I’ve come to the conclusion that knowing how to love others comes WITH, is born ALONGSIDE, knowing how to love yourself. Jesus himself said it: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” As people we love ourselves when we allow ourselves the freedom to be who we are while still leaving room for who we MIGHT be—when we allow ourselves the freedom of stillness and the freedom of transformation. The freedom of growth. Of trial and error. We love ourselves when we can accept that AT THIS POINT IN TIME we think like THIS and feel like THAT and dress in THAT MANNER but tomorrow all of that may change and you know what? It’s perfectly okay! We’re constantly evolving. We’re creatures sensitive to stimuli and no one is so set in his ways that he’s never changed by external phenomena like time and age and education and new environments and unexpected relationships with unlikely people. We love ourselves when we recognize that “ourself” isn’t static. Sometimes we have more to give and sometimes we have less to give but no matter what we deserve the same grace we show others. We take all our strengths and all our weaknesses and all our good hair days and all our bad hair days—we take what’s good in us and what could use some improvement—and we call it all lovely, beautiful, ACCEPTABLE, simply because it’s all of that TOGETHER, all the pretty and all the ugly, that makes us who we are.
We’re called to do the same with others. If I once believed in the existence of a perfect OTHER—a perfect friend or a perfect parent or a perfect leader—I now know better. Jesus never demanded perfection—the Pharisees did. Jesus demanded only authenticity: an authentic willingness to take up a cross and follow Him. Give like Him. Serve like Him. LOVE like him. When we love someone (note: LOVE and not IDOLIZE), we see both the parts that are lovable and the parts that are not; we see the wounds that have scarred over and the ones that still need healing; we see who they are when their hair is styled and their makeup is done but we remember who they were at 2 am the night before when they woke up sick and they weren’t presentable and nothing about them dazzled our eye. Being able to love another means letting go of the “should” and embracing the “is”—we stop foisting our own ideas and likes and convictions upon them and accept that they come stamped: their experiences and their circumstances and their prior relationships have irrevocably shaped their interior.
And the interior belongs to them. It’s an area over which we exert no control, no matter how much we’d sometimes like to change (note: FIX) their rough and rocky emotional terrain. That’s what grace is (the same kind Jesus lavishes on US): THEIR freedom to choose. THEIR freedom to make mistakes; to live imperfectly. OUR God-given ability to love DESPITE instead of BECAUSE. That’s why self-love is so critical. If we can’t love the lessons our mistakes taught us we won’t tolerate the mistakes of others; if we can’t love the growth and strength our scars represent we won’t understand or empathize with someone else’s battles. If we love ourselves only under flattering lighting we’ll never, NEVER, be able to see her darkness and still call her beloved. Because we are. Beloved, that is. All of us. That’s what’s so beautiful but so challenging about the commandment to love others as we love ourselves: we need a heart like God’s. It’s a choice that contradicts instinct. Loving like that—both ourselves and others—requires recognizing that grace is sufficient. We all come as we are. A little broken, a little jaded, a little unpolished and rough around the edges. We come and sit at the feet of the One whose love informs our own; whose love makes ours POSSIBLE. There’s no need for perfection there. His love—and by extension, OUR love—is enough.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
On a Wednesday, in a cafe, I watched it begin again
I’m finally ready. Ready to close an old book; ready to buy a new journal at Target (maybe I’ll buy one of those expensive sparkly ones!) and write something new. I’ll sing a new song. I’ll dance in the rain for the first time and let myself rejoice just because I believe there’s something to rejoice about no matter what comes my way. So I write this as both prologue and epilogue: a beginning disguised as an end, something beautiful that could only grow in the dark.
I’m closing the book on a past of what-ifs; should-have-beens; if-onlys—a past, in essence, viewed from a biased lens, much too riddled with disappointment, heartache, and the kind of sad, grey reality that shatters every fairytale you once believed in wholeheartedly. The past is a place I’ve dwelled in for too long. A place I’ve longed for with the unrealistic expectations of a child frozen in time. I’ve lived most of my life looking always backwards, see? In retrospect the landscape of my past is like a battlefield: there were victories and there were failures and ground was gained and loved ones were lost but all I see from this vantage point is barren terrain and monuments that are meant to bear testimony to everything that was seen and felt and experienced—monuments I erected so that I’d never, ever forget. It’s not a very pretty view. It’s definitely not a place where new dreams can blossom or new love can grow or new beauty can emerge. There’s nothing left there but the memory of what once was, and my yesterday is no longer a place I wish to revisit.
I no longer want to rehash everything—all the events and people and make-it-or-break-it moments—that happened or didn’t happen, that went according to plan or fell apart instead. What’s done is done; no amount of wishful thinking can alter the facts as they now stand. Looking back at that battlefield for the last time I can say this: there was pain. Unspeakable, I-feel-like-I’m-suffocating pain. There was joy too. Love like I’ve never, ever known. Tears that left me nauseated; laughter that induced hysteria; moments that were precious, that made me feel more alive than I thought possible; moments that left me aghast at the cruelty of the world; there was sorrow and there was love and there was disillusionment and there was friendship and there was anger and there was hope and there was fear—there was LIFE. Life lived to the best of my ability. Life at its peak: messy, feral, full of tragedies I didn’t expect and rewards I didn’t earn.
Was life unfair to me? Absolutely. Has anyone managed to live life and come out the other side unscathed? Not that I know of. Everyone has a story to tell. We all have our scars. We’re all, at best, DAMAGED in some way; pockmarked and wounded and left at the side of the road with broken limbs and broken wings and broken hearts. There’s always, always the person we were SUPPOSED to be and the person we BECAME; the person we should, could, WOULD have been and the person we’ve settled for. And, like me, too many people spend an infinite amount of time and energy wishing AWAY the life that happened to them, or willing away the scars that branded them, or rewriting the events of yesteryear so that they feel less cheated. Or maybe we do this so that we feel more vindicated. So that the blame will never, ever be cast on us or the decisions we make on a daily basis—it’s always pinned on our history. We’re guarded and selfish and unyielding because history taught us not to trust; we’re everything we hate and nothing we’d like to be because history told us it’s better to not try than to try and fail. Such a sad, broken world we come from. And we’ve inevitably been shaped by it, so without really realizing it we become sad, broken people.
The kind of people doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity because we never dare look forward. How can we when we’re always looking behind us, casting either longing, wistful glances at the good that somehow turned sour or disenchanted, disbelieving glares at the bad that overtook what was once good?
That’s my problem with modern-day therapy. Most of the time the past is remembered and revisited and reenacted, as if answers will suddenly come to us when we’re forced to recall Events A, B, and C; Person X, Y, and Z; Tragedy #4 and Heartbreak #2 and Disappointment #8. Most of us believe this is true, I think. We soul-search and delve through our pasts with magnifying glasses and a deposit-box of self-help jargon, trying to identify the point at which everything went wrong so that we can bandage an old wound and fix what was broken. As I see it, though, it’s not quite that simple. When you break a bone or crack a rib or puncture a lung the healing process is pretty straightforward—the damage can be precisely located, seen with an x-ray, and then it can be dealt with in the most obvious and effective way. Healing can occur. There’s often even little to no evidence that the damage occurred: a bone will set; a wound will scab and then new skin will emerge; a damaged organ can be operated upon and, if not healed entirely, at the very least be made functional. The damage is dealt with and then rarely thought of again. A once-fractured femur, for instance, doesn’t continue to ache and throb long after it’s been set and restored to its former usefulness. Broken hearts, unfortunately, DO. Broken spirits hurt even after the source of the pain has been removed. A broken sense of self—because your dad abandoned you or your mom didn’t affirm you enough or you came from a broken home and never went off to school with a warm brownie in your knapsack—leaves us crippled in a way a broken foot never does: it changes us. Forever.
When we break emotionally we’re changed by the experience permanently, for better or worse—with every heartbreak and every blow we’re dealt the trajectory of our life changes; the way we see the world changes; our belief system changes; the very world we inhabit CHANGES. I don’t think there’s a cure for that. I don’t believe it’s possible to sit on a therapist’s leather couch and “become” again that six-year old child who was dumped on an aunt’s doorstep and find healing in that place. It’s true that doing this might bring clarity to some of the “whys” of our past—but does understanding something ever change the fact that it happened? Does it lessen the hurt, soften the blow, act as a shield against the damage? I once spoke to a psychiatrist who told me the most honest thing I think I’ve ever heard from a health professional’s mouth: “Psychotherapy is fine. It might bring some understanding to the difficult and painful things of your past. But, to be honest, healing is a CHOICE. You have to wake up and say, ‘This is bull****.’ And you have to move on.”
