No, not thinking about the 80s movie with James Spader and Andie MacDowell. Well, maybe. It was a movie about turning in on the self, because everything else had failed. Dissatisfaction with jobs, personal lives, spouses, children, whatever "flavor of the day" you might choose. Emptiness. Lacking. Not measuring up. Missing the mark. Where's the joy, man? Where's the joy? Risky Business, Wall Street, Pretty Woman...everything and everyone is objectified. And the money...so much disposable money! And so much dissatisfaction with living. Oh, yes, and all the suicides in Plano. How can a 15 year old brain get its head around the glaring contradictions of what it saw every day? Excess, so many choices, at the price of a family that never shared a meal together. Maybe worse than Viet Nam...maybe not worse, but definitely more personal.
I'm stuck in the illusion theme for now. I've got Billie Holiday playing on the CD player: "Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on...sometime when you think its on, baby, it has turned off and gone."
This August month, I've been encountering so many disillusioned people. So much dissatisfaction, so much pain, that often manifests in a suicide attempt. I recall a woman at a church, so dissatisfied and angry about her husband leaving. She left a email note for her pastor. It indicated her plans. The pastor called the police and together they went over to her apt. He knocked on the door and called out to her. They then heard the gunshot, broke down the door and discovered she had shot off half of her face, but was not dead. She lived about 6 hours longer. I sat with the woman who sat with her until she died. The woman was strong enough to sit with her friend, who had become so angry about what she was losing, she forgot that she still had a 10 year old son to care for, and who loved her. The survivor, her friend, had wounds to heal as well. Being present for our life changing events, both good and bad, need honoring and quite often ritual to heal us.
That was one of many times that I have sat with men and women who tell me their tragedies, their pain, their helplessness in being a witness to the suffering of a loved one or even a stranger. I recall one of my sixth graders in a confirmation class, telling me about how he and his mom happened on an accident (his mom was a nurse) and how he kept talking with the little girl lying on the road, badly burned from the wreck. He was so glad to be there with her. We never know another's story, we shouldn't assume, but we need to be awake to the clues and the bread crumbs people leave for us. I'm good at listening to stories of violence, well because, I've been around it a lot. It makes me a good listener, at least about those things. We each have some kind of charism that makes us a unique member of the Body of Christ. We need to name it and then use it to help ourselves and others.
I was reminded of that last night, retelling the story to someone I didn't know too well. It shows up every now and then. It's August. Something I heard or felt must have needed the story. Or perhaps its personal. It's hot. The things I've encountered this week: Sex, lies and Videotape.
Of the three, lying has always been the most deadly for me. Lying was the first overt sin committed in the Garden. It was perhaps the reason we were thrown out of the Garden, not that we had done something wrong, but that we were unwilling to admit it, to own it.
If I catch someone in a lie, when it is a lie not directed toward an idea or an event, and possibly toward another person, I can be present with it, hold it and kind of ride with them until they get to the next place. But if the lie is directed at me, I take it personally. Not a misunderstanding, mind you, but a bold face lie, all my compassion goes out the window. I have to work hard to come back into the room. It is a reminder to me of how really big my ego is.
And when I become brutally aware that I am angry about what was said and perhaps why, I have to ask myself...do I have the heart of a nun? Can I stand and take the abuse of someone lying to my face and still love them? Can I not get hot under my collar because I disagree with what I have just seen or experienced? Can I think it through before it unsettles my soul? And I sigh and realize how far I am from being the perfect priest. (Yes, I deliberately put that here)
I have to remember that most of our lives are spent in an illusion. That Corinthians 13 passage on love is 100% correct: For now I see in a mirror dimly, then I will see face to face. Nothing I can see or say will be the Truth, all I can share is my journey, my perspective. I can only know what I see and even that is filled with clouds and dirt.
Everyone I know that has committed suicide has done it because he/she was suffering from believing an illusion. Most of our pain and suffering comes from living inside the illusion. This truth should being nihilism or even the dark passage in Ecclesiastes "All things are vanity (nothing)." I mean, of course it is true...but it's like Viktor Frankl wrote: Suffering, once it has a name ceases to be suffering.
We need to name what torments us. If we can name the devil we are already halfway to defeating him. But it is all so treacherous...the path is filled with rocks and critters to distract us from what we seek. Then we get the answer and the pendulum swings the other way.
When we think we know, when we think we have it figured out, when we rest contentedly in the knowledge that we have discovered the proof to the theorem, the solution to the equation, or the infallible dogma of the Doctrines of God, we are in the greatest danger of pulling the trigger on our own lives.
Looking at things from a human point of view, there is very little to be happy about. There is little or no joy. We have to reach out for the transcendent. We have to divorce ourselves from our egos without losing the self. The more humility was can embrace, the more that life becomes beautiful.
Humility is that thin space where we know that we are always less but still enough to be present to ourselves and each other.
And that is so hard to do. Especially for people in great pain. How to be humble in pain, that is the true character of a saint. Maybe we can't really discard our illusions, but we might be able to at least acknowledge that they are illusions. That we really can't see clearly and maybe a bold face lie, was the best that person could offer in the situation.
Love them where they are.
Love, Cindy
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