there exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful. We are like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, joyousness, and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage to Captain’s table. Unlike the feelings of the ship’s passengers, however, our joy in escape from disaster does not subside as we go our individual ways. The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us.”
Gabon Mate in his seminal survey work on the role of emotional isolation in the genesis of catastrophic disease, When the Body Says No, cites countless studies highly suggestive of the great health hazards deriving from social and emotional isolation. In one definitive study, he describes the role of pseudo-independence or compensating hyper-independence in the genesis of rheumatoid arthritis. One could spend a lifetime reading studies offering evidence of the hazards of being self-sufficient, stoic, and emotionally isolated from others. As we become a nation of wandering economic refugees, these risks increase exponentially. For a culture in a painful economic transition with long-standing reverence for self-sufficiency and independence, hazards for pandemic disease abound.
For a mere dollar a day, and that’s optional, those struggling with alcoholism and addictions are able to join in a friendliness and camaraderie not found in larger society. In the culture of recovery, one’s successes and failures are celebrated and mourned with an emotional presence that’s sometimes astounding. The intensity of community to be found in intensive care waiting rooms as we say farewell to one who’s lost her battle is dumbfounding. The intensity of joy to be found when someone celebrates his first year of sobriety is often overwhelming. The realities of on-going life and death struggles in addiction’s recovery in a society awash in alcohol and drugs promotes a bonding not unlike that found in soldiers, flyers, and sailors returning from war.
In a consumer society that’s lost its spiritual and economic bearings, we find ourselves among uncounted millions struggling through the harsh realities of foreclosure, unemployment, forced mobility, even existential crises of life purpose. Wondering why so many of us are so sick, Gabon Mate could easily come back and say “I told you so” or “What did you expect?” but his good manners would keep him from this. In some respects we’ve set ourselves up for the perfect storm, the consequences of which may not become fully evident for some years. As a society we may pay personal costs in our physical and emotional health reaching far beyond those of losing our high-paying jobs or McMansions. For the foreseeable future health care will probably remain the one viable growth industry in America.
At the end of recovery meetings it’s traditional for participants to hold hands, say the Lord’s Prayer out loud and then declare “Let this circle represent that which we can’t do alone we can do together.” Those who find ongoing success in their recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction know they cannot do it alone. It’s a shared effort bringing together those from all strata of economic, educational and spiritual walks of life. Almost daily we get harsh reminders from those who thought they could fly solo on their journey.
Perhaps there’s a powerful message in the recovery world for those in larger society who wish to recover from the harsh realities of the American Dream which proved to be little more than a waking nightmare. In recovery we learn to turn our lives and will over to the care of God. We get His best when we let Him do the choosing for us. We also learn to hold hands with each other and look both ways before crossing the street.
We might even avoid being subjects in Mate’s case studies.
It would be painful elaboration of the obvious to describe the profound impact to physical and emotional health deriving from social disconnection and loss of supporting and nurturing relationships. The dark side of living in a very large country with high levels of mobility is a growing pandemic of social disconnection. Millions of us find ourselves living as economic refugees in strange cities, hoping to strike it rich. As America’s economy moves into a discomfiting ‘new normal’ the loss of entire cities to financial implosion has driven this pandemic to unprecedented levels. We abandon our histories, neighbors, family, sense of place; reliving the images of the Great Depression. We are little more than 21st century hobos without the luxury of barns to sleep in or the hospitality of a good meal at the back door of a farm house.
Those who’ve survived a common peril experience a bond unlike any other. The lifelong friendships arising out of the trench warfare of WW I are legendary. Those surviving the assault of Normandy’s beaches have experienced levels of camaraderie unknown to the civilian population. Sailors returning for their ship reunions bask in a relational cohesion most of us will never enjoy.
Men and women who’ve become refugees from larger society because of their struggles with alcohol and drug addiction are at especially high risk for losing emotional, financial, and physical ground. As America adapts to its ‘new normal’ social safety nets for addicts and alcoholics are fast fraying. Detox programs, shelter homes, food programs, retraining programs, and jobs become ever scarcer. The economical and relational perils of the present day put those at war with their addictions at special risk. There are no ticket tape parades or celebrations at airports for those coming home. So often, many just get turned out from prison gates at midnight to find their way into an unwanting society with $25 in their pocket and little else.
Strangely, as my own street transitions from a once-vibrant social fabric of friendship, potluck dinners, shared child rearing, and play to a collage of anonymous economic refugees from states with burst housing markets, I become ever more grateful to the small islands of shared support and encouragement I find myself on. Paradoxically, addicted souls scrambling onto the safe shores of recovery experience camaraderie and bonding unlike any other. There’s great celebration for those gaining important beachheads in their journeys towards sobriety and re-integration into larger society.
As dissimilar people found themselves on the battlefields of Europe or Afghanistan, unlike people find themselves on the battlefields of addiction. People who’d never cross paths find themselves sharing in a mission-critical journey towards sobriety. “We are people who normally would not mix. But there exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful. We are like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, joyousness, and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage to Captain’s table. Unlike the feelings of the ship’s passengers, however, our joy in escape from disaster does not subside as we go our individual ways. The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us.”
Gabon Mate in his seminal survey work on the role of emotional isolation in the genesis of catastrophic disease, When the Body Says No, cites countless studies highly suggestive of the great health hazards deriving from social and emotional isolation. In one definitive study, he describes the role of pseudo-independence or compensating hyper-independence in the genesis of rheumatoid arthritis. One could spend a lifetime reading studies offering evidence of the hazards of being self-sufficient, stoic, and emotionally isolated from others. As we become a nation of wandering economic refugees, these risks increase exponentially. For a culture in a painful economic transition with long-standing reverence for self-sufficiency and independence, hazards for pandemic disease abound.
For a mere dollar a day, and that’s optional, those struggling with alcoholism and addictions are able to join in a friendliness and camaraderie not found in larger society. In the culture of recovery, one’s successes and failures are celebrated and mourned with an emotional presence that’s sometimes astounding. The intensity of community to be found in intensive care waiting rooms as we say farewell to one who’s lost her battle is dumbfounding. The intensity of joy to be found when someone celebrates his first year of sobriety is often overwhelming. The realities of on-going life and death struggles in addiction’s recovery in a society awash in alcohol and drugs promotes a bonding not unlike that found in soldiers, flyers, and sailors returning from war.
In a consumer society that’s lost its spiritual and economic bearings, we find ourselves among uncounted millions struggling through the harsh realities of foreclosure, unemployment, forced mobility, even existential crises of life purpose. Wondering why so many of us are so sick, Gabon Mate could easily come back and say “I told you so” or “What did you expect?” but his good manners would keep him from this. In some respects we’ve set ourselves up for the perfect storm, the consequences of which may not become fully evident for some years. As a society we may pay personal costs in our physical and emotional health reaching far beyond those of losing our high-paying jobs or McMansions. For the foreseeable future health care will probably remain the one viable growth industry in America.
At the end of recovery meetings it’s traditional for participants to hold hands, say the Lord’s Prayer out loud and then declare “Let this circle represent that which we can’t do alone we can do together.” Those who find ongoing success in their recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction know they cannot do it alone. It’s a shared effort bringing together those from all strata of economic, educational and spiritual walks of life. Almost daily we get harsh reminders from those who thought they could fly solo on their journey.
Perhaps there’s a powerful message in the recovery world for those in larger society who wish to recover from the harsh realities of the American Dream which proved to be little more than a waking nightmare. In recovery we learn to turn our lives and will over to the care of God. We get His best when we let Him do the choosing for us. We also learn to hold hands with each other and look both ways before crossing the street.
We might even avoid being subjects in Mate’s case studies.
When the Body Says No 10-3-11
Anderson, South Carolina
A dear friend in British Columbia sent me a recommendation for a book written by a Canadian physician working in palliative care. The book makes a convincing argument for the idea that unresolved emotional issues will typically find release as physical disease, especially cancer and degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Reading this book gave me a near epiphany.
One of my great torments for a long time has been the exclusion I’ve always felt from family members. In part I think this derives from my unwillingness to keep family skeletons in the closet; the realities of drug addiction, alcoholism, and a universal pattern of marital failure across three generations. As we head into the holiday season once again I’m reminded of this reality.
In his book When the Body Says No, Gabon Mate cites the life of Betty Ford in her struggles with alcoholism and breast cancer. Mate makes astute observations about Betty Ford’s early life. He’s able to easily deduce from her autobiography an inclination to see her childhood through rose-colored glasses. He describes Betty as repressing her own feelings to preserve a sense of idyllic relationship with a parent. He suggests unresolved emotional issues were players in her future use of pain killers, tranquilizers, and alcohol.
Betty in her own words describes an ever-increasing existential crisis, losing sight of who she was as a person, despite being the First Lady. “I couldn’t accept that people liked me for myself ... I was measuring myself against impossible ideals – Martha or my mother – and coming up short. That’s a good recipe for alcoholism.” Mate makes the assertion that Betty was blind to emotional realities in her own life. “She does not see that surrendering herself to her husband’s needs and expectations – becoming a ‘doormat’ – resulted from childhood conditioning. The emotional repression, the harsh self-judgment and the perfectionism Betty Ford acquired as a child, through no fault of her own, are more than a ‘good recipe for alcoholism.’ They are also a ‘good recipe’ for cancer of the breast.”
In the past year both my brothers turned up with life-threatening cancers requiring urgent treatment of the highest order. Both my brothers have had at least two kinds of cancer show up in their lives. Despite being raised in an alcoholic drug-addicted environment my twin brother has often wondered what my adjustment problems are, citing a perfectly normal childhood. Attempts to get my siblings to merely own that childhood did not work for me has consistently invoked a defensive posturing tinged with anger in one case and emotional absence in the other. My twin clearly displays unconscious Level II emotional expressions of strong anger wrapped in defensiveness. My older brother simply has made himself quite inaccessible to me for more than four decades. Extreme wealth and distance has made this easy for him to accomplish. He needs nothing whatever from me, especially the message that childhood did not work and that it’s taking me a lifetime to clean up the mess. Such messengers don’t get invited to parties.
Years ago I embraced the blessed twelve steps of recovery for a variety of reasons. One of the greatest prizes to be had in recovery is the opportunity for authentic release of toxic emotions. In recovery rooms and with trusted friends and sponsors one is free to have true emotional ‘dumps’ and to ‘get it off one’s chest.’ The culture of recovery insists on honest expression of one’s feelings, especially negative ones, believing their expression leads to immediate relief, soon followed by true healing and growth. Such has been my repeated experience. I can’t but wonder in light of Mate’s observations if getting emotional burdens off one’s chest in a recovery room might not mitigate the need to engage a surgeon to get it off our chests in the case of breast cancer. Extensive research suggests our bodies finally do say no and will find ways to offload our emotional burdens in ways not necessarily to our liking.
My mother turned up with catastrophic breast cancer. She finally got her long standing resentments ‘off her chest’. My twin brother found many people to be a ‘pain in the butt’, even recently telling me he hated a class of people as much as Hitler hated Jews. A few months ago he had a good chunk of his colon resected for invasive cancer. My older brother may well have been ‘pissed off’ at our alcoholic mother and repressed his feelings. He turned up with aggressive prostate cancer. In recovery we are told resentments are the number one killer. Resentments are nothing more than fatal repressed emotions, a ‘luxury’ we can ill afford.
I can’t say for certain my mother and brothers turned up with cancer because of unresolved emotions but when researchers are able to use interview instruments with 96% accuracy to predict the advent of cancer in people with unresolved emotions, one does wonder. It’s not likely I will ever have the authentic communication with my brothers that I enjoy in recovery but I can certainly take their experiences as cautionary; being reminded resentments and unresolved emotions are not something I can afford.