Moving on, as I see it, doesn’t mean pretending the damage never happened. It did. It happened, and you didn’t deserve it, and you didn’t do anything to cause it, and it changed you because every fire does; every time there’s a discrepancy between “should have” and “was”, between “the ideal” and “the reality”, something happens inside us. The thing about the kind of damage we take medication for or see a shrink for is that it can’t be FIXED—it can’t be undone. That might make the situation seem hopeless, but that’s only the case if we equate fixing with HEALING. I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. Fixing something is making it like it was before, so that it operates in the same way it did before…we fix a damaged tire by either patching it up or replacing it altogether if the damage is severe…when we’re done the tire looks and functions the same as it did before the incident.
HEALING, on the other hand, just means that we learn to function, to THRIVE, even, in spite of the damaged parts. Think about what a scar looks like. It’s essentially DAMAGED SKIN, flesh that will never, ever look like it did before, that will never, ever BE the unmarked, unblemished thing it used to be. Think for a moment about what a scar IS. It’s a wound, some sort of DAMAGE, that HEALED. Can a wound be fixed? No. Healing, however, is not only possible but wholly inevitable. A wound will heal even if not actively tended to—as long as it’s kept clean and free of infection. In most cases nothing fancy is required…a simple cleaning or dressing of the wound will suffice, and then time does what it does best: it heals the hurt. Makes it go away, even if the scar remains. Our emotional wounds can be tended to in much the same way. As with a physical wound, the damage must be acknowledged—even when it’s ugly, even when it’s hard to look at, even when it’s in a place we’d rather others not know about. Secondly the wound must be cleared of all debris—all those macro- and microscopic foreign substances that may, if left, cause the wound to fester and decay.
This is where it gets challenging. In our lives someone or something hurts us and debris comes flying in from a million different directions, from a million different well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning sources: we’re told we should hold a grudge; we’re encouraged to do that and act like this and harden our heart and put up more walls; we’re told of a plethora of devices and attitudes and dispositions that might ease the pain and make us forget. When we’re hurting somewhere it’s hard to just let the wound be—so it’s sometimes easier to deal with the debris. To get lost in the junk; in the excess stuff that, if we really think about it, is as far removed from the damaged sight as it is possible to be.
Pain is how we know something isn’t right. It’s how our psyche tells us that something went amiss—and a wound is the evidence that we were affected; that, despite our best efforts, we got caught in the cross-fire. Healing is THERE, I believe. In that place where a hurt is self-sufficient, where it isn’t sandwiched between a thousand theories and quick-fixes, where it’s simply allowed to BE. Healing is found in that place where we’re hurt but don’t seek to understand or categorize or fix it; where we strive to accept only that something happened and we’re different people because of it and we still, NO MATTER WHAT, have an obligation to be all that we can be. Our wounds will scar. We still won’t understand, and it will still be unfair, and the evidence of the original wound will still, ALWAYS, be there…but the pain will no longer exist in the present. And, perhaps most importantly, it will no longer define our future.
I’ve lived too long with the misguided idea that I need to rectify the past in order to heal in the present and thrive in the future; that healing comes in retrospect rather than in progress. I no longer want to subscribe to that mindset. I am no longer interested in what happened yesterday—I am no longer concerned with trying to make sense of a past that evades tidy, concrete labeling. I’m realizing, slowly but surely, that I’m NOT the person I would have been had life not happened to me; I’m NOT the person I imagined I’d be when I was five; I’m NOT unmarked and I’m not without scars and I’m not unaffected by the events of my past, good or bad. But I’m nonetheless responsible for today. And for tomorrow. I can’t evade my responsibilities—my life, my SELF—simply because I didn’t get the fairy-tale life I thought I had to a right to. The truth is, fairy tales only exist in our imaginations. A life without struggle, without pain, isn’t life at all, because life is about the challenges that test our mettle; the scars that give us character; the horror stories that made us humble when we were arrogant, flexible when we were unyielding, compassionate when we were self-centered. Yesterday is no longer my responsibility, but I AM responsible for embracing life fully in the present moment. After all, the present is God’s greatest gift to us. The past already happened. The good, the bad, the disappointing—it’s all done with. The future is uncertain. It’s determined in part by circumstances and forces outside our control, but it’s also set in motion by the choices we make NOW. In the present moment. The future is shaped by TODAY’S decision to GET UP, get moving, and get on with it. Enough is enough. We have only THIS moment, THIS day, THIS opportunity to do THAT thing and love THOSE people and make a difference THERE. So don’t waste it. Don’t spend your life trying to understand yesterday or fearing that tomorrow will follow the same broken pattern as the past—close that book and begin writing your story NOW. Accept that your history changed you, shaped you, and believe that you can alter history on a bigger, grander, more universal scale if you choose to inhabit the present and fix your gaze forward rather than backward. God has called you, after all. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.
I’m closing the book on a past of what-ifs; should-have-beens; if-onlys—a past, in essence, viewed from a biased lens, much too riddled with disappointment, heartache, and the kind of sad, grey reality that shatters every fairytale you once believed in wholeheartedly. The past is a place I’ve dwelled in for too long. A place I’ve longed for with the unrealistic expectations of a child frozen in time. I’ve lived most of my life looking always backwards, see? In retrospect the landscape of my past is like a battlefield: there were victories and there were failures and ground was gained and loved ones were lost but all I see from this vantage point is barren terrain and monuments that are meant to bear testimony to everything that was seen and felt and experienced—monuments I erected so that I’d never, ever forget. It’s not a very pretty view. It’s definitely not a place where new dreams can blossom or new love can grow or new beauty can emerge. There’s nothing left there but the memory of what once was, and my yesterday is no longer a place I wish to revisit.
I no longer want to rehash everything—all the events and people and make-it-or-break-it moments—that happened or didn’t happen, that went according to plan or fell apart instead. What’s done is done; no amount of wishful thinking can alter the facts as they now stand. Looking back at that battlefield for the last time I can say this: there was pain. Unspeakable, I-feel-like-I’m-suffocating pain. There was joy too. Love like I’ve never, ever known. Tears that left me nauseated; laughter that induced hysteria; moments that were precious, that made me feel more alive than I thought possible; moments that left me aghast at the cruelty of the world; there was sorrow and there was love and there was disillusionment and there was friendship and there was anger and there was hope and there was fear—there was LIFE. Life lived to the best of my ability. Life at its peak: messy, feral, full of tragedies I didn’t expect and rewards I didn’t earn.
Was life unfair to me? Absolutely. Has anyone managed to live life and come out the other side unscathed? Not that I know of. Everyone has a story to tell. We all have our scars. We’re all, at best, DAMAGED in some way; pockmarked and wounded and left at the side of the road with broken limbs and broken wings and broken hearts. There’s always, always the person we were SUPPOSED to be and the person we BECAME; the person we should, could, WOULD have been and the person we’ve settled for. And, like me, too many people spend an infinite amount of time and energy wishing AWAY the life that happened to them, or willing away the scars that branded them, or rewriting the events of yesteryear so that they feel less cheated. Or maybe we do this so that we feel more vindicated. So that the blame will never, ever be cast on us or the decisions we make on a daily basis—it’s always pinned on our history. We’re guarded and selfish and unyielding because history taught us not to trust; we’re everything we hate and nothing we’d like to be because history told us it’s better to not try than to try and fail. Such a sad, broken world we come from. And we’ve inevitably been shaped by it, so without really realizing it we become sad, broken people.
The kind of people doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity because we never dare look forward. How can we when we’re always looking behind us, casting either longing, wistful glances at the good that somehow turned sour or disenchanted, disbelieving glares at the bad that overtook what was once good?
