On learning to love

I'm risking some TMI (too much information) here. I do so to show the deep struggle that is the life of earnest prayer---not just praying for things, but the deeper way of prayer leading to the goal of the spiritual life: union with God. In July of 2009, I was wrestling with the pain and humiliation of a failed marriage and wondering what it all meant, how I could continue on.

"What is this school you've got me in, Lord?"

And God said: "You once prayed, 'Teach me to love, till I love Love above all, till I am Love.' This school's is an answer to your prayer."

"Yes, I remember, but I didn't think learning to love would require this. I guess I thought love would be enjoyable."

"Love will cost you everything."

"Then I didn't mean it."

"You didn't know then what learning to love would mean. Who does? But I mean for you to learn it. Do you think this was only your idea?"

"Then I'm tired of it. I'm hurt, broken, pretty much a failure. I guess I'm tired of You too. You make things pretty tough."

"And sometimes I'm tired of you. You make things pretty tough. But this doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it. It's your attachments that make it feel like this learning-to-love is killing you. That part of you must die. Unless it does, you'll never live in Love. This isn't the end of you; it's the beginning. So stop resisting, and let Me take these lesser things from you. They are not the true you anyway."

Let God kiss you

Here's a revolutionary spiritual practice that can bring you into the present and can change your experience of this moment:

With only a very few exceptions, welcome whatever you face in this present moment as if you'd asked God for it specifically.

You spend a lot of time dwelling on what you want instead of what is. You waste a lot of good energy fighting your way through this present moment, because it's not what you thought you'd signed up for or what you think God should have given you. You dream of a better job, a better body, a better friend or spouse or child or boss. And you're in essence praying for deliverance from this moment. But what if you're praying against the present God's given you? What difference would it make today, right now, if you yielded and embraced this moment---even its pain---as a gift from God?

Of course there must be exceptions. No one should accept as gift the cruel things humans can do to each other. Those are more rare than you may think. While you may suffered great cruelty at a moment the past, you're not facing it at this very moment. The pain was real, but right now it's a pain that can only live in you with the permission of your memory. Let it go. It's hurt you too long.

Come into this moment.

Be.

Here. Now.

Breathe.

Let God kiss you.

Painful things can hold exquisite beauty in its place

Usually, I feel a sense of accomplishment when I come to the end of a book.  I close the book and put it back on the shelf and feel no compulsion to reread it.  But once in a blue moon, I come the end of a book and grieve reading the last few sentences.  I'll never again get to read the book for the first time. In 2006, I felt that way with Will Dalyrimple's, From the Holy Mountain.  This morning, I read the final word, "Selah," in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, paused, and wept.

The Red Tent is a deeply moving retelling of the biblical story of Jacob's kin, told from the vantage point of the women.  It's a tale of rare beauty, terrible brutality, and of suffering redeemed.

After these grueling years of my own suffering, I find my journey reframed by this ancient tale freshly retold.  After brokenness and loss and death, a new wholeness is coming.  After her own long, hard road of suffering, Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob says, "The painful things seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place."

I like that.  Pain made beautiful.  Somehow---both a gift of God and the fruit of our own dogged determination to put one foot in front of the other.  Pain is not forgotten or trivialized.  Rather, there comes a point when you begin to realize that your knotty pain is keeping the beads of an exquisite beauty in place.  You awaken to realize that even death has lost its cruel sting.

Suffering and death, no longer enemies, become "the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art.  Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death."

Suffering winnows and refines until only love remains.  If it does that---if we allow it to do that---death will lose its sting.  And suffering becomes our teacher.

Solomon once said that "love is strong as death."  He was wrong.  It's stronger.  For love alone is immortal---and so are we, when our suffering's stripped us of every lesser thing.

PTSD and spiritual practice

A reader commented on my recent post, Suffering doesn't mean tolerating abuse.  What she says is very important, and adds urgency to what I've said before.

I really appreciate the awareness you're been fostering concerning mental illness, especially depression. It's something that is highly stigmatized and misunderstood, and too often dismissed in church communities. I would like to bring up another mental illness that is also misunderstood, dismissed, and often not even believed to exist: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD).

Your description of an abuse victim suffering from an internal abuser after the external abuse has stopped is, I believe, a classic description of PTSD. And though I don't think you were at all trying to imply in your post that abuse is something one should just be able to "get over", and I agree that the process of getting out of one's thoughts can be helpful in the healing process.  But I think that a sufferer of PTSD usually needs a lot more.

Too often in our culture communities tend to deny the abuse itself, as well as the fallout---the reality of the symptoms of PTSD, which are the normal human response to trauma. The further tragedy is that PTSD is highly treatable with a number of therapeutic approaches, but most abuse victims don't get the treatment they need, either because they don't know about it or because it's really expensive.

The big thing I would like to stress is that the symptoms of PTSD, including the feelings you describe in your post, are not the result of any kind of failing on the part of the victim, and that to imply that they are does further damage to the sufferer.

I don't think you're implying this, but a reader who suffers from PTSD might misunderstand you---since one of the symptoms often related to PTSD is the way the sufferer feels responsible for and guilty of the things that one suffers, even though that's not the case.  And given the pervasiveness of abuse in our culture (statistically more American women have been raped than hold college degrees), it's probable that you have quite a number of PTSD sufferers among your readers.

Again, I greatly appreciate your engaging in discussion of mental illness. It's terribly important and necessary, and we can't have healing in our society without such discussion.

For an excellent treatment of the relationship between spiritual practices like meditation and emotional distress like PTSD see this brief article by Dr.Robert Scaer.

Suffering doesn't mean tolerating abuse

Some disliked my choice of wording in a previous post. When I say, "When you're Real, you don't mind being hurt," it feels to them like I'm saying, "you don't care that you're hurt"---suffer, no matter, what comes your way.

I do not mean to say anything like that. If a woman is being abused, it would be wrong for me to suggest she should not care about being hurt. She should care and so should the rest of us. And she should do what it takes to end the abuse, move away from it, get help, seek justice, stand up for her God-breathed dignity---and us, with her.

When I say that "you don't mind being hurt," what I mean is that you want to get to the point where you're no longer getting hooked by your thoughts over and over again, obsessing in your mind about the wrong done to you, living unconsciously about the way your thoughts can drive you into a doom-loop of cognitive captivity.

My focus is your thought life. If with your feet you must walk away, if you need to protect your body, then by all means possible, do so.

And when you're free and have the safety to do so, then enter into a healing process so you can learn to let go of the outrage that can fester and hold you prisoner to the abuse you once experienced. Relinquish the resentment. Give up your grievance. You can do so, by becoming aware that of the fact that you will suffer, but your suffering doesn't have to define you. No one wants to suffer, but all of us will---some of us in awful ways. And I do not intend to minimize or render people passive to the inhumanity of some forms of suffering.

Instead, I want to invite you into a way to be honest about your suffering, while not tolerating the kind of suffering no human being should have to suffer.  The resurrection of Jesus means at least this:  Life is at work in you and will not rest until you are fully alive, fully free.  So, you should no longer tolerate abuse.  Neither should you let suffering define you, imprison you, or keep you suffering over your suffering.

Unless you learn to stop suffering over your suffering, the abuse will never stop, even if you're now living in safety. The abuse has just moved inside, into the realm of your mind. Your abuser is no longer outside you, but inside you. The thoughts of your mind have become the abuser, and your mind is much more difficult to escape.