Perhaps recovery has saved me from far more than the scourge of painkillers, tranquilizers and alcohol. So far I’ve not turned up with cancer. Colonoscopy and lab tests tell me I have a daily reprieve at present. This could change at any time. I don’t yet know if the God of my understanding in recovery has granted me deferral or complete pardon from the malignant consequences of unresolved emotions and resentments. Time will tell.
What time has told me is recovery has granted me at least a twenty-year deferral from the scourges of degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Twenty-two years ago I sat in front of a neurologist’s desk to be told I had MS. It also looked like I was headed into an early journey with arthritis, just like Mom. A leave of absence from my medical training and a radical life detour allowed me to explore the cesspools of resentment and unresolved emotional issues in my life. Twenty-two years later I have no evidence of MS or arthritis and the strongest drugs I take are fish oil and vitamins.
For certain, there’s no graduation from a life of recovery, only promotion. Also certain is the granting of a daily reprieve based on my spiritual condition. As long as I make an honest attempt to own my dark side and get it off my chest in a healthy manner; to avoid the emotional constipation deriving from harbored resentments, I might just find my body instead saying ‘Yes!” to the wonders of living a joyous good life.
A dear friend in British Columbia sent me a recommendation for a book written by a Canadian physician working in palliative care. The book makes a convincing argument for the idea that unresolved emotional issues will typically find release as physical disease, especially cancer and degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Reading this book gave me a near epiphany.
One of my great torments for a long time has been the exclusion I’ve always felt from family members. In part I think this derives from my unwillingness to keep family skeletons in the closet; the realities of drug addiction, alcoholism, and a universal pattern of marital failure across three generations. As we head into the holiday season once again I’m reminded of this reality.
In his book When the Body Says No, Gabon Mate cites the life of Betty Ford in her struggles with alcoholism and breast cancer. Mate makes astute observations about Betty Ford’s early life. He’s able to easily deduce from her autobiography an inclination to see her childhood through rose-colored glasses. He describes Betty as repressing her own feelings to preserve a sense of idyllic relationship with a parent. He suggests unresolved emotional issues were players in her future use of pain killers, tranquilizers, and alcohol.
Betty in her own words describes an ever-increasing existential crisis, losing sight of who she was as a person, despite being the First Lady. “I couldn’t accept that people liked me for myself ... I was measuring myself against impossible ideals – Martha or my mother – and coming up short. That’s a good recipe for alcoholism.” Mate makes the assertion that Betty was blind to emotional realities in her own life. “She does not see that surrendering herself to her husband’s needs and expectations – becoming a ‘doormat’ – resulted from childhood conditioning. The emotional repression, the harsh self-judgment and the perfectionism Betty Ford acquired as a child, through no fault of her own, are more than a ‘good recipe for alcoholism.’ They are also a ‘good recipe’ for cancer of the breast.”
In the past year both my brothers turned up with life-threatening cancers requiring urgent treatment of the highest order. Both my brothers have had at least two kinds of cancer show up in their lives. Despite being raised in an alcoholic drug-addicted environment my twin brother has often wondered what my adjustment problems are, citing a perfectly normal childhood. Attempts to get my siblings to merely own that childhood did not work for me has consistently invoked a defensive posturing tinged with anger in one case and emotional absence in the other. My twin clearly displays unconscious Level II emotional expressions of strong anger wrapped in defensiveness. My older brother simply has made himself quite inaccessible to me for more than four decades. Extreme wealth and distance has made this easy for him to accomplish. He needs nothing whatever from me, especially the message that childhood did not work and that it’s taking me a lifetime to clean up the mess. Such messengers don’t get invited to parties.
Years ago I embraced the blessed twelve steps of recovery for a variety of reasons. One of the greatest prizes to be had in recovery is the opportunity for authentic release of toxic emotions. In recovery rooms and with trusted friends and sponsors one is free to have true emotional ‘dumps’ and to ‘get it off one’s chest.’ The culture of recovery insists on honest expression of one’s feelings, especially negative ones, believing their expression leads to immediate relief, soon followed by true healing and growth. Such has been my repeated experience. I can’t but wonder in light of Mate’s observations if getting emotional burdens off one’s chest in a recovery room might not mitigate the need to engage a surgeon to get it off our chests in the case of breast cancer. Extensive research suggests our bodies finally do say no and will find ways to offload our emotional burdens in ways not necessarily to our liking.
My mother turned up with catastrophic breast cancer. She finally got her long standing resentments ‘off her chest’. My twin brother found many people to be a ‘pain in the butt’, even recently telling me he hated a class of people as much as Hitler hated Jews. A few months ago he had a good chunk of his colon resected for invasive cancer. My older brother may well have been ‘pissed off’ at our alcoholic mother and repressed his feelings. He turned up with aggressive prostate cancer. In recovery we are told resentments are the number one killer. Resentments are nothing more than fatal repressed emotions, a ‘luxury’ we can ill afford.
I can’t say for certain my mother and brothers turned up with cancer because of unresolved emotions but when researchers are able to use interview instruments with 96% accuracy to predict the advent of cancer in people with unresolved emotions, one does wonder. It’s not likely I will ever have the authentic communication with my brothers that I enjoy in recovery but I can certainly take their experiences as cautionary; being reminded resentments and unresolved emotions are not something I can afford.
Perhaps recovery has saved me from far more than the scourge of painkillers, tranquilizers and alcohol. So far I’ve not turned up with cancer. Colonoscopy and lab tests tell me I have a daily reprieve at present. This could change at any time. I don’t yet know if the God of my understanding in recovery has granted me deferral or complete pardon from the malignant consequences of unresolved emotions and resentments. Time will tell.
What time has told me is recovery has granted me at least a twenty-year deferral from the scourges of degenerative autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Twenty-two years ago I sat in front of a neurologist’s desk to be told I had MS. It also looked like I was headed into an early journey with arthritis, just like Mom. A leave of absence from my medical training and a radical life detour allowed me to explore the cesspools of resentment and unresolved emotional issues in my life. Twenty-two years later I have no evidence of MS or arthritis and the strongest drugs I take are fish oil and vitamins.
For certain, there’s no graduation from a life of recovery, only promotion. Also certain is the granting of a daily reprieve based on my spiritual condition. As long as I make an honest attempt to own my dark side and get it off my chest in a healthy manner; to avoid the emotional constipation deriving from harbored resentments, I might just find my body instead saying ‘Yes!” to the wonders of living a joyous good life.
Lying – Does Perception Trump Reality? 9-13-11
Anderson, South Carolina
Surveys and opinion polls suggest lying and cheating have become endemic in American culture, even normalized as acceptable behavior. An astounding majority of students have admitted to cheating on examinations. Universities often lie about the rate of job placement success among their graduates. Substantial numbers of athletes are found covertly using illegal performance-enhancing drugs to gain unfair advantage over competitors. Misrepresentation and manipulation of clinical data in drug research trials is scandalous. America’s economy was nearly destroyed by misrepresentation of risk and quality in mortgage-backed investments. Millions of individuals lie to their spouses as to their whereabouts, ending up in divorce court. Perhaps a majority of political campaigns are driven by empty sound bites and unfulfilled promises.
I presently live in South Carolina because of a big lie. Twenty years ago a professional position was advertised in newspapers nationally. Responding to display ads, I was led to believe I’d be an equity partner in a medical research group being spun off from a large community hospital, to be relocating to an appealing nearby city where I would participate in commissions on outside sales. I moved several states to take this opportunity, giving up a long-standing history and satisfying social network. My contacts made with hospital systems in other states generated sufficient revenues to fund a stand-alone company doing business in another state. I was not invited to join the research group when it formed in a distant city. I was never anything but an ordinary salaried employee in the local community hospital, never participating in revenues from outside sales, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Twenty years later nothing promised has come to pass.
A prestigious university hospital in the southeast contacted me, asking me to travel to a distant city and make formal presentations of my work to the medical staff, promising to underwrite my expenses and provide a substantial audience of physicians and administrators in a large auditorium. Instead I found a small acrimonious group of a dozen individuals in a small conference room disinterested in my academic work, giving me but a few hurried minutes. My travel expenses were never taken care of and I was never offered speaker’s compensation.
In the mid-nineties my medical informatics work was considered rather novel, even useful. Sharing methodologies and research protocols was standard practice in academic medicine. Was it standard practice for hospitals to see my work at medical conferences and then make clones of it for their own use? Years after the fact I would find hospitals in distant states using identical clones of my work, not even offering acknowledgements. I once found an academic article in a prestigious peer-review medical journal about my work. Much of the text in that article was from my own hand, having been lifted en bloc from other sources. Even my graphics were unaltered. I left the medical world eleven years ago with no regrets.
A well-known university in the southeast invited me to participate in a summer institute as guest faculty. Within an hour of arriving on campus I had occasion to careen down two flights of marble stairs in the dining commons and break my leg, leaving me in a wheel chair for some months. The dining facility director immediately promised full assistance of the university, including payment of any medical and surgical expenses. University risk management staff intervened, refusing to consider my claims, never making good on the promises of its director. The possibility of compensation would have required acrimonious long-distance litigation. I opted out, declining later opportunities to teach there.
In recent years photography has become a source of great satisfaction. More so has been the willingness of patrons to actually buy my work, or at least promise to do so. Not satisfying are empty requests from wealthy individuals to produce large format photo prints in custom gallery frames. Individuals promising to purchase them do not return phone calls and months later I have unsold inventory accreting in my house. I’ve not yet learned a man is only as good as his word, not yet requiring full payment in advance.
Special order furniture also accumulates in my garage. I receive requests from long-standing friends to produce very specific cabinets, only to have them back away when the work is completed. Some of us are very slow learners. Do I really want to enter into agreements based on mistrust, requiring 100% payment up front to force them to perform? Not really. Do I need to? Really.
What constitutes truth? When do good intentions become empty promises? When does a life-long pattern of empty over-promising and under-delivering become little more than fraud? When does it become just a pack of lies? Perhaps the hardest thing to prove in a court of law is intent or pre-meditation. Do individuals with habitual good intentions know they are offering nothing but hollow promises, even lies? Even the jury will never know.
A decade ago I was a candidate in a four-day spiritual retreat. On the last day the lay rector knowingly lied to the candidate class, saying we would have to immediately leave the large comfortable conference hall we had been enjoying for three days; indicating a corporate group paid substantial rent, pre-empting us. I found myself secretly enraged our very expensive experience was being truncated in the interests of revenue enhancement. Later in the day this proved to be nothing more than a guise to get us out of the hall so it could be prepared for a lavish closing ceremony. In the meantime some of us fumed and fussed greatly over the belief we had been pre-empted for a profit opportunity. I nearly left the retreat early in agitated fashion. A fellow candidate talked me into staying. The deception was revealed. Perception trumped reality for a season.
Do white lies ever operate for the better good? Do we deceive in order to get a group to do what we want? Do we pad the numbers to create a perception? Does a priest’s knowingly inflating attendance numbers in his church ever achieve a greater good? Does a temporary perception ever really trump reality?
Having someone look you in the eye and tell you a set of facts is true is most disquieting when irrefutable evidence proves otherwise. Have we so normalized our manipulation of perception as to create a reality in which people can tell bold-faced lies while looking another directly in the eye? Yes, we seem to have found a ‘new normal’ in American culture.
For if I do wish to boast I will not be foolish, for I will be speaking the truth; but I refrain from this, so that no one will credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me.