That’s my problem with modern-day therapy. Most of the time the past is remembered and revisited and reenacted, as if answers will suddenly come to us when we’re forced to recall Events A, B, and C; Person X, Y, and Z; Tragedy #4 and Heartbreak #2 and Disappointment #8. Most of us believe this is true, I think. We soul-search and delve through our pasts with magnifying glasses and a deposit-box of self-help jargon, trying to identify the point at which everything went wrong so that we can bandage an old wound and fix what was broken. As I see it, though, it’s not quite that simple. When you break a bone or crack a rib or puncture a lung the healing process is pretty straightforward—the damage can be precisely located, seen with an x-ray, and then it can be dealt with in the most obvious and effective way. Healing can occur. There’s often even little to no evidence that the damage occurred: a bone will set; a wound will scab and then new skin will emerge; a damaged organ can be operated upon and, if not healed entirely, at the very least be made functional. The damage is dealt with and then rarely thought of again. A once-fractured femur, for instance, doesn’t continue to ache and throb long after it’s been set and restored to its former usefulness. Broken hearts, unfortunately, DO. Broken spirits hurt even after the source of the pain has been removed. A broken sense of self—because your dad abandoned you or your mom didn’t affirm you enough or you came from a broken home and never went off to school with a warm brownie in your knapsack—leaves us crippled in a way a broken foot never does: it changes us. Forever.
When we break emotionally we’re changed by the experience permanently, for better or worse—with every heartbreak and every blow we’re dealt the trajectory of our life changes; the way we see the world changes; our belief system changes; the very world we inhabit CHANGES. I don’t think there’s a cure for that. I don’t believe it’s possible to sit on a therapist’s leather couch and “become” again that six-year old child who was dumped on an aunt’s doorstep and find healing in that place. It’s true that doing this might bring clarity to some of the “whys” of our past—but does understanding something ever change the fact that it happened? Does it lessen the hurt, soften the blow, act as a shield against the damage? I once spoke to a psychiatrist who told me the most honest thing I think I’ve ever heard from a health professional’s mouth: “Psychotherapy is fine. It might bring some understanding to the difficult and painful things of your past. But, to be honest, healing is a CHOICE. You have to wake up and say, ‘This is bull****.’ And you have to move on.”
Moving on, as I see it, doesn’t mean pretending the damage never happened. It did. It happened, and you didn’t deserve it, and you didn’t do anything to cause it, and it changed you because every fire does; every time there’s a discrepancy between “should have” and “was”, between “the ideal” and “the reality”, something happens inside us. The thing about the kind of damage we take medication for or see a shrink for is that it can’t be FIXED—it can’t be undone. That might make the situation seem hopeless, but that’s only the case if we equate fixing with HEALING. I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. Fixing something is making it like it was before, so that it operates in the same way it did before…we fix a damaged tire by either patching it up or replacing it altogether if the damage is severe…when we’re done the tire looks and functions the same as it did before the incident.
HEALING, on the other hand, just means that we learn to function, to THRIVE, even, in spite of the damaged parts. Think about what a scar looks like. It’s essentially DAMAGED SKIN, flesh that will never, ever look like it did before, that will never, ever BE the unmarked, unblemished thing it used to be. Think for a moment about what a scar IS. It’s a wound, some sort of DAMAGE, that HEALED. Can a wound be fixed? No. Healing, however, is not only possible but wholly inevitable. A wound will heal even if not actively tended to—as long as it’s kept clean and free of infection. In most cases nothing fancy is required…a simple cleaning or dressing of the wound will suffice, and then time does what it does best: it heals the hurt. Makes it go away, even if the scar remains. Our emotional wounds can be tended to in much the same way. As with a physical wound, the damage must be acknowledged—even when it’s ugly, even when it’s hard to look at, even when it’s in a place we’d rather others not know about. Secondly the wound must be cleared of all debris—all those macro- and microscopic foreign substances that may, if left, cause the wound to fester and decay.
This is where it gets challenging. In our lives someone or something hurts us and debris comes flying in from a million different directions, from a million different well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning sources: we’re told we should hold a grudge; we’re encouraged to do that and act like this and harden our heart and put up more walls; we’re told of a plethora of devices and attitudes and dispositions that might ease the pain and make us forget. When we’re hurting somewhere it’s hard to just let the wound be—so it’s sometimes easier to deal with the debris. To get lost in the junk; in the excess stuff that, if we really think about it, is as far removed from the damaged sight as it is possible to be.
Pain is how we know something isn’t right. It’s how our psyche tells us that something went amiss—and a wound is the evidence that we were affected; that, despite our best efforts, we got caught in the cross-fire. Healing is THERE, I believe. In that place where a hurt is self-sufficient, where it isn’t sandwiched between a thousand theories and quick-fixes, where it’s simply allowed to BE. Healing is found in that place where we’re hurt but don’t seek to understand or categorize or fix it; where we strive to accept only that something happened and we’re different people because of it and we still, NO MATTER WHAT, have an obligation to be all that we can be. Our wounds will scar. We still won’t understand, and it will still be unfair, and the evidence of the original wound will still, ALWAYS, be there…but the pain will no longer exist in the present. And, perhaps most importantly, it will no longer define our future.
I’ve lived too long with the misguided idea that I need to rectify the past in order to heal in the present and thrive in the future; that healing comes in retrospect rather than in progress. I no longer want to subscribe to that mindset. I am no longer interested in what happened yesterday—I am no longer concerned with trying to make sense of a past that evades tidy, concrete labeling. I’m realizing, slowly but surely, that I’m NOT the person I would have been had life not happened to me; I’m NOT the person I imagined I’d be when I was five; I’m NOT unmarked and I’m not without scars and I’m not unaffected by the events of my past, good or bad. But I’m nonetheless responsible for today. And for tomorrow. I can’t evade my responsibilities—my life, my SELF—simply because I didn’t get the fairy-tale life I thought I had to a right to. The truth is, fairy tales only exist in our imaginations. A life without struggle, without pain, isn’t life at all, because life is about the challenges that test our mettle; the scars that give us character; the horror stories that made us humble when we were arrogant, flexible when we were unyielding, compassionate when we were self-centered. Yesterday is no longer my responsibility, but I AM responsible for embracing life fully in the present moment. After all, the present is God’s greatest gift to us. The past already happened. The good, the bad, the disappointing—it’s all done with. The future is uncertain. It’s determined in part by circumstances and forces outside our control, but it’s also set in motion by the choices we make NOW. In the present moment. The future is shaped by TODAY’S decision to GET UP, get moving, and get on with it. Enough is enough. We have only THIS moment, THIS day, THIS opportunity to do THAT thing and love THOSE people and make a difference THERE. So don’t waste it. Don’t spend your life trying to understand yesterday or fearing that tomorrow will follow the same broken pattern as the past—close that book and begin writing your story NOW. Accept that your history changed you, shaped you, and believe that you can alter history on a bigger, grander, more universal scale if you choose to inhabit the present and fix your gaze forward rather than backward. God has called you, after all. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
For What It's Worth...
When I was 12 my mom had a friend whose husband beat her. It was the same every time. He’d be ok for a while—sometimes better than ok, for a day or two or ten he was maybe even the doting husband she’d long ago fallen in love with and said “I do” to—but then something would set him off and he’d go on a verbal and physical rampage. Each time he laid a hand on her she’d call the police and he’d get sent away to prison for a while—and each time she’d call my mom (with me in tow) and swear, SWEAR, that this time was the last time; this time she’d had enough; this time she’d learned her lesson; THIS time she’d finally realized that love wasn’t supposed to hurt this much.
Except her angry diatribe was easily quelled by his tearful apology. He promised he’d never, ever hurt her again. He was a changed man. He’d made a mistake, and all he wanted, all he NEEDED, was a second (or maybe a twentieth) chance; he’d finally, finally realized how much she meant to him. He knew her worth, and he didn’t want to lose her.
Except he DIDN’T know her worth. But neither did she. Even at age 12 I wondered if she’d ever heard this age-old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” At the end of the day, he only did what he did because she allowed it. Even I, inexperienced child that I was, realized this. As I listened to her tearful assertions (“This time, Maria, I’m not letting him come back home. I deserve better than this. I can’t, won’t, do this to myself anymore.”) I wondered how anyone could value themselves so little; how any woman could say she “loved” a man—and, worse yet, swear he “loved” her—when the only thing holding them together was the nightmare they’d woven. I couldn’t wrap my brain around such self-inflicted torture. I was 12 and full of big dreams and an I-can-do-anything attitude—it seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to me for her to pack up her bags, leave her good-for-nothing husband, and start over. Move on to greener pastures. Find someone who’d love her wild mane; her warm brown eyes; her soft, sing-songy voice; her infectious laugh.
But for a reason that evaded me then, she chose to stay.