Surveys and opinion polls suggest lying and cheating have become endemic in American culture, even normalized as acceptable behavior. An astounding majority of students have admitted to cheating on examinations. Universities often lie about the rate of job placement success among their graduates. Substantial numbers of athletes are found covertly using illegal performance-enhancing drugs to gain unfair advantage over competitors. Misrepresentation and manipulation of clinical data in drug research trials is scandalous. America’s economy was nearly destroyed by misrepresentation of risk and quality in mortgage-backed investments. Millions of individuals lie to their spouses as to their whereabouts, ending up in divorce court. Perhaps a majority of political campaigns are driven by empty sound bites and unfulfilled promises.
I presently live in South Carolina because of a big lie. Twenty years ago a professional position was advertised in newspapers nationally. Responding to display ads, I was led to believe I’d be an equity partner in a medical research group being spun off from a large community hospital, to be relocating to an appealing nearby city where I would participate in commissions on outside sales. I moved several states to take this opportunity, giving up a long-standing history and satisfying social network. My contacts made with hospital systems in other states generated sufficient revenues to fund a stand-alone company doing business in another state. I was not invited to join the research group when it formed in a distant city. I was never anything but an ordinary salaried employee in the local community hospital, never participating in revenues from outside sales, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Twenty years later nothing promised has come to pass.
A prestigious university hospital in the southeast contacted me, asking me to travel to a distant city and make formal presentations of my work to the medical staff, promising to underwrite my expenses and provide a substantial audience of physicians and administrators in a large auditorium. Instead I found a small acrimonious group of a dozen individuals in a small conference room disinterested in my academic work, giving me but a few hurried minutes. My travel expenses were never taken care of and I was never offered speaker’s compensation.
In the mid-nineties my medical informatics work was considered rather novel, even useful. Sharing methodologies and research protocols was standard practice in academic medicine. Was it standard practice for hospitals to see my work at medical conferences and then make clones of it for their own use? Years after the fact I would find hospitals in distant states using identical clones of my work, not even offering acknowledgements. I once found an academic article in a prestigious peer-review medical journal about my work. Much of the text in that article was from my own hand, having been lifted en bloc from other sources. Even my graphics were unaltered. I left the medical world eleven years ago with no regrets.
A well-known university in the southeast invited me to participate in a summer institute as guest faculty. Within an hour of arriving on campus I had occasion to careen down two flights of marble stairs in the dining commons and break my leg, leaving me in a wheel chair for some months. The dining facility director immediately promised full assistance of the university, including payment of any medical and surgical expenses. University risk management staff intervened, refusing to consider my claims, never making good on the promises of its director. The possibility of compensation would have required acrimonious long-distance litigation. I opted out, declining later opportunities to teach there.
In recent years photography has become a source of great satisfaction. More so has been the willingness of patrons to actually buy my work, or at least promise to do so. Not satisfying are empty requests from wealthy individuals to produce large format photo prints in custom gallery frames. Individuals promising to purchase them do not return phone calls and months later I have unsold inventory accreting in my house. I’ve not yet learned a man is only as good as his word, not yet requiring full payment in advance.
Special order furniture also accumulates in my garage. I receive requests from long-standing friends to produce very specific cabinets, only to have them back away when the work is completed. Some of us are very slow learners. Do I really want to enter into agreements based on mistrust, requiring 100% payment up front to force them to perform? Not really. Do I need to? Really.
What constitutes truth? When do good intentions become empty promises? When does a life-long pattern of empty over-promising and under-delivering become little more than fraud? When does it become just a pack of lies? Perhaps the hardest thing to prove in a court of law is intent or pre-meditation. Do individuals with habitual good intentions know they are offering nothing but hollow promises, even lies? Even the jury will never know.
A decade ago I was a candidate in a four-day spiritual retreat. On the last day the lay rector knowingly lied to the candidate class, saying we would have to immediately leave the large comfortable conference hall we had been enjoying for three days; indicating a corporate group paid substantial rent, pre-empting us. I found myself secretly enraged our very expensive experience was being truncated in the interests of revenue enhancement. Later in the day this proved to be nothing more than a guise to get us out of the hall so it could be prepared for a lavish closing ceremony. In the meantime some of us fumed and fussed greatly over the belief we had been pre-empted for a profit opportunity. I nearly left the retreat early in agitated fashion. A fellow candidate talked me into staying. The deception was revealed. Perception trumped reality for a season.
Do white lies ever operate for the better good? Do we deceive in order to get a group to do what we want? Do we pad the numbers to create a perception? Does a priest’s knowingly inflating attendance numbers in his church ever achieve a greater good? Does a temporary perception ever really trump reality?
Having someone look you in the eye and tell you a set of facts is true is most disquieting when irrefutable evidence proves otherwise. Have we so normalized our manipulation of perception as to create a reality in which people can tell bold-faced lies while looking another directly in the eye? Yes, we seem to have found a ‘new normal’ in American culture.
For if I do wish to boast I will not be foolish, for I will be speaking the truth; but I refrain from this, so that no one will credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Hitting Pay Dirt 8-30-11
Anderson, South Carolina
For several years I took a foreign policy class moderated by Matthew, a fellow once living a spectacularly interesting life. Having served in the CIA, the Foreign Service, and a number of Department of Defense positions, our leader was in a position to bring rather enlightening perspectives to a number of thorny and vexing foreign policy issues. Most of those in class had interesting lives of their own as ex-pat CEOs and intellectual stimulation in these sessions could provide a real rush.
I saw Matthew in the gym recently and asked him what he was doing these days, not having seen him in many months. Looking a bit forlorn he told me he was doing nothing and “just waiting for the big dirt.” Dumbfounded, I asked for clarification. Could this vibrant man with an exemplary career, no money problems, good physical health, and a beautiful wife be waiting to die? I thought only people in bad health, intense pain, lonely, with lots of problems, and confined to institutions would anticipate the day someone shoveled dirt onto their coffins. I wondered why Matthew was even in the gym. A large motivator for my going to the gym is being around people who are excited about life and actively promoting its quality.
Perhaps there are greater existential questions arising from Matthew’s answer. Is there any real purpose or satisfaction in life after we have stopped producing earned income? Are we nothing more than fodder for those still seeking profit at our expense? Do we simply wait for the Grim Reaper to clock us out? In the American culture one certainly does wonder.
A vast highly profitable industry has arisen out of creating increasingly structured environments where people bored to death wait for … well, death. Adults-only living, retirement living, senior living, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, and even long-term hospitalization options have sprouted overnight like mushrooms during a damp spring night. These allow one to have a structured expensive wait for the big dirt. Even there the profit potential is large; profit margins in the funeral industry are staggering.
Millions pay vast endowments to buy their way into the safety and predictability of structured institutional environments. After giving up their life estates they pay draconian monthly assessments for little of nothing – a couple of sheetrock rooms and institutional meals in a cafeteria. Institutional care operators don’t give back endowments at death. If any assets remain, these will be sopped up by the undertaker. Is this becoming an end-point of American economy, high performance employees working stressful careers, making too much money, just to ultimately give it all to funeral parlors and their institutional waiting rooms?
At the lower end of the economy tens of millions are trapped in economic quicksand by alcoholism and addictions. Others driven by profit motives have recently found a fountain of profit. Unqualified individuals are buying houses in marginal neighborhoods for back taxes at courthouse auctions, renting rooms by the week and calling their enterprises Recovery Houses. From conversation with individuals in these houses, more resentment than recovery is being generated. Buying a house for $900 in back taxes and then renting it by the room for $100 a week to people who are truly powerless over their lives is nothing short of hitting pay dirt in a big way. Spending $900 one time and gaining cash flow of $2,400 a month from six desperate women in a ghetto dump is certainly not in keeping with the spirit of the recovery message. Imagine owning eight of these houses. Do the math. It’s better than dealing dope, and perfectly legal. One is capitalizing on vast profits to be had from filling up institutional living arrangements with those desperate for predictability and structure, be they opulent church-operated ones with endowments of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or tax-defaulted houses in the ‘hood for $100 a week, per room.
Home for many has become an evanescent, even ephemeral construct of the imagination. Multi-generational extended families living on family farms for a century or more have given way to isolated nuclear families living in suburban houses. As solitary nuclear families prove themselves ever more fragile, more than half of them shatter, leaving millions looking for places to live. Life challenges lead many to use psychotropic drugs, alcohol, and illicit drugs, leading to even more familial failures. The end point is millions of us desperately seeking safe places to lay our heads at night, places to have a sense of belonging and community. Alas, opulent senior care facilities and recovery houses in the ‘hood simply cannot offer the sense of history, place, security, and belonging deriving from multi-generational extended living arrangements in large houses extending across many decades.
While having dinner in a grand dining room near Inverness, I wondered about those dining here prior to my showing up at the table. For eight hundred years one family has been living in this wondrous place in the north of Scotland. The table at which I enjoyed my repast has been in place for five centuries. Portraits of twenty generations hung on walls around me. Regrettably, the present castle owner is the last survivor in her family lineage and this history and sense of place is about to go away, a tragic sign of the times. As families shrink, break up, and disperse, clapboard houses on the farm and castles alike will fall into ruin, taking with them their legacies of history, place, security, and belonging.
Do we really want the social landscape we are creating for ourselves here in the Western World? Perhaps waiting for the big dirt is understandable if there’s little to look forward to other than domiciliary care in some sort of facility, be it an opulent church-operated one with an endowment of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or a tax-defaulted house in the ‘hood for $100 a week.
There’s another choice, one on the other side of the big dirt, one grander than pay dirt in the hood, one giving us reason to move beyond our social malaise and austere institutional models of community. It’s possible to live in the big house with extended family. The choice is ours.
Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.
For several years I took a foreign policy class moderated by Matthew, a fellow once living a spectacularly interesting life. Having served in the CIA, the Foreign Service, and a number of Department of Defense positions, our leader was in a position to bring rather enlightening perspectives to a number of thorny and vexing foreign policy issues. Most of those in class had interesting lives of their own as ex-pat CEOs and intellectual stimulation in these sessions could provide a real rush.
I saw Matthew in the gym recently and asked him what he was doing these days, not having seen him in many months. Looking a bit forlorn he told me he was doing nothing and “just waiting for the big dirt.” Dumbfounded, I asked for clarification. Could this vibrant man with an exemplary career, no money problems, good physical health, and a beautiful wife be waiting to die? I thought only people in bad health, intense pain, lonely, with lots of problems, and confined to institutions would anticipate the day someone shoveled dirt onto their coffins. I wondered why Matthew was even in the gym. A large motivator for my going to the gym is being around people who are excited about life and actively promoting its quality.
Perhaps there are greater existential questions arising from Matthew’s answer. Is there any real purpose or satisfaction in life after we have stopped producing earned income? Are we nothing more than fodder for those still seeking profit at our expense? Do we simply wait for the Grim Reaper to clock us out? In the American culture one certainly does wonder.
A vast highly profitable industry has arisen out of creating increasingly structured environments where people bored to death wait for … well, death. Adults-only living, retirement living, senior living, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, and even long-term hospitalization options have sprouted overnight like mushrooms during a damp spring night. These allow one to have a structured expensive wait for the big dirt. Even there the profit potential is large; profit margins in the funeral industry are staggering.
Millions pay vast endowments to buy their way into the safety and predictability of structured institutional environments. After giving up their life estates they pay draconian monthly assessments for little of nothing – a couple of sheetrock rooms and institutional meals in a cafeteria. Institutional care operators don’t give back endowments at death. If any assets remain, these will be sopped up by the undertaker. Is this becoming an end-point of American economy, high performance employees working stressful careers, making too much money, just to ultimately give it all to funeral parlors and their institutional waiting rooms?
At the lower end of the economy tens of millions are trapped in economic quicksand by alcoholism and addictions. Others driven by profit motives have recently found a fountain of profit. Unqualified individuals are buying houses in marginal neighborhoods for back taxes at courthouse auctions, renting rooms by the week and calling their enterprises Recovery Houses. From conversation with individuals in these houses, more resentment than recovery is being generated. Buying a house for $900 in back taxes and then renting it by the room for $100 a week to people who are truly powerless over their lives is nothing short of hitting pay dirt in a big way. Spending $900 one time and gaining cash flow of $2,400 a month from six desperate women in a ghetto dump is certainly not in keeping with the spirit of the recovery message. Imagine owning eight of these houses. Do the math. It’s better than dealing dope, and perfectly legal. One is capitalizing on vast profits to be had from filling up institutional living arrangements with those desperate for predictability and structure, be they opulent church-operated ones with endowments of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or tax-defaulted houses in the ‘hood for $100 a week, per room.
Home for many has become an evanescent, even ephemeral construct of the imagination. Multi-generational extended families living on family farms for a century or more have given way to isolated nuclear families living in suburban houses. As solitary nuclear families prove themselves ever more fragile, more than half of them shatter, leaving millions looking for places to live. Life challenges lead many to use psychotropic drugs, alcohol, and illicit drugs, leading to even more familial failures. The end point is millions of us desperately seeking safe places to lay our heads at night, places to have a sense of belonging and community. Alas, opulent senior care facilities and recovery houses in the ‘hood simply cannot offer the sense of history, place, security, and belonging deriving from multi-generational extended living arrangements in large houses extending across many decades.
While having dinner in a grand dining room near Inverness, I wondered about those dining here prior to my showing up at the table. For eight hundred years one family has been living in this wondrous place in the north of Scotland. The table at which I enjoyed my repast has been in place for five centuries. Portraits of twenty generations hung on walls around me. Regrettably, the present castle owner is the last survivor in her family lineage and this history and sense of place is about to go away, a tragic sign of the times. As families shrink, break up, and disperse, clapboard houses on the farm and castles alike will fall into ruin, taking with them their legacies of history, place, security, and belonging.
Do we really want the social landscape we are creating for ourselves here in the Western World? Perhaps waiting for the big dirt is understandable if there’s little to look forward to other than domiciliary care in some sort of facility, be it an opulent church-operated one with an endowment of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or a tax-defaulted house in the ‘hood for $100 a week.
There’s another choice, one on the other side of the big dirt, one grander than pay dirt in the hood, one giving us reason to move beyond our social malaise and austere institutional models of community. It’s possible to live in the big house with extended family. The choice is ours.
Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.
The Most Wanted List 8-21-11
Mt Pleasant, Pennsylvania
Growing up we are taught important life values; who to hate, who to love, groups to exclude from our lives, groups worthy of our membership. Primal needs of humans to belong have been increasingly corrupted by large forces at work in highly competitive fragmented societies. Assurance of belonging has provoked thousands to join street gangs, crime syndicates, Hell’s Angels, white supremacy groups, ad infinitum. The predictability and sense of personal security deriving from childhood in intact extended families have become frightening scarce resources. We become desperate to belong to groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Some offer nothing but illusions.
In Los Angeles County there existed the so-called Blue Book, a social register not unlike the Who’s Who of America. Inclusion in this tome was tantamount to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, assuring readers of the economic, social, and moral integrity of those so included. Throughout my childhood school years, gaining inclusion in this hallowed volume was a driving force for my mother, despite four marriages, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Even from my limited childhood perspective I could not fathom how our shattered little family with closets full of skeletons could gain the Blue Book Seal of Approval, not that it mattered to me. I was too busy just trying to survive and find my own sense of belonging. Half a century later it still eludes me. Alcoholic wandering and moving twenty times by age fifteen does not promote putting down roots, joining groups, learning to build life-long friendships.
Second grade provided my first craving for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Elected Student Council members, class reps, and the like were given color-coded scarves to wear, monikers offering unbounded prestige and status on the grounds of George Ellery Hale Elementary School. Class Safety Officer was considered a bogus job no one wanted but it offered the incumbent one of those sacred scarves, a navy blue one. I was all over it. I had a chance at a Seal of Approval. I proved to be a legend only in my own mind, never gaining any hoped-for social capital from my position.
Even temporary groups offered an illusion of prestige, security, options for personal validation. On February 14 elementary schools conducted fiendish popularity contests. Students had an hour late in the day during which they traded Valentine’s Cards. Intuitive compassionate parents made sure their little darlings took cards for everyone in the class. There must not be too many of them. Some of us ended up with rather small piles of cards, mostly little ones about the size of a business card. Some in the class ended up with piles of large specialty cards, enough to stock a card shop. We all knew who got the Seal of Approval. Still, I hoped even one of those small cards of mine was a willful mindful act on the part of the giver, not just psychic damage control by a benevolent parent.. I never knew. Perhaps it’s why I always keep greetings cards sent to me.
One of the junior high schools I attended afforded great prestige to marching band members. On game days members wore black and orange uniforms all day, an ultimate symbol of status and acceptance. How I craved the opportunity to play in that band and belong, to have prestige, security, options for personal validation. Alas, I never got a chance. Household finances got soaked in alcohol and we ended up in an apartment in another school district.
Perhaps the most challenging group member induction in all childhood was that of picking sides for athletic events. Even knowing in advance the two most popular boys in class would go to every effort to avoid picking me for their team did little to lessen the pain of exclusion. Being a socially marginalized student finding refuge in the library during recess, Physical Education was a dreadful rite of exclusion, especially on rainy days when team picking for indoor games was more likely. Predictably, I was always last.
During the last year of high school millions of us went through expensive and desperate rituals to gain acceptance into a very different kind of club; prestigious universities promising stellar education leading to glamorous high-paying careers. Even forty years later I’ve no idea how it was I was admitted to the most expensive school in America on full scholarship, one offering the world. Strangely, I never felt admitted into the culture of this ultra-competitive school, where classmates were potential enemies who might steal my place in medical school by doing better than me in organic chemistry.
During the last year of university hundreds of thousands of us went through even more expensive and frantic rituals to gain acceptance into a very different kind of club; prestigious medical schools promising stellar education leading to glamorous high-paying careers. Even thirty years later I’ve no idea how it was I was admitted to a prestigious medical school in America on full scholarship, one offering the world. Strangely, I never felt admitted into the culture of this ultra-competitive school, where classmates were potential enemies who might steal my place on top of the class-weighted pass-fail cut-point. Every exam offered opportunity to view a list of my enemies under glass, seeing the weighted scores of those who might cause me to flunk out and default on my scholarships.
Primal needs of humans to belong have been increasingly corrupted by large forces at work in highly competitive fragmented societies. Long past elementary school, junior high school, university, and medical school I still have a craving for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Gated communities, high rise condominiums with armed guards and valets, board memberships, presidencies; none of these moved me closer to a sense of belonging.
Social Registers, Student Councils, Valentine’s Lists, Marching Band, Team Rosters, The Class of 1975, The Medical Class of 1991, Board Presidencies. Invitation Lists. Important lists. Will they matter when our civilization has been forgotten, when our lists have devolved into dust to be sifted by archeologists yet unborn for a hundred centuries? Do they matter now?
For practitioners of Anglican or Episcopal variants of the Christian faith, a prayer of thanksgiving is often offered after Rite II Holy Eucharist. Included is the possibility for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. “We thank you for feeding us … and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.” I still have a craving. Have I finally found myself wanted on the Most Wanted List after all these years?
“He who overcomes shall thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father, and before His angels.”
I might even get to wear the ultimate white coat.
Growing up we are taught important life values; who to hate, who to love, groups to exclude from our lives, groups worthy of our membership. Primal needs of humans to belong have been increasingly corrupted by large forces at work in highly competitive fragmented societies. Assurance of belonging has provoked thousands to join street gangs, crime syndicates, Hell’s Angels, white supremacy groups, ad infinitum. The predictability and sense of personal security deriving from childhood in intact extended families have become frightening scarce resources. We become desperate to belong to groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Some offer nothing but illusions.
In Los Angeles County there existed the so-called Blue Book, a social register not unlike the Who’s Who of America. Inclusion in this tome was tantamount to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, assuring readers of the economic, social, and moral integrity of those so included. Throughout my childhood school years, gaining inclusion in this hallowed volume was a driving force for my mother, despite four marriages, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Even from my limited childhood perspective I could not fathom how our shattered little family with closets full of skeletons could gain the Blue Book Seal of Approval, not that it mattered to me. I was too busy just trying to survive and find my own sense of belonging. Half a century later it still eludes me. Alcoholic wandering and moving twenty times by age fifteen does not promote putting down roots, joining groups, learning to build life-long friendships.
Second grade provided my first craving for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Elected Student Council members, class reps, and the like were given color-coded scarves to wear, monikers offering unbounded prestige and status on the grounds of George Ellery Hale Elementary School. Class Safety Officer was considered a bogus job no one wanted but it offered the incumbent one of those sacred scarves, a navy blue one. I was all over it. I had a chance at a Seal of Approval. I proved to be a legend only in my own mind, never gaining any hoped-for social capital from my position.
Even temporary groups offered an illusion of prestige, security, options for personal validation. On February 14 elementary schools conducted fiendish popularity contests. Students had an hour late in the day during which they traded Valentine’s Cards. Intuitive compassionate parents made sure their little darlings took cards for everyone in the class. There must not be too many of them. Some of us ended up with rather small piles of cards, mostly little ones about the size of a business card. Some in the class ended up with piles of large specialty cards, enough to stock a card shop. We all knew who got the Seal of Approval. Still, I hoped even one of those small cards of mine was a willful mindful act on the part of the giver, not just psychic damage control by a benevolent parent.. I never knew. Perhaps it’s why I always keep greetings cards sent to me.
One of the junior high schools I attended afforded great prestige to marching band members. On game days members wore black and orange uniforms all day, an ultimate symbol of status and acceptance. How I craved the opportunity to play in that band and belong, to have prestige, security, options for personal validation. Alas, I never got a chance. Household finances got soaked in alcohol and we ended up in an apartment in another school district.
Perhaps the most challenging group member induction in all childhood was that of picking sides for athletic events. Even knowing in advance the two most popular boys in class would go to every effort to avoid picking me for their team did little to lessen the pain of exclusion. Being a socially marginalized student finding refuge in the library during recess, Physical Education was a dreadful rite of exclusion, especially on rainy days when team picking for indoor games was more likely. Predictably, I was always last.
During the last year of high school millions of us went through expensive and desperate rituals to gain acceptance into a very different kind of club; prestigious universities promising stellar education leading to glamorous high-paying careers. Even forty years later I’ve no idea how it was I was admitted to the most expensive school in America on full scholarship, one offering the world. Strangely, I never felt admitted into the culture of this ultra-competitive school, where classmates were potential enemies who might steal my place in medical school by doing better than me in organic chemistry.
During the last year of university hundreds of thousands of us went through even more expensive and frantic rituals to gain acceptance into a very different kind of club; prestigious medical schools promising stellar education leading to glamorous high-paying careers. Even thirty years later I’ve no idea how it was I was admitted to a prestigious medical school in America on full scholarship, one offering the world. Strangely, I never felt admitted into the culture of this ultra-competitive school, where classmates were potential enemies who might steal my place on top of the class-weighted pass-fail cut-point. Every exam offered opportunity to view a list of my enemies under glass, seeing the weighted scores of those who might cause me to flunk out and default on my scholarships.
Primal needs of humans to belong have been increasingly corrupted by large forces at work in highly competitive fragmented societies. Long past elementary school, junior high school, university, and medical school I still have a craving for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. Gated communities, high rise condominiums with armed guards and valets, board memberships, presidencies; none of these moved me closer to a sense of belonging.