Twelve years later, I see that her situation wasn’t unique. Hers might have been one of the more extreme cases I’ve encountered in my 24 years of existence, but it was certainly not the last. In fact, it happens all too often. It’s happened to me, to my mom, to my aunt, to my college professor, to the woman behind the check-out counter at the supermarket—all of us have, at one point or other, stayed when we should have left. We’ve done all the math in our head—how thin are we? how popular were we in high school? how many boys asked us to the prom?—and come up with a myriad of formulas and equations to denote our worth: Sara is worth two abusive relationships and a dead-end job she abhors; Claudia is worth three years of being a doormat and friends who like her as long as she lends them money; Cindy is worth a decade of low self-esteem and a boyfriend she only tolerates.
We settle. We compromise. We accept the unacceptable because we don’t believe we deserve better. I was a precocious child raised to believe I could do and be anything my heart desired but even I have played the “unworthy” card; even I have sought lesser things because deep down the unchallenged belief is that I’m a lesser thing myself.
The truth of the matter is that none of us have gone through life unscathed. Our pasts are riddled with the very things we unconsciously invite into our lives now: abuse, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, slander, contempt—the list goes on. And on. Somewhere along the line someone made us feel unloved; someone told us we were ugly; a teacher told us we’d never amount to anything in life; the man who promised to love us forever walked away and never looked back; we were bullied, insulted, degraded; the scale or the mirror or the movies or, sometimes, our own flesh and blood, told us we just weren’t good enough—and we accepted it as irrefutable truth. So we stay with the husbands who show us their love with blows to the head. We know our dreams are too big so we stop dreaming. We chase after people incapable of loving us because we don’t really want to be loved anyway. Isn’t that a scary thought? That, ultimately, we’re the keeper of our own keys; the guards outside our own cells; the villain counterpart to our own repressed hero?
I think sometimes we forget that we have a choice. We were powerless to stop our parent’s divorce; our father never asked us for permission before he left our family and started a new one; Life never took us for coffee and politely inquired what we’d like from it and how much heartache we’d be able to withstand before the damage became irreparable. For better or worse, at one point we really DIDN’T have a choice. The love we were given was the love we had to accept. The circumstances we were born into would color every aspect of our lives until we grew up enough to assume responsibility for our own present and future. And once we no longer had to rely on Mom or Dad or Abuelo or Abuela to feed and clothe and shelter us the choice became ours: what are we worth? What are we worth to ourselves?
Because THAT, my dears, is the important question at the end of the day. NOT: What am I worth to him? To her? To my teacher, my pastor, my friend? They’ll do unto you as you do unto yourself. You can cry and complain and raise a battle cry against all the injustice, but if you stay it’s because you made the decision to do so.
I’m no longer 12. I have more scars, more hurts, more emotional baggage than I did then, when I looked at my mom’s friend’s tear-streaked face and wondered how anyone could love herself so little. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I would judge her so harshly. But I’d tell her that Rob isn’t the issue. Even his violent abuse isn’t the issue. The issue is her own conception of who she is and what she’s worth. It’s what she’s allowed—what she ALLOWS and most likely will continue to allow—because her gauge is warped, broken, misaligned with the reality of her inherent value as a human being. I would tell her that she’s beautiful. That her smile lights up a room. That, when you love yourself first, love from someone else DOESN’T hurt—not ever.
I don’t know where she is now, but I hope, like I did then, that she finally stood up.
Except her angry diatribe was easily quelled by his tearful apology. He promised he’d never, ever hurt her again. He was a changed man. He’d made a mistake, and all he wanted, all he NEEDED, was a second (or maybe a twentieth) chance; he’d finally, finally realized how much she meant to him. He knew her worth, and he didn’t want to lose her.
Except he DIDN’T know her worth. But neither did she. Even at age 12 I wondered if she’d ever heard this age-old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” At the end of the day, he only did what he did because she allowed it. Even I, inexperienced child that I was, realized this. As I listened to her tearful assertions (“This time, Maria, I’m not letting him come back home. I deserve better than this. I can’t, won’t, do this to myself anymore.”) I wondered how anyone could value themselves so little; how any woman could say she “loved” a man—and, worse yet, swear he “loved” her—when the only thing holding them together was the nightmare they’d woven. I couldn’t wrap my brain around such self-inflicted torture. I was 12 and full of big dreams and an I-can-do-anything attitude—it seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to me for her to pack up her bags, leave her good-for-nothing husband, and start over. Move on to greener pastures. Find someone who’d love her wild mane; her warm brown eyes; her soft, sing-songy voice; her infectious laugh.
But for a reason that evaded me then, she chose to stay.
Twelve years later, I see that her situation wasn’t unique. Hers might have been one of the more extreme cases I’ve encountered in my 24 years of existence, but it was certainly not the last. In fact, it happens all too often. It’s happened to me, to my mom, to my aunt, to my college professor, to the woman behind the check-out counter at the supermarket—all of us have, at one point or other, stayed when we should have left. We’ve done all the math in our head—how thin are we? how popular were we in high school? how many boys asked us to the prom?—and come up with a myriad of formulas and equations to denote our worth: Sara is worth two abusive relationships and a dead-end job she abhors; Claudia is worth three years of being a doormat and friends who like her as long as she lends them money; Cindy is worth a decade of low self-esteem and a boyfriend she only tolerates.
We settle. We compromise. We accept the unacceptable because we don’t believe we deserve better. I was a precocious child raised to believe I could do and be anything my heart desired but even I have played the “unworthy” card; even I have sought lesser things because deep down the unchallenged belief is that I’m a lesser thing myself.
The truth of the matter is that none of us have gone through life unscathed. Our pasts are riddled with the very things we unconsciously invite into our lives now: abuse, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, slander, contempt—the list goes on. And on. Somewhere along the line someone made us feel unloved; someone told us we were ugly; a teacher told us we’d never amount to anything in life; the man who promised to love us forever walked away and never looked back; we were bullied, insulted, degraded; the scale or the mirror or the movies or, sometimes, our own flesh and blood, told us we just weren’t good enough—and we accepted it as irrefutable truth. So we stay with the husbands who show us their love with blows to the head. We know our dreams are too big so we stop dreaming. We chase after people incapable of loving us because we don’t really want to be loved anyway. Isn’t that a scary thought? That, ultimately, we’re the keeper of our own keys; the guards outside our own cells; the villain counterpart to our own repressed hero?
I think sometimes we forget that we have a choice. We were powerless to stop our parent’s divorce; our father never asked us for permission before he left our family and started a new one; Life never took us for coffee and politely inquired what we’d like from it and how much heartache we’d be able to withstand before the damage became irreparable. For better or worse, at one point we really DIDN’T have a choice. The love we were given was the love we had to accept. The circumstances we were born into would color every aspect of our lives until we grew up enough to assume responsibility for our own present and future. And once we no longer had to rely on Mom or Dad or Abuelo or Abuela to feed and clothe and shelter us the choice became ours: what are we worth? What are we worth to ourselves?
Because THAT, my dears, is the important question at the end of the day. NOT: What am I worth to him? To her? To my teacher, my pastor, my friend? They’ll do unto you as you do unto yourself. You can cry and complain and raise a battle cry against all the injustice, but if you stay it’s because you made the decision to do so.
I’m no longer 12. I have more scars, more hurts, more emotional baggage than I did then, when I looked at my mom’s friend’s tear-streaked face and wondered how anyone could love herself so little. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I would judge her so harshly. But I’d tell her that Rob isn’t the issue. Even his violent abuse isn’t the issue. The issue is her own conception of who she is and what she’s worth. It’s what she’s allowed—what she ALLOWS and most likely will continue to allow—because her gauge is warped, broken, misaligned with the reality of her inherent value as a human being. I would tell her that she’s beautiful. That her smile lights up a room. That, when you love yourself first, love from someone else DOESN’T hurt—not ever.
I don’t know where she is now, but I hope, like I did then, that she finally stood up.
Friday, June 14, 2013
GOLD-colored glasses
It calms me just to sit on a train and know that no one knows who I am--I'm no one's daughter, no one's friend, no one's go-to person in a crisis or the girl they'll call when the first five people on their list don't pick up the phone. I'm no one's ANYTHING. I'm sitting there on those hard seats, squished between a snoring black man and a girl wearing over-sized sunglasses and a leather jacket (I'm secretly laughing at the ironic juxtaposition), and I'm absolutely LOVING the anonymity that being amongst strangers grants me. I could be anyone. Better yet, I could be SOMEONE--someone important. Someone cool (because in real life I'm not, not even a little). Someone off to some exotic place to meet up with her exotic friends, disguised as the girl-next-door but sporting a small, self-satisfied smile because the rest of the passengers have NO IDEA that inside my oversized handbag is an LBD and a pair of KILLER heels and the night is young and so am I and there's a rooftop party and clinking champagne glasses and SO MUCH FUN on the agenda. Ha! That's not true, of course, but it COULD be. That's the beauty of anonymity--everyone COULD be something other than what they really are. The snoring black man? He could be an artist, a muralist--he's just spent the past six months in Greece painting people's likenesses on vast beige walls and he's only just returned home, and he's been spending his days riding every bus and train in the city in the desperate, desperate hope that inspiration will strike again and WHAM!--he'll whisk himself away to the next foreign locale and take up his paintbrush once again. The Hipster sitting across from me is a budding musician--he just had a loud, angry fight with his Asian girlfriend but instead of being bothered by it he's thrilled because as she was screaming at him a dozen lyrics wrote themselves in his head and he's off to the recording studio to make some magic. So many people, so many stories, so many COULD-BEs and MAYBEs and WHAT-IFs. It makes me smile. It makes me feel alive again. I need this--this sitting on a train, alone, silent, watchful--because my life is filled with BUSY-NESS and obligation and I sometimes forget to hope. I forget to SEE (even though I LOOK); I forget to LIVE (even though my heart never stops beating). I forget that the world is vast, fluid, poignant...I've seen so much and yet I've seen nothing at all, because beneath what's readily apparent there are entire universes that we can only see when we allow ourselves the space to believe. Believe in what? In magic. In novelty. In a world that is more than appearances and duties and responsibilities; a world where riding a train is the adventure of a lifetime and every single person you encounter is sharing that moment with you because they're MEANT to and maybe you didn't utter a word to them but their very presence is shaping you, changing you, CREATING you, YOU, the YOU that is more than "Target Cashier", "Grace's Daughter", "Jim's Wife", "Little League Soccer Coach." YOU is limitless. YOU is indefinable. YOU is the unassuming college boy with the Star Wars T-shirt: others look at him and think they have him pegged, but do they know that he's riding the train because he volunteers at the Soup Kitchen downtown, and that after that he'll stop in at the hardware store to buy a pack of seeds because he's an avid gardener? YOU resists categorization, tidy labeling, trite stereotyping. YOU is what you can be when there's no one to tell you otherwise; when the voices of your teachers and parents and friends are finally, FINALLY silenced and a stranger boards the train you're riding and your eyes briefly meet and you almost fall out of your seat because for one quick second you see yourself reflected in her eyes and you're different; you're new; you're the man you've always wanted, HOPED, to be (but you didn't dare because the ones who know you say you're something else entirely).
That's what's so wonderful about being seen through a different lens. About SEEING through a different lens. The mundane suddenly becomes magical and what you dismissed yesterday suddenly captivates you because you finally stop resisting. So I sit on the train and watch as people get in and get off, and if someone looks my way I smile and write their story in my head, and even if I'm way off mark I don't care because I'm someone else too and all that really matters in that instant is that I'm there and he's there and she's there--we're ALL there, on that train, heading to God-knows-where--and we're strangers but not really because we're all sons and daughters; friends and lovers; coworkers and neighbors and church-goers and whatever other umbrella we fall under in "real life." Here on this train? This isn't real life. This is no-man's land. This is Limbo--the in-between place where we can rest; where we can stop sucking in our stomach and loosen our tie a bit; where we can reapply our lipstick, smooth our hair, wipe the shine off our forehead and pretend (when we get off the train) that we looked that flawless all along. It makes me happy. I watch as trees and dilapidated houses and the L.A. River fly past my window and I can breathe again because, for the duration of the train ride, I've been allowed to hope again. Or rather, I'VE allowed myself to hope again.
I hope that there's an infinite amount of Beauty to uncover. I hope that one day I'll look out at the horizon and see not what could be but what IS: I've already lived my dream. I hope I'll never look out at the city I live in from unimaginable heights and not feel a flutter of awe deep down in my belly; I hope, like the song says, that I'll still feel small when I stand beside the ocean, no matter how much time has passed or how much pain I've known or how much "success" I think I've achieved. I hope and I hope and I hope, and then I close my eyes and take a deep breath and hope some more. I am, after all, riding the train, and I have all the time in the world.
That's what's so wonderful about being seen through a different lens. About SEEING through a different lens. The mundane suddenly becomes magical and what you dismissed yesterday suddenly captivates you because you finally stop resisting. So I sit on the train and watch as people get in and get off, and if someone looks my way I smile and write their story in my head, and even if I'm way off mark I don't care because I'm someone else too and all that really matters in that instant is that I'm there and he's there and she's there--we're ALL there, on that train, heading to God-knows-where--and we're strangers but not really because we're all sons and daughters; friends and lovers; coworkers and neighbors and church-goers and whatever other umbrella we fall under in "real life." Here on this train? This isn't real life. This is no-man's land. This is Limbo--the in-between place where we can rest; where we can stop sucking in our stomach and loosen our tie a bit; where we can reapply our lipstick, smooth our hair, wipe the shine off our forehead and pretend (when we get off the train) that we looked that flawless all along. It makes me happy. I watch as trees and dilapidated houses and the L.A. River fly past my window and I can breathe again because, for the duration of the train ride, I've been allowed to hope again. Or rather, I'VE allowed myself to hope again.
I hope that there's an infinite amount of Beauty to uncover. I hope that one day I'll look out at the horizon and see not what could be but what IS: I've already lived my dream. I hope I'll never look out at the city I live in from unimaginable heights and not feel a flutter of awe deep down in my belly; I hope, like the song says, that I'll still feel small when I stand beside the ocean, no matter how much time has passed or how much pain I've known or how much "success" I think I've achieved. I hope and I hope and I hope, and then I close my eyes and take a deep breath and hope some more. I am, after all, riding the train, and I have all the time in the world.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Today was a Fairy Tale
This is real life and real life isn't always pretty. It's not always fun. You can laugh when it's appropriate and smile when you mean it but that doesn't mean there isn't heartbreak and tribulation in the midst of it all. This is real life, in the real world, and at all times we're surrounded by real people with real problems and real feelings with which to either magnify or minimize those problems. Because, at the end of the day, we all struggle. Some of us laugh a little louder; some of us hide it a little better; some of us can push away the negativity for just a little longer and bask in the sunshine instead. But no matter where you fall on the spectrum of human adaptability, of human PERSISTENCE and WILLINGNESS TO ENDURE, you're not immune to fear or pride or worry or failed expectations or disillusionment or any of the other storms that we sometimes get caught in. Life happens to even the most prepared. It happens to the prettiest. To the smartest. To the bravest. And one of the things we have to accept about life is that sometimes we won't get our happily-ever-after. Maybe our prince is more frog than blue-blooded royalty; maybe the only castle we'll ever call ours is the one we build in the sky; maybe we'd like to be the princess but in reality we have more in common with the ugly stepsister or the lonely spinster or the young maiden who Prince Edward WOULD have fancied if he hadn't fallen for Sleeping Beauty instead. And maybe we WILL get our own perfect version of happily-ever-after. Except it's not as black-and-white as the fairy tales would have you believe: because there are two sides to every coin. When you're on a winning streak you don't remember that your success comes at the expense of someone else...for every win, someone must lose. Can you be happy if it means you're making someone else miserable? Can you dance with the prince at the ball and rule over a kingdom from your castle balcony if it means YOUR dreams came true but someone else's were shattered? Like I said, this is real life and real life never promised it'd be fair. And the ones navigating the sometimes-calm, sometimes-turbulent waters of Real Life are Real People: fallible, imperfect, messy, exalting goodness but prone to depravity, selfish and self-interested and self-indulgent. We might be the hero in our own story but someone else might cast us as the villain in theirs--and in reality we're neither; in reality we're both. Protagonist and antagonist; friend and foe; beauty and beast. And sometimes our kingdom by the Sea becomes a sepulcher; a prison we suddenly find ourselves bound by, with a steel-grey ocean crashing violently against the walls we erected to protect ourselves; sometimes we think we see clearly but then wake up one day and realize our view was distorted, like looking in a fun-house mirror--the veil has been lifted and we don't like what we see when we look at ourselves or the life we've so carefully built for ourselves and our loved ones. This happens because Real Life isn't static. It ebbs and flows and carries with it our hopes, our illusions, our Big Dreams and Plan A's and Future Successes. We can swim with the tide or we can swim against it; neither is more "right" than the other but it all depends on our destination.