Social Registers, Student Councils, Valentine’s Lists, Marching Band, Team Rosters, The Class of 1975, The Medical Class of 1991, Board Presidencies. Invitation Lists. Important lists. Will they matter when our civilization has been forgotten, when our lists have devolved into dust to be sifted by archeologists yet unborn for a hundred centuries? Do they matter now?
For practitioners of Anglican or Episcopal variants of the Christian faith, a prayer of thanksgiving is often offered after Rite II Holy Eucharist. Included is the possibility for inclusion in groups larger than ourselves, offering prestige, security, options for personal validation. “We thank you for feeding us … and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.” I still have a craving. Have I finally found myself wanted on the Most Wanted List after all these years?
“He who overcomes shall thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father, and before His angels.”
I might even get to wear the ultimate white coat.
Being Demoted to One’s Level of Competence 8-17-11
Anderson, South Carolina
Exploring one’s true powerlessness can be disconcerting. One can perhaps embrace the idea he’s not cut out to be Emperor of the world, but embracing powerlessness over things most people seem to handle with facility is a different matter. After six decades I lack relational skills most ten year olds have readily acquired.
Happily, I’m not in a dark night of the soul but I am in an introspective place, one which facilitates exploring one’s powerlessness. Last Saturday a memorial service was held for a friend of many years. During the course of the service and reception following it became evident there was something not working for me. Despite knowing half the people in the church, some for twenty years, I’d never been in the homes of any of these people who treat me like the Prodigal son in public spaces, but never invite me into their lives. Conversations made it obvious these people have extensive interactions with each other, traveling, buying vacation properties together, socializing in each other’s homes. I don’t even know where they live.
If this was an isolated episode it would be easy to discount it and stop cogitating about my deficiencies, but it’s not. In my own church of fifteen years I’ve had nearly the same history, and so it was dozens of times in as many states. I don’t know where most live and have never been admitted into their lives. As at the funeral venue, these people have extensive interactions with each other, traveling, buying vacation properties together, socializing in each other’s homes. I simply go home alone and eat at the kitchen counter and try finding travel options for single people. Even my offer to provide a free first-class ticket for a companion to enjoy world-wide travel met with deafening silence. Going around the world first class, alone, is not quite as glamorous as one might think, but it does beat standing at the kitchen counter.
Lawrence Peters wrote his satirical The Peter Principle as a tongue-in-cheek description of how it is we are promoted to our own level of incompetence. His small work became a management classic. Given enough time, all organizations will be populated with people working one level above their level of competence. He articulated how it is so many things go wrong throughout the world; his satirical writing style kept the text from being a downer.
I found the text especially pertinent to my own circumstances. I wonder if merely being born can constitute a promotion to one’s level of incompetency from the get-go. Many ten year olds prove their competence at sand box, making friends, developing well-placed loyalties, even inspiring and motivating others. I never did figure any of this out, and five decades past sandbox I still find a film of bewilderment over my understanding of how other people seem to make relational stuff so easy and natural. I remain mystified.
Figuring academic knowledge might clear up my early-onset dimness, I went off for a comprehensive dual masters program in management and systems engineering, even taking a residency in management. Something must not have adhered in my teachable moments. Three decades later, despite my prestigious education, I’ve never successfully managed a soul in my professional life and many would be quick to declare my incompetence spills over into my social life as well.
Peter suggests the world might be a far more efficient and productive place if we could just figure out what our highest level of competence is and decline the promotion that would find us biting off more than one can chew. But what does one do when merely being born might be one promotion too many? In recovery we learn to stay right-size with God’s help, bringing our reckless ego into line and down-sizing it.
For certain, I’ve never qualified for a corner office or promotion to Emperor of the world despite acquiring exemplary academic credentials and field experience. What I’ve learned in recent years by working in recovery is that by accepting Gods’ plan for my life I can accept I will never successfully manage people, that perhaps he has something else for me to be doing. We are told “We no longer strive to dominate or rule those about us in order to gain self-importance. We no longer seek fame and honor in order to be praised.” We learn there’s serenity and acceptance to be found in being average, in being ordinary. “Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful or profoundly happy. Not many of us can be leaders of prominence, nor do we wish to be.”
Acceptance of our lot in life is the answer to all that ails us. Our value does not come from our stations in life. “In God’s sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and living alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God’s scheme of things – these are the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.”
I’m told in ancient sacred writings “I know the thoughts I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you hope and a future.” Perhaps God’s plan for me will include remedial work to learn competence at sand box, making friends, developing well-placed loyalties, even inspiring and motivating others. For me, being demoted a level to my level of competence would be a challenge, but with God all things are possible.
Exploring one’s true powerlessness can be disconcerting. One can perhaps embrace the idea he’s not cut out to be Emperor of the world, but embracing powerlessness over things most people seem to handle with facility is a different matter. After six decades I lack relational skills most ten year olds have readily acquired.
Happily, I’m not in a dark night of the soul but I am in an introspective place, one which facilitates exploring one’s powerlessness. Last Saturday a memorial service was held for a friend of many years. During the course of the service and reception following it became evident there was something not working for me. Despite knowing half the people in the church, some for twenty years, I’d never been in the homes of any of these people who treat me like the Prodigal son in public spaces, but never invite me into their lives. Conversations made it obvious these people have extensive interactions with each other, traveling, buying vacation properties together, socializing in each other’s homes. I don’t even know where they live.
If this was an isolated episode it would be easy to discount it and stop cogitating about my deficiencies, but it’s not. In my own church of fifteen years I’ve had nearly the same history, and so it was dozens of times in as many states. I don’t know where most live and have never been admitted into their lives. As at the funeral venue, these people have extensive interactions with each other, traveling, buying vacation properties together, socializing in each other’s homes. I simply go home alone and eat at the kitchen counter and try finding travel options for single people. Even my offer to provide a free first-class ticket for a companion to enjoy world-wide travel met with deafening silence. Going around the world first class, alone, is not quite as glamorous as one might think, but it does beat standing at the kitchen counter.
Lawrence Peters wrote his satirical The Peter Principle as a tongue-in-cheek description of how it is we are promoted to our own level of incompetence. His small work became a management classic. Given enough time, all organizations will be populated with people working one level above their level of competence. He articulated how it is so many things go wrong throughout the world; his satirical writing style kept the text from being a downer.
I found the text especially pertinent to my own circumstances. I wonder if merely being born can constitute a promotion to one’s level of incompetency from the get-go. Many ten year olds prove their competence at sand box, making friends, developing well-placed loyalties, even inspiring and motivating others. I never did figure any of this out, and five decades past sandbox I still find a film of bewilderment over my understanding of how other people seem to make relational stuff so easy and natural. I remain mystified.
Figuring academic knowledge might clear up my early-onset dimness, I went off for a comprehensive dual masters program in management and systems engineering, even taking a residency in management. Something must not have adhered in my teachable moments. Three decades later, despite my prestigious education, I’ve never successfully managed a soul in my professional life and many would be quick to declare my incompetence spills over into my social life as well.
Peter suggests the world might be a far more efficient and productive place if we could just figure out what our highest level of competence is and decline the promotion that would find us biting off more than one can chew. But what does one do when merely being born might be one promotion too many? In recovery we learn to stay right-size with God’s help, bringing our reckless ego into line and down-sizing it.
For certain, I’ve never qualified for a corner office or promotion to Emperor of the world despite acquiring exemplary academic credentials and field experience. What I’ve learned in recent years by working in recovery is that by accepting Gods’ plan for my life I can accept I will never successfully manage people, that perhaps he has something else for me to be doing. We are told “We no longer strive to dominate or rule those about us in order to gain self-importance. We no longer seek fame and honor in order to be praised.” We learn there’s serenity and acceptance to be found in being average, in being ordinary. “Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be useful or profoundly happy. Not many of us can be leaders of prominence, nor do we wish to be.”
Acceptance of our lot in life is the answer to all that ails us. Our value does not come from our stations in life. “In God’s sight all human beings are important, the proof that love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer isolated and living alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God’s scheme of things – these are the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.”
I’m told in ancient sacred writings “I know the thoughts I have for you, thoughts for good, not for evil, plans that will give you hope and a future.” Perhaps God’s plan for me will include remedial work to learn competence at sand box, making friends, developing well-placed loyalties, even inspiring and motivating others. For me, being demoted a level to my level of competence would be a challenge, but with God all things are possible.
On Romance 8-13-11
Anderson, South Carolina
Not so long ago I wondered if it was possible to love someone too much, often awaking with a visceral craving to be in another’s presence. This intoxication over-rode most everything in my world. It mattered little what I did as long as I did it with this one in my life. Experiencing an effervescent state, all life was wondrous, magical, shimmering with possibility.
In short order I found myself re-orienting the entirety of my life, considered leaving town, selling my house, restructuring my finances, giving up the history I’ve built here, thinking another individual had keys to the Emerald City of Oz. Under the influence, I found myself willing to consider financial and relational risks inconceivable but weeks previously. Most sobering was believing God was absolutely in the middle of this upheaval in my world. Having seen people around me experience this same upheaval, making premature journeys to the altar, I wondered what could drive them to such abrupt life decisions, risking all they’d known. So it was recently for me. I found myself wanting to take my beloved, forsake all, go the courthouse, skip the pomp and circumstances, say “I do”, and go off living happily ever after in an ill-defined nirvana. I watched others do this in my family of origin, only to end up in lifelong patterns of repeated failure.
Eros is a curious phenomenon to me. The depth of affectational and motivational change it can produce is simply staggering to me. While under its influence I found myself willing to consider decisions assuring the complete transformation of my life, but into what? Many people have often told me “You have a great life.” I wonder now what exactly I thought I was about to trade it in for.
We are taught from our first breath finding perfect romantic love will fulfill every longing and desire we can experience. Pop culture, great writers, composers, playwrights, and painters give more ‘air time’ to the idea of finding complete fulfillment in another human being than perhaps any subject. Family court often gives a clarifying image of another reality.
As one always struggling with a sense of belonging in family, church, and the larger culture, it was quite stunning to suddenly feel admitted to the family of humanity at a new level for the first time ever. The prospect of marrying into a widow’s large family was captivating for one raised in a fragmented and isolated alcoholic household that never put down roots. Having attended the same university as my dearest, I had a wondrous sense of recapturing long-forgotten history from earlier years. In my initial romantic fugue, the idea my thoughts and beliefs would be valued and embraced was empowering to me in ways new. Was I about to really have an advocate, a champion of my own? Be a respected elder in a large family? Reality bit.
Studies have shown adults under the influence of marijuana and other substances believe they are producing museum-grade art. While intoxicated, given brushes and paint, inebriated artisans produce what they believed to be very high-quality original work. When detoxed they are astounded to see their less-than-stellar realities produced in altered states.
While intoxicated with being ‘in-love’ I came to believe our relationship was going to be an example to the world of how to do it exactly right. The divorce rate in America would plunge because people were finally going to see how to get it right. I had the idea the family I was to marry into was going to be astounded by my arrival, even bowing down in my presence with thanksgiving for the spiritual stature and maturity I was bringing into their midst. I discovered my own baggage was still on the dock and would likely keep me from making unfettered relational journeys down any road.
In recovery one of the primary goals of twelve step work is re-sizing our egos. Those struggling with addictions and alcoholism experience out-of-control ego issues. Substances in their early course confer a confidence and robustness of affect contributing greatly to their widespread abuse. Crack cocaine addicts tell me the sense of empowerment and sexual capacity in the early stages is inconceivable. Trying to recapture a fleeting false empowerment leads them to destructive efforts to regain that first high, lost forever in the massive casualties of addiction.