All of us look out at the horizon at some point and see the big WHAT-COULD-BE: what we could be, what our lives could be, what HUMAN EXISTENCE could be if only we all somehow realized that there's no loss greater or more tragic than the loss of our humanity. But then again, it's easy to compromise. It's easy to trade compassion for comfort; love for lust; generosity for greed and community for selfish gain. Easy and oh-so encouraged by a world that's becoming smaller and yet far lonelier, far more isolated and individualistic. That's the goal sometimes, isn't it? To build our own legacy, complete with palaces and courtiers and flashy balls--the people we have to step on along the way notwithstanding. We'll be the princess in this story even if we have to crown OURSELVES! And if Prince Charming isn't quite up to par then we'll trade him in for a newer, younger, shinier model. This is, after all, Real Life, and Real Life is cut-throat so we might as well take a page from its book and adopt the same kind of attitude.
But life is more than survival. It's more than the daily grind that leaves us empty and exhausted and YEARNING for that elusive "something-more" we get glimpses of when we look out at the sky at night; it's more than being the belle of the ball or catching the cute prince's eye or ruling a kingdom with an iron fist. We might never know what happily-ever-after looks like or tastes like or feels like but that's okay because we'll know something deeper, something more innate and yet more universal, something we all have a right to no matter what our condition in life or who other people think we are. We'll know what it means to LIVE. To BE ALIVE. To have our heart broken and cry until we're sated; to love someone just because; to throw in all our chips even when the odds are heavily stacked against us; to give more than we should and laugh more than we should and hope against all hope that we'll be loved more than we should. It'll never, ever be perfect. There WILL be perfect moments, times of divinity and holiness and transcendent beauty, but they won't last. The moment will fade, tomorrow will come, and our ugliness and the world's ugliness will be thrown in our face in even more minute detail. But at the end of the day, if we live a life that is genuine, a life that is accepted and fully lived in the calm and in the storm, we don't need Perfection. We don't need happily-ever-after. Instead, we need precisely WHATEVER life throws at us, because the only foundation that can truly anchor us to our humanity is experience. So Live. =)
All of us look out at the horizon at some point and see the big WHAT-COULD-BE: what we could be, what our lives could be, what HUMAN EXISTENCE could be if only we all somehow realized that there's no loss greater or more tragic than the loss of our humanity. But then again, it's easy to compromise. It's easy to trade compassion for comfort; love for lust; generosity for greed and community for selfish gain. Easy and oh-so encouraged by a world that's becoming smaller and yet far lonelier, far more isolated and individualistic. That's the goal sometimes, isn't it? To build our own legacy, complete with palaces and courtiers and flashy balls--the people we have to step on along the way notwithstanding. We'll be the princess in this story even if we have to crown OURSELVES! And if Prince Charming isn't quite up to par then we'll trade him in for a newer, younger, shinier model. This is, after all, Real Life, and Real Life is cut-throat so we might as well take a page from its book and adopt the same kind of attitude.
But life is more than survival. It's more than the daily grind that leaves us empty and exhausted and YEARNING for that elusive "something-more" we get glimpses of when we look out at the sky at night; it's more than being the belle of the ball or catching the cute prince's eye or ruling a kingdom with an iron fist. We might never know what happily-ever-after looks like or tastes like or feels like but that's okay because we'll know something deeper, something more innate and yet more universal, something we all have a right to no matter what our condition in life or who other people think we are. We'll know what it means to LIVE. To BE ALIVE. To have our heart broken and cry until we're sated; to love someone just because; to throw in all our chips even when the odds are heavily stacked against us; to give more than we should and laugh more than we should and hope against all hope that we'll be loved more than we should. It'll never, ever be perfect. There WILL be perfect moments, times of divinity and holiness and transcendent beauty, but they won't last. The moment will fade, tomorrow will come, and our ugliness and the world's ugliness will be thrown in our face in even more minute detail. But at the end of the day, if we live a life that is genuine, a life that is accepted and fully lived in the calm and in the storm, we don't need Perfection. We don't need happily-ever-after. Instead, we need precisely WHATEVER life throws at us, because the only foundation that can truly anchor us to our humanity is experience. So Live. =)
Sunday, March 3, 2013
A Little Thing Called Love
People talk about "unconditional love" all the time. It's in nearly every movie and book and song we come across, hitting us like a slap to the face if our own lives are lacking in this so-called "unconditional love" department, and we buy into the idea of it because it sounds so nice and as people we're hardwired for eternity--we want to believe in permanence. In forever. That's why we write, and paint, and compose music, and build skyscrapers--because we're incredibly aware of our own mortality, and as such we yearn to leave behind something that will last. A legacy. OUR legacy.
The greatest legacy? Being loved unconditionally. Knowing that, even if we perish, we live on in another's love...they'll never forget our smile, the way the sun turned our dark eyes golden, that time we cried and cried and they just held us in silence because no words could suffice. It's true, isn't it? I mean, that's why it's called UNCONDITIONAL love. It's independent of everything. Once it's ours it's irrevocable; we can say all the wrong things, put our worst foot forward, wake up in the morning looking like hell frozen over except we somehow look worse--and it doesn't matter. We're loved IN SPITE of everything that's wrong with us. Maybe we're even loved FOR it. We're loved without any merit, without any shiny gold badges, without titles or plaques or first-place ribbons.
It's supposed to last forever. Empires can fall and great civilizations can perish and the apocalypse can hit unexpectedly and turn us all into raging, blood-lusting zombies--but love is still unconditional. It's so strong that even if we all DO morph into the walking dead, love can still pierce our cold, dead hearts; the death of our humanity is not, if we're to believe the recent slew of monster-human love stories that have proliferated as of late (Twilight anyone? How about "Warm Bodies"?)--I repeat, the loss of everything that makes us human is NOT utterly hopeless if we can still feel love. What, after all, can be more "unconditional" than a vampire falling in love with a human whose blood he constantly thirsts for? Isn't love unconditional when it's what a young woman feels toward the zombie who brutally ATE her former boyfriend? Talk about a love that transcends all!
Let's consider the final scene in the film "Titanic" for a moment. A 90-something year old Rose Dawson has just died in her bed, old and wrinkly and WARM (just like Jack predicted as he was dying of hypothermia in the Atlantic Ocean...how romantic...). In the scene that follows, Rose is young and beautiful again and she's in Titanic heaven with the love of her life waiting to welcome her...home at long last. She's finally in that place--that realm or dimension or world or whatever you want to call it--where the full glory of Love can be unleashed, and where those who were lucky enough to experience it once can experience it eternally. This scene epitomizes, perhaps like no other, the idea that unconditional love can be interrupted but never truly thwarted, never fully annihilated. It might change forms; it might require fifty or a hundred years to come to full fruition; it might even mean loving someone else for a season (like Rose loved the father of her children)...until that fateful, inevitable day when you close your eyes and open them again only to find yourself aboard the Titanic, ascending a staircase as a Tuxedo-clad Leonardo DiCaprio extends a gloved hand to you...
Love, then, in its purest, truest, most elemental form, is SUPPOSED to be the thing that saves us, our one-way ticket to a lifetime of bliss. The crazy thing? It's true. Love IS that which redeems us. That which validates us. That which transcends and thereby defeats the biggest marker of our frail humanity: death. In being loved we ARE immortal. The catch? Love at that level, at such a profound, soul-saving depth, cannot be found, cannot be achieved or earned or experienced, in any of our ordinary human interactions. In this respect the movies and books that champion human-monster love have the right idea (though only superficially): the kind of love that can transcend every limitation, including death, requires a supernatural source. It's as black-and-white as that. No human being--not even Leo DiCaprio in his prime--is capable of loving us into a state of eternity because he or she is himself/herself very much vulnerable to, bound and defined by, the garment of our mortality as human beings. How then can one person's love be deemed "unconditional" if his or her very life is SO conditional, contingent upon people and circumstances and mechanisms over which that person ultimately has no control?
The truth is that no one's love is unconditional. Think about it. Think about the love you've freely given and then freely withdrawn when your feelings changed; when you met someone else; when he did what to you was unforgivable or when she said the one thing that could cause your heart to close forever.
I know it's happened to me. I've loved a lot of people in my lifetime, in a lot of different ways--my love has been a steady, warm flame; it's been a volatile and petulant spark; it's been a furnace that sometimes glows hot but that at other times is cold and lackluster because there's nothing to feed it. I've sworn to forever love friends who moved away the following year and then I never spoke to them again; most of the people I loved when I was 12 are not the same people I love now at 23. I've looked someone in the eye and said "I love you" and meant it in that instant with every fiber of my being, and the next day my heart was quiet, sated--that love couldn't be sustained.