As recovery literature affirms, we believed we were ten feet tall and bullet proof. As we crashed and burned we came to discover we were anything but, coming to the realization we were powerless and unable to manage our own lives. Attempts to ‘manage’ the lives of others in this large extended family with my erudite writing were quickly rebuffed. Calling to task one who had caused me some potential legal grief, I expected a contrite apology and a correction in her behavior. I was blown off. Alas, my ideas about honesty and ethics don’t hold water in an increasingly secular culture, and I only received further confirmation of this. I’m truly powerless over people, places, and things.
Stunning to me is how often I have seen apparently sane sober people go onto Internet dating sites, shop, and meet another promising the keys to the city, only to have their lives destroyed by deception, financial ruin, relational issues with family, and the very kinds of dishonesty I recently called one to task about. Not a few are the individuals I have seen who gave up fine jobs, splendid histories, and a sense of belonging, to embark on a new journey down the yellow brick road, only to find themselves in dark forests with all manner of evil beasts. For many of these travelers there wasn’t a good witch of the West to show them the way back to Kansas. The City of Oz was never found.
Regularly I encounter people struggling with profound loneliness, who despite repeated violent divorces, still believe the only solution to their affective angst is to keep searching, looking for the one who can deliver them from this scourge. Dysfunction, chaotic relationships, and risk of catastrophic life experiences are viewed as better than being alone. I find no small number of people who opt for psychotropic drugs to numb the pain of being on a solo journey in life. Many find consequences of psychotropic drugs even more nefarious and elect to get off the yellow brick road altogether, terminating their lives with violent impulse. This past week three individuals in my world elected suicide, rather than finding their way clear of the dark trees in life.
I’ve recently been going through the experience of detoxing from my inebriated eros state, coming to realize the art work I have been producing is rather poor. I’ve not been building the relationship which will become the topic of morning talk shows. As the experience of being in love fades, reality comes into sharper focus for me. Family issues, financial concerns, medical challenges, my inability to accept others for who they are, and my own lack of life focus have shown me to be standing in dark shadows wondering how it was I managed to get myself into such a place, with its hidden risks.
I cannot but be bewildered, realizing something seeming so real and solid was little more than evanescent ephemeral wisps in my affective state. I wonder a lot now about just how one goes about building a successful marriage. I suddenly feel totally ignorant on the subject. I nearly succeeded in dragging another into the vacuum of my knowledge, at her great peril.
Our one saving redemption proved to be a nearly simultaneous loss of that wondrous affective state song writers love to write about. We suffered through surprisingly little emotional injury at the demise of something once so overwhelming to both of us. We sort of stand around now in bewilderment asking, “What happened?” What was that?
Half a century ago Erich Fromm wrote his immensely successful The Art of Loving, articulating love in the Western experience. He describes our desperate bid to ‘belong to the herd’, to achieve union, to avoid the acute anxiety which derives from separation. Separation is seen as a great existential evil, one to be avoided at all costs. Fromm posits alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide are symptoms of failure of herd conformity. We grasp onto those people we believe can deliver us from this acute anxiety of separation. Did I do this very thing thinking another could empower me to suddenly feel admitted to the family of humanity at a new level for the first time ever? Probably.
The need to be included, to belong, cannot be overstated. Failure to Thrive is a recognized condition in infants and young children who die despite being kept clean, well fed, warm, and safe. Children who are not touched with affection or nurtured died despite their biological needs being completely fulfilled. As adults, we may not die directly for our lack of belonging but the intense affective pain of separateness drives millions to find relief in the murky world of addictions. Anyone who has been shunned or excluded by a group knows the intensity of being removed from the herd. Family black sheep know this well. Social nerds know this. Alcoholics know it. I know it.
Even half a century ago Fromm described a growing dysfunction of herd conformity; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay in the herd. Many writers since have articulated on the profound depression, anxiety, rage, and social pathology becoming endemic because so many of us are feeling left out of our families, work places, social groups, neighborhoods, even places of worship.
Finding individuals of the opposite sex with similar feelings, we seek salvation in each other, often ending up with little more than the annihilation that occurs when matter and anti-matter collide. This annihilation energizes a vast legal system profiting from damage control. In cultures with increasing inability to include individuals within the herd, unbounded expectations on romantic partners to fully compensate for group failure is a near-certain script for divorce and further exacerbation of Fromm’s acute separateness.
Thousands of years ago we lived in far smaller social landscapes where inclusion was far easier, the angst of anonymity much less. Strangers were a rarity. Even so, contemporary writers of ancient times recognized we already had long standing struggles with issues of belonging, of feeling we are really loveable. Wise sages suggested the love of God was the only real cure, the only thing that could take away our acute pain of separateness. Saul of Tarsus came to this realization on his Damascus Road experience and suggested:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Perhaps this is enough for me and I no longer have to wander around in the dark forest afraid of the goblins of loneliness, isolation and despair. Finding true belonging in God’s love alone I can begin anew, experiencing an effervescent state, all of life wondrous, magical, shimmering with possibility.
Not so long ago I wondered if it was possible to love someone too much, often awaking with a visceral craving to be in another’s presence. This intoxication over-rode most everything in my world. It mattered little what I did as long as I did it with this one in my life. Experiencing an effervescent state, all life was wondrous, magical, shimmering with possibility.
In short order I found myself re-orienting the entirety of my life, considered leaving town, selling my house, restructuring my finances, giving up the history I’ve built here, thinking another individual had keys to the Emerald City of Oz. Under the influence, I found myself willing to consider financial and relational risks inconceivable but weeks previously. Most sobering was believing God was absolutely in the middle of this upheaval in my world. Having seen people around me experience this same upheaval, making premature journeys to the altar, I wondered what could drive them to such abrupt life decisions, risking all they’d known. So it was recently for me. I found myself wanting to take my beloved, forsake all, go the courthouse, skip the pomp and circumstances, say “I do”, and go off living happily ever after in an ill-defined nirvana. I watched others do this in my family of origin, only to end up in lifelong patterns of repeated failure.
Eros is a curious phenomenon to me. The depth of affectational and motivational change it can produce is simply staggering to me. While under its influence I found myself willing to consider decisions assuring the complete transformation of my life, but into what? Many people have often told me “You have a great life.” I wonder now what exactly I thought I was about to trade it in for.
We are taught from our first breath finding perfect romantic love will fulfill every longing and desire we can experience. Pop culture, great writers, composers, playwrights, and painters give more ‘air time’ to the idea of finding complete fulfillment in another human being than perhaps any subject. Family court often gives a clarifying image of another reality.
As one always struggling with a sense of belonging in family, church, and the larger culture, it was quite stunning to suddenly feel admitted to the family of humanity at a new level for the first time ever. The prospect of marrying into a widow’s large family was captivating for one raised in a fragmented and isolated alcoholic household that never put down roots. Having attended the same university as my dearest, I had a wondrous sense of recapturing long-forgotten history from earlier years. In my initial romantic fugue, the idea my thoughts and beliefs would be valued and embraced was empowering to me in ways new. Was I about to really have an advocate, a champion of my own? Be a respected elder in a large family? Reality bit.
Studies have shown adults under the influence of marijuana and other substances believe they are producing museum-grade art. While intoxicated, given brushes and paint, inebriated artisans produce what they believed to be very high-quality original work. When detoxed they are astounded to see their less-than-stellar realities produced in altered states.
While intoxicated with being ‘in-love’ I came to believe our relationship was going to be an example to the world of how to do it exactly right. The divorce rate in America would plunge because people were finally going to see how to get it right. I had the idea the family I was to marry into was going to be astounded by my arrival, even bowing down in my presence with thanksgiving for the spiritual stature and maturity I was bringing into their midst. I discovered my own baggage was still on the dock and would likely keep me from making unfettered relational journeys down any road.
In recovery one of the primary goals of twelve step work is re-sizing our egos. Those struggling with addictions and alcoholism experience out-of-control ego issues. Substances in their early course confer a confidence and robustness of affect contributing greatly to their widespread abuse. Crack cocaine addicts tell me the sense of empowerment and sexual capacity in the early stages is inconceivable. Trying to recapture a fleeting false empowerment leads them to destructive efforts to regain that first high, lost forever in the massive casualties of addiction.
As recovery literature affirms, we believed we were ten feet tall and bullet proof. As we crashed and burned we came to discover we were anything but, coming to the realization we were powerless and unable to manage our own lives. Attempts to ‘manage’ the lives of others in this large extended family with my erudite writing were quickly rebuffed. Calling to task one who had caused me some potential legal grief, I expected a contrite apology and a correction in her behavior. I was blown off. Alas, my ideas about honesty and ethics don’t hold water in an increasingly secular culture, and I only received further confirmation of this. I’m truly powerless over people, places, and things.
Stunning to me is how often I have seen apparently sane sober people go onto Internet dating sites, shop, and meet another promising the keys to the city, only to have their lives destroyed by deception, financial ruin, relational issues with family, and the very kinds of dishonesty I recently called one to task about. Not a few are the individuals I have seen who gave up fine jobs, splendid histories, and a sense of belonging, to embark on a new journey down the yellow brick road, only to find themselves in dark forests with all manner of evil beasts. For many of these travelers there wasn’t a good witch of the West to show them the way back to Kansas. The City of Oz was never found.
Regularly I encounter people struggling with profound loneliness, who despite repeated violent divorces, still believe the only solution to their affective angst is to keep searching, looking for the one who can deliver them from this scourge. Dysfunction, chaotic relationships, and risk of catastrophic life experiences are viewed as better than being alone. I find no small number of people who opt for psychotropic drugs to numb the pain of being on a solo journey in life. Many find consequences of psychotropic drugs even more nefarious and elect to get off the yellow brick road altogether, terminating their lives with violent impulse. This past week three individuals in my world elected suicide, rather than finding their way clear of the dark trees in life.
I’ve recently been going through the experience of detoxing from my inebriated eros state, coming to realize the art work I have been producing is rather poor. I’ve not been building the relationship which will become the topic of morning talk shows. As the experience of being in love fades, reality comes into sharper focus for me. Family issues, financial concerns, medical challenges, my inability to accept others for who they are, and my own lack of life focus have shown me to be standing in dark shadows wondering how it was I managed to get myself into such a place, with its hidden risks.
I cannot but be bewildered, realizing something seeming so real and solid was little more than evanescent ephemeral wisps in my affective state. I wonder a lot now about just how one goes about building a successful marriage. I suddenly feel totally ignorant on the subject. I nearly succeeded in dragging another into the vacuum of my knowledge, at her great peril.
Our one saving redemption proved to be a nearly simultaneous loss of that wondrous affective state song writers love to write about. We suffered through surprisingly little emotional injury at the demise of something once so overwhelming to both of us. We sort of stand around now in bewilderment asking, “What happened?” What was that?
Half a century ago Erich Fromm wrote his immensely successful The Art of Loving, articulating love in the Western experience. He describes our desperate bid to ‘belong to the herd’, to achieve union, to avoid the acute anxiety which derives from separation. Separation is seen as a great existential evil, one to be avoided at all costs. Fromm posits alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide are symptoms of failure of herd conformity. We grasp onto those people we believe can deliver us from this acute anxiety of separation. Did I do this very thing thinking another could empower me to suddenly feel admitted to the family of humanity at a new level for the first time ever? Probably.
The need to be included, to belong, cannot be overstated. Failure to Thrive is a recognized condition in infants and young children who die despite being kept clean, well fed, warm, and safe. Children who are not touched with affection or nurtured died despite their biological needs being completely fulfilled. As adults, we may not die directly for our lack of belonging but the intense affective pain of separateness drives millions to find relief in the murky world of addictions. Anyone who has been shunned or excluded by a group knows the intensity of being removed from the herd. Family black sheep know this well. Social nerds know this. Alcoholics know it. I know it.