I've loved passionately and I've loved fiercely and I've maybe even loved faithfully, but I've never, ever loved unconditionally. There's always a condition. Always some line that can't be crossed without the veil falling away and our eyes being opened to the truth behind love's brilliant facade: that our capacity for love is minute, shallow; that our DESIRE for love sometimes outweighs our love itself; that where and when love ends CHOICE must begin--we must CHOOSE to love (even if we no longer LOVE) our wife, our husband, the friend who let us down, the mother who made all the wrong choices.
So if we as people are incapable--and often unwilling--to love one another unconditionally, why are we so obsessed with finding it, with keeping it, with reinventing it over and over and over again in nearly every form of popular media?
It goes back, I think, to the way we're hardwired. Just as we fight aging with botox and life-threatening diseases with surgery and radiation and an assortment of pills and powders and liquids, we also fight--or ATTEMPT to fight--death with love. Except we fail. We fail because the battle was only won ONCE. It was won by one man--the only one with both the ability and desire to love us (ALL of us) without condition. It was won at the Cross.
And there it is. Our society's great epiphany--we've been in search of something that we've already been granted. We've looked for it in Dad. We've squealed with delight because we thought we found it in Boyfriend #4. We've nipped and tucked and starved and dyed and pierced, hoping all the while that in the process we've somehow managed to make ourselves worthy of the love we can't live without. But for all our efforts these irrefutable, immutable truths remain: we want to be loved unconditionally. We are inherently unworthy of this, and no amount of "self-improvement" can alter this fact. And, more importantly than everything else, our unworthiness is not held against us: we're already loved. We're already loved unconditionally. We're already loved into salvation, into eternity, into inmortality. We're loved by God.
God is our true supernatural source. He's Edward Cullen and the cute zombie from that movie and "the one who got away" and every other man or woman we've ever demanded love from all rolled into one. If love has ever disappointed or confused or evaded us it's okay because that's the nature of ordinary human love: it's messy; it's fickle; it's transient; it's not always patient, it's not always kind; it can't always bear or endure all things; it can't always hope during hopeless times. Most of all, though, the love we've experienced at the hands of others has ultimately failed us because it was SUPPOSED to...it was supposed to cause us to look out, to look up, to look beyond ourselves and toward the One who loved to the point of death.
The greatest legacy? Being loved unconditionally. Knowing that, even if we perish, we live on in another's love...they'll never forget our smile, the way the sun turned our dark eyes golden, that time we cried and cried and they just held us in silence because no words could suffice. It's true, isn't it? I mean, that's why it's called UNCONDITIONAL love. It's independent of everything. Once it's ours it's irrevocable; we can say all the wrong things, put our worst foot forward, wake up in the morning looking like hell frozen over except we somehow look worse--and it doesn't matter. We're loved IN SPITE of everything that's wrong with us. Maybe we're even loved FOR it. We're loved without any merit, without any shiny gold badges, without titles or plaques or first-place ribbons.
It's supposed to last forever. Empires can fall and great civilizations can perish and the apocalypse can hit unexpectedly and turn us all into raging, blood-lusting zombies--but love is still unconditional. It's so strong that even if we all DO morph into the walking dead, love can still pierce our cold, dead hearts; the death of our humanity is not, if we're to believe the recent slew of monster-human love stories that have proliferated as of late (Twilight anyone? How about "Warm Bodies"?)--I repeat, the loss of everything that makes us human is NOT utterly hopeless if we can still feel love. What, after all, can be more "unconditional" than a vampire falling in love with a human whose blood he constantly thirsts for? Isn't love unconditional when it's what a young woman feels toward the zombie who brutally ATE her former boyfriend? Talk about a love that transcends all!
Let's consider the final scene in the film "Titanic" for a moment. A 90-something year old Rose Dawson has just died in her bed, old and wrinkly and WARM (just like Jack predicted as he was dying of hypothermia in the Atlantic Ocean...how romantic...). In the scene that follows, Rose is young and beautiful again and she's in Titanic heaven with the love of her life waiting to welcome her...home at long last. She's finally in that place--that realm or dimension or world or whatever you want to call it--where the full glory of Love can be unleashed, and where those who were lucky enough to experience it once can experience it eternally. This scene epitomizes, perhaps like no other, the idea that unconditional love can be interrupted but never truly thwarted, never fully annihilated. It might change forms; it might require fifty or a hundred years to come to full fruition; it might even mean loving someone else for a season (like Rose loved the father of her children)...until that fateful, inevitable day when you close your eyes and open them again only to find yourself aboard the Titanic, ascending a staircase as a Tuxedo-clad Leonardo DiCaprio extends a gloved hand to you...
Love, then, in its purest, truest, most elemental form, is SUPPOSED to be the thing that saves us, our one-way ticket to a lifetime of bliss. The crazy thing? It's true. Love IS that which redeems us. That which validates us. That which transcends and thereby defeats the biggest marker of our frail humanity: death. In being loved we ARE immortal. The catch? Love at that level, at such a profound, soul-saving depth, cannot be found, cannot be achieved or earned or experienced, in any of our ordinary human interactions. In this respect the movies and books that champion human-monster love have the right idea (though only superficially): the kind of love that can transcend every limitation, including death, requires a supernatural source. It's as black-and-white as that. No human being--not even Leo DiCaprio in his prime--is capable of loving us into a state of eternity because he or she is himself/herself very much vulnerable to, bound and defined by, the garment of our mortality as human beings. How then can one person's love be deemed "unconditional" if his or her very life is SO conditional, contingent upon people and circumstances and mechanisms over which that person ultimately has no control?
The truth is that no one's love is unconditional. Think about it. Think about the love you've freely given and then freely withdrawn when your feelings changed; when you met someone else; when he did what to you was unforgivable or when she said the one thing that could cause your heart to close forever.
I know it's happened to me. I've loved a lot of people in my lifetime, in a lot of different ways--my love has been a steady, warm flame; it's been a volatile and petulant spark; it's been a furnace that sometimes glows hot but that at other times is cold and lackluster because there's nothing to feed it. I've sworn to forever love friends who moved away the following year and then I never spoke to them again; most of the people I loved when I was 12 are not the same people I love now at 23. I've looked someone in the eye and said "I love you" and meant it in that instant with every fiber of my being, and the next day my heart was quiet, sated--that love couldn't be sustained.
I've loved passionately and I've loved fiercely and I've maybe even loved faithfully, but I've never, ever loved unconditionally. There's always a condition. Always some line that can't be crossed without the veil falling away and our eyes being opened to the truth behind love's brilliant facade: that our capacity for love is minute, shallow; that our DESIRE for love sometimes outweighs our love itself; that where and when love ends CHOICE must begin--we must CHOOSE to love (even if we no longer LOVE) our wife, our husband, the friend who let us down, the mother who made all the wrong choices.
So if we as people are incapable--and often unwilling--to love one another unconditionally, why are we so obsessed with finding it, with keeping it, with reinventing it over and over and over again in nearly every form of popular media?
It goes back, I think, to the way we're hardwired. Just as we fight aging with botox and life-threatening diseases with surgery and radiation and an assortment of pills and powders and liquids, we also fight--or ATTEMPT to fight--death with love. Except we fail. We fail because the battle was only won ONCE. It was won by one man--the only one with both the ability and desire to love us (ALL of us) without condition. It was won at the Cross.
And there it is. Our society's great epiphany--we've been in search of something that we've already been granted. We've looked for it in Dad. We've squealed with delight because we thought we found it in Boyfriend #4. We've nipped and tucked and starved and dyed and pierced, hoping all the while that in the process we've somehow managed to make ourselves worthy of the love we can't live without. But for all our efforts these irrefutable, immutable truths remain: we want to be loved unconditionally. We are inherently unworthy of this, and no amount of "self-improvement" can alter this fact. And, more importantly than everything else, our unworthiness is not held against us: we're already loved. We're already loved unconditionally. We're already loved into salvation, into eternity, into inmortality. We're loved by God.
God is our true supernatural source. He's Edward Cullen and the cute zombie from that movie and "the one who got away" and every other man or woman we've ever demanded love from all rolled into one. If love has ever disappointed or confused or evaded us it's okay because that's the nature of ordinary human love: it's messy; it's fickle; it's transient; it's not always patient, it's not always kind; it can't always bear or endure all things; it can't always hope during hopeless times. Most of all, though, the love we've experienced at the hands of others has ultimately failed us because it was SUPPOSED to...it was supposed to cause us to look out, to look up, to look beyond ourselves and toward the One who loved to the point of death.