Even half a century ago Fromm described a growing dysfunction of herd conformity; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay in the herd. Many writers since have articulated on the profound depression, anxiety, rage, and social pathology becoming endemic because so many of us are feeling left out of our families, work places, social groups, neighborhoods, even places of worship.
Finding individuals of the opposite sex with similar feelings, we seek salvation in each other, often ending up with little more than the annihilation that occurs when matter and anti-matter collide. This annihilation energizes a vast legal system profiting from damage control. In cultures with increasing inability to include individuals within the herd, unbounded expectations on romantic partners to fully compensate for group failure is a near-certain script for divorce and further exacerbation of Fromm’s acute separateness.
Thousands of years ago we lived in far smaller social landscapes where inclusion was far easier, the angst of anonymity much less. Strangers were a rarity. Even so, contemporary writers of ancient times recognized we already had long standing struggles with issues of belonging, of feeling we are really loveable. Wise sages suggested the love of God was the only real cure, the only thing that could take away our acute pain of separateness. Saul of Tarsus came to this realization on his Damascus Road experience and suggested:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Perhaps this is enough for me and I no longer have to wander around in the dark forest afraid of the goblins of loneliness, isolation and despair. Finding true belonging in God’s love alone I can begin anew, experiencing an effervescent state, all of life wondrous, magical, shimmering with possibility.
Finding our True Strength 8-7-11
Anderson, South Carolina
Working with those in recovery from alcoholism and addictions allows an unusual perspective, not unlike that experienced by clergy and physicians. Battered by traumas and losses attendant with addiction, once-highly-functioning adults wash up onto the shores of our recovery programs powerless to manage even the smallest affairs of their truncated lives. Having been beaten down by the rigors of addiction, these individuals often seem nearly devoid of defended egos. In their pain and desperation they’ve become teachable, respectful, willing to try something new, free of argument, perhaps lacking in good judgment.
Foundational to all successful recovery is a belief one must admit to complete powerlessness over people, places, things, and of course the offending agent of addiction; be it alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, ad infinitum. Recovery workers as well as priests and physicians can’t but help note the profound emotional accessibility existing in ‘new arrivals.’ Patients in the midst of medical crisis are inclined to be compliant and teachable. Parishioners in spiritual crisis imbue their priests with great power, open to their every word.
Addicts and alcoholics newly arrived in recovery are often free of defended ego, pilgrims frequently emotionally accessible in ways not usually seen in stronger higher-functioning individuals. Intense authentic and honest communication and affective expression can be nothing short of intoxicating, nearly hypnotic for those they reach out to. Their powerlessness can be most attractive, even in a secular culture worshipping power and fame.
Those in healing professions often find themselves taken in by this hypnotic state, ending up in relationships with patients and clients far beyond appropriate boundaries of professional conduct. It’s no different in recovery work. In twelve step programs references are often made to ‘thirteenth stepping.’ Vulnerable individuals newly arrived in recovery are at high risk for falling into premature and inappropriate relationships with those claiming extended sobriety and clean time. Large numbers of romances, marriages, and children arise in recovery rooms. The number of romances and marriages occurring between patients in detox and rehab facilities is daunting, often with catastrophic results. There’s an often alluring emotional accessibility present in those beaten down by addictions and alcoholism. Those caught up in alcoholism and addiction will quickly confess drinking and using were embraced because of how it made them feel. The feelings one can get from feeling needed, loved, cared for, and reassured can be fully as powerful.
A suggestion often made to newcomers in recovery is to avoid making major decisions during year one of recovery, especially romantic ones. In recovery we often hear strategies to avoid the ‘stinking thinking’ which often precedes relapse. A failed or dysfunctional romance must be one of the most fertile soils for ‘stinking thinking’ on earth. We strongly remind members that “sobriety comes first, everything else will follow.” No premature or inappropriate romance is worth risking a hard-won beachhead in sobriety.
In my five-year journey it’s been my personal experience to have fallen sway to the intoxication of being needed, respected, cared for, even treated a bit as an oracle. This affective hypnosis has more than once started me into ‘stinking thinking’, imagining that being a strong, ethical, knowledge, able mentor capable of protecting and nurturing a hapless newcomer was a good idea. Alas, I was a giant only in my own mind. Somewhere the suggestion to avoid romance in the rooms took root years ago in my psyche and I have no regrets, having gone no further than the original twelve steps. Picking ‘low hanging fruit’ in recovery rooms must be one of the crassest uncivil things one could think of doing.
We were created social beings with strong needs for validation, affirmation, reassurance, and belonging. When our lives have unraveled, these needs become acute. Shining knights on white horses easily capture our attention. Even for those not caught up in alcoholism or addition, living lives devoid of purpose or meaning can set them up to seek solutions where they are not to be found. When we seek Divine guidance in our lives we are able to find solutions to our deepest needs in the appropriate places.
Paradoxically, learning to live in a powerless state, dependent on God, can be the most powerful thing we will ever do. Culture tells us we must learn to show only our powerful, strong, confident, controlled, independent personality. It’s when we learn to reveal our needy, frightened, doubting, angry aspects we can really gain a sense of power operating in our lives. Showing our soft side paradoxically will allow us to build lasting relationships, feeling closer to others who will feel far closer to us. It helps us grow in self-esteem and self-acceptance. It works both ways.
Times without number I’ve felt ‘emotionally ‘safer’ with new arrivals still tenderized by their nightmare journeys into addiction. As they have gained affective strength and ego reasserts itself, this sense of safety often dissipates. Anger, ego, and boundary issues often re-emerge unless newcomers are guided into a humble dependency on God in all aspects of their lives, staying mindful of their true powerlessness.
The revered Henri Nouwen gained his place in history by developing a system of thought in which those of us in the healing professions learned true power comes from revealing our own weaknesses first. Patients and clients were not asked to do anything healers had not already done first – own their own weaknesses and powerlessness. In his best-selling Wounded Healer Nouwen broken down conventions of power for those wearing white coats and collars. In recovery we who’ve been landed for some time reveal our own powerlessness and how we came to find places of power. We share our experience, strength and hope with those who so often arrive hopeless.
We find our true strength when we learn to handle our powerlessness appropriately. That strength does not come from white knights on great steeds or from being needed by those who have reached maximum vulnerability in their life journeys.
We continue on a journey of learning; that we were powerless to manage the affairs of our lives, that God could do something about our powerlessness, and that by turning the affairs of our lives over to His care, we could find a form of powerful living previously unknown to us, even to trusting Him in the matters of our deepest desires, a true connection to those around us and a connection to our Creator.
“He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
Working with those in recovery from alcoholism and addictions allows an unusual perspective, not unlike that experienced by clergy and physicians. Battered by traumas and losses attendant with addiction, once-highly-functioning adults wash up onto the shores of our recovery programs powerless to manage even the smallest affairs of their truncated lives. Having been beaten down by the rigors of addiction, these individuals often seem nearly devoid of defended egos. In their pain and desperation they’ve become teachable, respectful, willing to try something new, free of argument, perhaps lacking in good judgment.
Foundational to all successful recovery is a belief one must admit to complete powerlessness over people, places, things, and of course the offending agent of addiction; be it alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, ad infinitum. Recovery workers as well as priests and physicians can’t but help note the profound emotional accessibility existing in ‘new arrivals.’ Patients in the midst of medical crisis are inclined to be compliant and teachable. Parishioners in spiritual crisis imbue their priests with great power, open to their every word.
Addicts and alcoholics newly arrived in recovery are often free of defended ego, pilgrims frequently emotionally accessible in ways not usually seen in stronger higher-functioning individuals. Intense authentic and honest communication and affective expression can be nothing short of intoxicating, nearly hypnotic for those they reach out to. Their powerlessness can be most attractive, even in a secular culture worshipping power and fame.
Those in healing professions often find themselves taken in by this hypnotic state, ending up in relationships with patients and clients far beyond appropriate boundaries of professional conduct. It’s no different in recovery work. In twelve step programs references are often made to ‘thirteenth stepping.’ Vulnerable individuals newly arrived in recovery are at high risk for falling into premature and inappropriate relationships with those claiming extended sobriety and clean time. Large numbers of romances, marriages, and children arise in recovery rooms. The number of romances and marriages occurring between patients in detox and rehab facilities is daunting, often with catastrophic results. There’s an often alluring emotional accessibility present in those beaten down by addictions and alcoholism. Those caught up in alcoholism and addiction will quickly confess drinking and using were embraced because of how it made them feel. The feelings one can get from feeling needed, loved, cared for, and reassured can be fully as powerful.
A suggestion often made to newcomers in recovery is to avoid making major decisions during year one of recovery, especially romantic ones. In recovery we often hear strategies to avoid the ‘stinking thinking’ which often precedes relapse. A failed or dysfunctional romance must be one of the most fertile soils for ‘stinking thinking’ on earth. We strongly remind members that “sobriety comes first, everything else will follow.” No premature or inappropriate romance is worth risking a hard-won beachhead in sobriety.
In my five-year journey it’s been my personal experience to have fallen sway to the intoxication of being needed, respected, cared for, even treated a bit as an oracle. This affective hypnosis has more than once started me into ‘stinking thinking’, imagining that being a strong, ethical, knowledge, able mentor capable of protecting and nurturing a hapless newcomer was a good idea. Alas, I was a giant only in my own mind. Somewhere the suggestion to avoid romance in the rooms took root years ago in my psyche and I have no regrets, having gone no further than the original twelve steps. Picking ‘low hanging fruit’ in recovery rooms must be one of the crassest uncivil things one could think of doing.
We were created social beings with strong needs for validation, affirmation, reassurance, and belonging. When our lives have unraveled, these needs become acute. Shining knights on white horses easily capture our attention. Even for those not caught up in alcoholism or addition, living lives devoid of purpose or meaning can set them up to seek solutions where they are not to be found. When we seek Divine guidance in our lives we are able to find solutions to our deepest needs in the appropriate places.
Paradoxically, learning to live in a powerless state, dependent on God, can be the most powerful thing we will ever do. Culture tells us we must learn to show only our powerful, strong, confident, controlled, independent personality. It’s when we learn to reveal our needy, frightened, doubting, angry aspects we can really gain a sense of power operating in our lives. Showing our soft side paradoxically will allow us to build lasting relationships, feeling closer to others who will feel far closer to us. It helps us grow in self-esteem and self-acceptance. It works both ways.
Times without number I’ve felt ‘emotionally ‘safer’ with new arrivals still tenderized by their nightmare journeys into addiction. As they have gained affective strength and ego reasserts itself, this sense of safety often dissipates. Anger, ego, and boundary issues often re-emerge unless newcomers are guided into a humble dependency on God in all aspects of their lives, staying mindful of their true powerlessness.
The revered Henri Nouwen gained his place in history by developing a system of thought in which those of us in the healing professions learned true power comes from revealing our own weaknesses first. Patients and clients were not asked to do anything healers had not already done first – own their own weaknesses and powerlessness. In his best-selling Wounded Healer Nouwen broken down conventions of power for those wearing white coats and collars. In recovery we who’ve been landed for some time reveal our own powerlessness and how we came to find places of power. We share our experience, strength and hope with those who so often arrive hopeless.
We find our true strength when we learn to handle our powerlessness appropriately. That strength does not come from white knights on great steeds or from being needed by those who have reached maximum vulnerability in their life journeys.
We continue on a journey of learning; that we were powerless to manage the affairs of our lives, that God could do something about our powerlessness, and that by turning the affairs of our lives over to His care, we could find a form of powerful living previously unknown to us, even to trusting Him in the matters of our deepest desires, a true connection to those around us and a connection to our Creator.
“He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
You Give Them Something to Eat 8-2-11
Anderson, South Carolina
In her A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackermann provides her readers with a luscious literary foray into the human experience of our five senses. Her description of our shared experiences with taste is no exception; leaving us wondering how we ever manage to eat anything mindlessly. Eastern practices of mindfulness often include exercises in eating consciously, savoring flavors, textures, and colors. In a frantic multi-tasking world eating has devolved into snatching bits of fuel while waiting at red lights. The fast food industry understands for many people, eating is something to be done quickly while driving; waiting for food to be prepared is often anathema to the American life style.
In ancient Rome eating vast meals extending over several days was the height of luxury. Emperors spent enormous resources to stage meals of inconceivable opulence. Little changed over the next twenty centuries. The overly corpulent Henry the Eighth was right in line with Romans emperors. The kitchen wing at Hampton Court Palace in London is staggering in scale. Hundreds of workers spent their lives preparing vast spreads consumed by those privileged to manifest gluttony in excess. Whole forests of magnificent oak trees were burned in the great fireplaces of Hampton Court’s kitchens. One’s ability to stage immense meals was a hallmark of ultimate wealth throughout history before the advent of consumer goods allowed wealth to be manifest in other ostentatious ways.
Festival meals remain the centerpiece of most religious traditions. The Passover meal is central to Jewish religious experience. Countless other festivals and feasts fill in the Jewish calendar. Christianity is even more focused on festival meals and the metaphors eating provides. Jesus’ last recorded act with his disciples was the convening of what has become known as the Last Supper. In Eastern churches and all of our Western liturgical churches, Holy Eucharist is the highest sacrament and central to religious practice.
Communion takes metaphors of dining to the highest level. At the completion of Communion, millions offer a thanksgiving prayer which includes “We thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son.” The metaphor is intended to bring us to a place of complete union with the Trinity. The Roman Catholic Church through the doctrine of transubstantiation insures the strength of the imagery by declaring consecrated wine and bread to be the actual body and blood of Jesus.
Critics often make pejorative comments about Christians practicing cannibalism. Ackerman in her extensive chapter on taste reveals history to have been immensely more tolerant of this practice than any of us want to admit. Cannibalism is one of the strongest cultural taboos in the present era. Extensive human sacrifice and cannibalism were mainstream in many cultures of the Old and New Worlds. Those partaking of the sacraments of Eucharist certainly do not perceive themselves as violating such taboos. Dogma and theological thought surrounding Eucharist steer the faithful away from such pejorative views of something embraced by billions. Inarguably, no matter one’s view, sharing meals of any kind carries huge emotional, spiritual, and social significance in the human experience. Little is more intimate in human commerce than the sharing of meals.
The recorded miracles of Jesus during his three years of public ministry most prominently involved the miraculous production of copious amounts of food and drink. In His first public miracle Jesus made one hundred thirty eight gallons of wine for a wedding reception. It was of such high quality as to capture the wonder and attention of the chief steward in a very wealthy household. Other miracles included the feeding of as many as five thousand men plus women and children. Small amounts of snack food ultimately fed countless thousands with as many as twelve large baskets of leftovers being picked from the grass. On one occasion Jesus told hapless fishermen to recast their nets after a fruitless night of labor. The subsequent catch was so vast as to risk the boat capsizing and priceless nets being torn asunder.
In Maslow’s need hierarchy food is our most important primary need. Without food everything else becomes moot. Without adequate food intake, our lives become miserable experience of eking out survival. For hundreds of millions, procurement of adequate food is a 24/7 effort, often ending in failure. Billions more are food insecure; enough to eat is a never a sure thing. Throughout most of history food inequity was a marker of wealth and power. Kings and emperors ate to excess while millions died of starvation. During the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, one third of Ireland’s population succumbed while the republic remained a net exporter of food. Much of the exported food went to the wealthy in England and elsewhere.
The US Department of Agriculture spent millions to conduct a multi-year Food Loss Study to assess food use and waste in America. The findings were rather astounding. More than half the food produced in America is never consumed by humans or animals. Fourteen percent of wasted food is discarded in unopened containers still within date. Six million pounds of hot prepared food is discarded every day by restaurants. Food waste is the single largest component of municipal solid waste facilities. These thirty four million tons of waste would feed 100 million people in perpetuity. Often this food is put into dumpsters and laced with ammonia so as to prevent food insecure individuals from making use of it. The value of food lost in America is estimated at $100 billion annually.
Perhaps the most flagrant waste of food is seen on cruise ships competing much as did the ancient emperors and kings to outdo each other. Obesity is an American epidemic putting health and public finance at grave risk in coming years. Strangely, in a land awash in too much food, many are dying from overeating while millions more stand in line at public pantries hoping to gain food security.
Daniel Quinn wrote his best selling Ishmael series to highlight many of the inequities and resultant insecurities modern cultures find themselves confronting. He describes a civilization where “Takers” extract many of the resources leaving the majority of individuals without enough to sustain meaningful quality of life. Haunting descriptions were given of the incredible power consolidated when people figure out how to control food chains. Putting an economic lock and key on the food chain has made a small number of Takers amazingly wealthy while leaving billions of people economically and food insecure.
As far back as twenty centuries people were beginning to show callous disregard for food welfare. Even Jesus’ disciples were not concerned about food for those sitting at His feet; asking Him to send everyone away to buy themselves something to eat. He told the disciples “You give them something to eat.” ‘Them’ was five thousand men plus women and children. The well-known account in Matthew’s gospel includes the detail of twelve baskets of scraps being left over. Perhaps Jesus’ imperative “You give them something to eat” is one we need to take to heart in an era of rampant food waste and food insecurity.
Is what we do with the food in our refrigerators and restaurants perhaps more indicative of our commitment to sacramental living than what we do with the wine and wafers in our pretty silver and gold chalices, ciboriums, and patens?
In her A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackermann provides her readers with a luscious literary foray into the human experience of our five senses. Her description of our shared experiences with taste is no exception; leaving us wondering how we ever manage to eat anything mindlessly. Eastern practices of mindfulness often include exercises in eating consciously, savoring flavors, textures, and colors. In a frantic multi-tasking world eating has devolved into snatching bits of fuel while waiting at red lights. The fast food industry understands for many people, eating is something to be done quickly while driving; waiting for food to be prepared is often anathema to the American life style.
In ancient Rome eating vast meals extending over several days was the height of luxury. Emperors spent enormous resources to stage meals of inconceivable opulence. Little changed over the next twenty centuries. The overly corpulent Henry the Eighth was right in line with Romans emperors. The kitchen wing at Hampton Court Palace in London is staggering in scale. Hundreds of workers spent their lives preparing vast spreads consumed by those privileged to manifest gluttony in excess. Whole forests of magnificent oak trees were burned in the great fireplaces of Hampton Court’s kitchens. One’s ability to stage immense meals was a hallmark of ultimate wealth throughout history before the advent of consumer goods allowed wealth to be manifest in other ostentatious ways.
Festival meals remain the centerpiece of most religious traditions. The Passover meal is central to Jewish religious experience. Countless other festivals and feasts fill in the Jewish calendar. Christianity is even more focused on festival meals and the metaphors eating provides. Jesus’ last recorded act with his disciples was the convening of what has become known as the Last Supper. In Eastern churches and all of our Western liturgical churches, Holy Eucharist is the highest sacrament and central to religious practice.
Communion takes metaphors of dining to the highest level. At the completion of Communion, millions offer a thanksgiving prayer which includes “We thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son.” The metaphor is intended to bring us to a place of complete union with the Trinity. The Roman Catholic Church through the doctrine of transubstantiation insures the strength of the imagery by declaring consecrated wine and bread to be the actual body and blood of Jesus.
Critics often make pejorative comments about Christians practicing cannibalism. Ackerman in her extensive chapter on taste reveals history to have been immensely more tolerant of this practice than any of us want to admit. Cannibalism is one of the strongest cultural taboos in the present era. Extensive human sacrifice and cannibalism were mainstream in many cultures of the Old and New Worlds. Those partaking of the sacraments of Eucharist certainly do not perceive themselves as violating such taboos. Dogma and theological thought surrounding Eucharist steer the faithful away from such pejorative views of something embraced by billions. Inarguably, no matter one’s view, sharing meals of any kind carries huge emotional, spiritual, and social significance in the human experience. Little is more intimate in human commerce than the sharing of meals.
The recorded miracles of Jesus during his three years of public ministry most prominently involved the miraculous production of copious amounts of food and drink. In His first public miracle Jesus made one hundred thirty eight gallons of wine for a wedding reception. It was of such high quality as to capture the wonder and attention of the chief steward in a very wealthy household. Other miracles included the feeding of as many as five thousand men plus women and children. Small amounts of snack food ultimately fed countless thousands with as many as twelve large baskets of leftovers being picked from the grass. On one occasion Jesus told hapless fishermen to recast their nets after a fruitless night of labor. The subsequent catch was so vast as to risk the boat capsizing and priceless nets being torn asunder.
In Maslow’s need hierarchy food is our most important primary need. Without food everything else becomes moot. Without adequate food intake, our lives become miserable experience of eking out survival. For hundreds of millions, procurement of adequate food is a 24/7 effort, often ending in failure. Billions more are food insecure; enough to eat is a never a sure thing. Throughout most of history food inequity was a marker of wealth and power. Kings and emperors ate to excess while millions died of starvation. During the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, one third of Ireland’s population succumbed while the republic remained a net exporter of food. Much of the exported food went to the wealthy in England and elsewhere.
The US Department of Agriculture spent millions to conduct a multi-year Food Loss Study to assess food use and waste in America. The findings were rather astounding. More than half the food produced in America is never consumed by humans or animals. Fourteen percent of wasted food is discarded in unopened containers still within date. Six million pounds of hot prepared food is discarded every day by restaurants. Food waste is the single largest component of municipal solid waste facilities. These thirty four million tons of waste would feed 100 million people in perpetuity. Often this food is put into dumpsters and laced with ammonia so as to prevent food insecure individuals from making use of it. The value of food lost in America is estimated at $100 billion annually.
Perhaps the most flagrant waste of food is seen on cruise ships competing much as did the ancient emperors and kings to outdo each other. Obesity is an American epidemic putting health and public finance at grave risk in coming years. Strangely, in a land awash in too much food, many are dying from overeating while millions more stand in line at public pantries hoping to gain food security.
Daniel Quinn wrote his best selling Ishmael series to highlight many of the inequities and resultant insecurities modern cultures find themselves confronting. He describes a civilization where “Takers” extract many of the resources leaving the majority of individuals without enough to sustain meaningful quality of life. Haunting descriptions were given of the incredible power consolidated when people figure out how to control food chains. Putting an economic lock and key on the food chain has made a small number of Takers amazingly wealthy while leaving billions of people economically and food insecure.
As far back as twenty centuries people were beginning to show callous disregard for food welfare. Even Jesus’ disciples were not concerned about food for those sitting at His feet; asking Him to send everyone away to buy themselves something to eat. He told the disciples “You give them something to eat.” ‘Them’ was five thousand men plus women and children. The well-known account in Matthew’s gospel includes the detail of twelve baskets of scraps being left over. Perhaps Jesus’ imperative “You give them something to eat” is one we need to take to heart in an era of rampant food waste and food insecurity.
Is what we do with the food in our refrigerators and restaurants perhaps more indicative of our commitment to sacramental living than what we do with the wine and wafers in our pretty silver and gold chalices, ciboriums, and patens?
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