Monday, February 25, 2013
A butterfly at last
Change. Such a small, insignificant word--and yet it's imbued with so much covert meaning. I wonder how many of us actually look forward to it. How many of us swim in ambivalence, alternating between euphoria at the prospect of a new adventure and absolute terror at the prospect of jumping headfirst into the unknown? Even change on a small scale can be daunting. I remember being in grade school, and how the start of every academic year brought with it a slew of anxiety-induced nightmares, along with qualms about which bus I'd ride and who I'd sit beside; in addition, of course, to those back-to-school shopping sprees, necessary because what self-respecting female would dare cross that school threshold in September wearing the same dress she'd worn in June? The list goes on. And on. There were always a slew of mornings when I'd wake up with a pounding heart and a sick feeling in my stomach (too many chili cheese fries AGAIN?!); a slew of bittersweet late-summer evenings spent staring out at a slowly-sinking sun, knowing shorter, colder, harder days were imminent. Even in college the anxiety, this aversion to change, persisted. Would I have another 8 AM class, and if I did would my professor turn a blind eye to my pajama bottoms and scraggly morning-hair? Would "oral participation" REALLY make up 20% of my grade? Would this be the year Michael Near would FINALLY only teach courses I'd already taken? Oh, the horror!
Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe I'm the only one who hates change about as much as I hate spiders--or rising gas prices. But I don't think so.
I think we're all at least somewhat wary of change. I think it's human nature to seek out the familiar, to stick to what we know. I mean, sure, the grass might LOOK greener on the other side, and sure, it might actually BE greener, but if given the opportunity would we REALLY leave our own little patch of dry tumbleweed and stake our flag on that lovely strip of astroturf on the other side? As people we're good at inventing excuses. Reasons why we can't; why it won't work; why we're doomed to failure so why even bother. It's not that we're lazy. It's not that we're sado-masochists bent on staying in the worst-possible circumstance just for the hell of it--but it is, I believe, at least in part, a form of self-sabotage. It's learning to be content with the hand life's dealt us--even when it's a terrible hand--rather than looking at ourselves in the mirror and seeing that we could be more, that we DESERVE to be more, that one day we WILL be more if only we don't give up on ourselves. It's staying stuck in the same bad job or the same bad marriage year after year after year, simply because we're scared of the possibilities that would be open to us if we acknowledged that no, we don't have to live this way and yes, we can be that man or woman God intended us to be. There's salvation for us after all.
But how many of us want to be saved? Isn't it true that sometimes we'd rather drown than swim to the life raft floating in the distance, discovering along the way that we're stronger than we thought, that there's muscle and power and determination beneath all those layers of self-doubt and self-hate; that maybe drowning was easy but swimming reminds us that we're young and vital and ALIVE? Salvation is a tricky thing because it requires loving ourselves more than we love a static image of ourselves--an image constructed piece by piece by what Mom thought we were and what Dad said we'd amount to and what every single person and event in our lives has taught us to believe is true about who we are, what we're worth, what we deserve. Accepting salvation is accepting a self that is UNMARKED...our past, our family, our friends, our circumstances can no longer tell us who we are. Or who we aren't. Only we can do that. Salvation is metamorphosis, and at the heart of metamorphosis is, of course, CHANGE.
There's just one singular difference. Salvation isn't change that happens TO us. It's not inevitable, it isn't forced upon us, we're not unwilling recipients or ill-fated victims. It's not your dad's remarriage, the break-up that left you devastated and forever branded with a badge of shame, the transition from happy-go-lucky child to sulky teen. Salvation is change that we precipitate. It's proactive, it's self-indulgent, it's the inevitable next-step of a self that has been reclaimed.
Maybe salvation happens naturally when we finally assume responsibility for what we are, for how we live--or don't live--our lives. Maybe salvation is nothing more than a decision to live in the present. A decision to stop trying to fix ourselves, and perhaps even realize that we were never broken, not the way we imagined--that all along there was something of holiness and divinity and God's very essence in us, something unnamable but beautiful, incomprehensible but perfect.
We are perfect. We are divine. We are timeless, eternal. And that, ultimately, is what salvation IS: "saving" the magnificent, resplendant, absolutely SCINTILLATING self we've hidden away, or let others bury beneath the avalanche of their reproach or disapproval or malice. Salvation is the butterfly emerging from its warm, familiar cocoon; or better yet, the caterpillar who finally, finally accepts the truth of what it can be, of what it already innately IS.
Salvation is change without the terror. Without fear, anxiety, or self-reproach. Salvation is, simply put, living in God's perfect will--and that, of course, means remembering that we're animate beings because we have in us that which sustains us: God's mighty breath. We are, therefore, more than the sum of everything that's ever happened to us--all life's injustices, all the ways in which we were cheated out of happily-ever-after--more, so much more. We are loved. We are lovely. And we are worth saving.
Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe I'm the only one who hates change about as much as I hate spiders--or rising gas prices. But I don't think so.
I think we're all at least somewhat wary of change. I think it's human nature to seek out the familiar, to stick to what we know. I mean, sure, the grass might LOOK greener on the other side, and sure, it might actually BE greener, but if given the opportunity would we REALLY leave our own little patch of dry tumbleweed and stake our flag on that lovely strip of astroturf on the other side? As people we're good at inventing excuses. Reasons why we can't; why it won't work; why we're doomed to failure so why even bother. It's not that we're lazy. It's not that we're sado-masochists bent on staying in the worst-possible circumstance just for the hell of it--but it is, I believe, at least in part, a form of self-sabotage. It's learning to be content with the hand life's dealt us--even when it's a terrible hand--rather than looking at ourselves in the mirror and seeing that we could be more, that we DESERVE to be more, that one day we WILL be more if only we don't give up on ourselves. It's staying stuck in the same bad job or the same bad marriage year after year after year, simply because we're scared of the possibilities that would be open to us if we acknowledged that no, we don't have to live this way and yes, we can be that man or woman God intended us to be. There's salvation for us after all.
But how many of us want to be saved? Isn't it true that sometimes we'd rather drown than swim to the life raft floating in the distance, discovering along the way that we're stronger than we thought, that there's muscle and power and determination beneath all those layers of self-doubt and self-hate; that maybe drowning was easy but swimming reminds us that we're young and vital and ALIVE? Salvation is a tricky thing because it requires loving ourselves more than we love a static image of ourselves--an image constructed piece by piece by what Mom thought we were and what Dad said we'd amount to and what every single person and event in our lives has taught us to believe is true about who we are, what we're worth, what we deserve. Accepting salvation is accepting a self that is UNMARKED...our past, our family, our friends, our circumstances can no longer tell us who we are. Or who we aren't. Only we can do that. Salvation is metamorphosis, and at the heart of metamorphosis is, of course, CHANGE.
There's just one singular difference. Salvation isn't change that happens TO us. It's not inevitable, it isn't forced upon us, we're not unwilling recipients or ill-fated victims. It's not your dad's remarriage, the break-up that left you devastated and forever branded with a badge of shame, the transition from happy-go-lucky child to sulky teen. Salvation is change that we precipitate. It's proactive, it's self-indulgent, it's the inevitable next-step of a self that has been reclaimed.
Maybe salvation happens naturally when we finally assume responsibility for what we are, for how we live--or don't live--our lives. Maybe salvation is nothing more than a decision to live in the present. A decision to stop trying to fix ourselves, and perhaps even realize that we were never broken, not the way we imagined--that all along there was something of holiness and divinity and God's very essence in us, something unnamable but beautiful, incomprehensible but perfect.
We are perfect. We are divine. We are timeless, eternal. And that, ultimately, is what salvation IS: "saving" the magnificent, resplendant, absolutely SCINTILLATING self we've hidden away, or let others bury beneath the avalanche of their reproach or disapproval or malice. Salvation is the butterfly emerging from its warm, familiar cocoon; or better yet, the caterpillar who finally, finally accepts the truth of what it can be, of what it already innately IS.
Salvation is change without the terror. Without fear, anxiety, or self-reproach. Salvation is, simply put, living in God's perfect will--and that, of course, means remembering that we're animate beings because we have in us that which sustains us: God's mighty breath. We are, therefore, more than the sum of everything that's ever happened to us--all life's injustices, all the ways in which we were cheated out of happily-ever-after--more, so much more. We are loved. We are lovely. And we are worth saving.
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