Choose life!

“… and the only thing that I can feel and see from my unconscious and un-owned belief that ‘I suck at loving’ you is how much ‘you suck at loving’ me, and I will leave or hurt you for it (depending on which end of the human pendulum I am swinging toward), in whatever way I can find, feeling fully justified in my insanity.”

”and to the degree I abandon, compromise, forget, hide, or withhold my true self (who God made me to be, at the top of the pendulum) out of fear and loathing of first me, then you, I will suffer in this world – not that there won’t be pain regardless, but my prolonged, ‘stuck’ suffering becomes a choice I am making unconsciously, and to be free again, I must first wake up and become conscious (down the rabbit hole I go), where I get to accept and experience the pain, in all of its mystery and unmanageability, let go of the choice to resist and thereby ‘suffer’ it, and choose again.”

”The choice of freedom is of life, embracing its love AND its pain, its passion AND its God-given purpose, leading to bliss and deep connection. The choice of bondage is of resistance, lost in its own self-deception and distractedness, meaninglessness hiding out in a mask of calm conformity (even when one of so-called ‘success’), leading only to suffering and lonely death.”

Choose life!

No nonsense

It has been suggested by many over the years that I have a “no nonsense approach” to coaching or simply “being with people” that many appreciate, and I really appreciate hearing that, and if this is true it is only because I have gotten intimately familiar with the depth and breadth of my many human nonsense layers, down to the core of me, so here is what I have to say about love relationships, stripped of all nonsense:

1) We want to love, and we want to “succeed” at being loving, but we just have no idea how to do that, so we’d like to be cut some slack, but we also don’t know how to ask for that. It’s all too embarrassing.

2) We can’t stand to have our obvious deficiencies in this area exposed and reflected back to us, especially by the ones we claim to love. (The one doing the semi-conscious attempting in the moment hates this truth.)

3) We don’t know how to accept and “be with” the notion of such glaring deficiencies on our part, so we must have someone to blame for these when they show up, and the most convenient and available person is the one who seems to be reflecting them back to us.

4) The one doing the unconscious reflecting rarely knows any better about love than the one claiming to love (in fact, the desperate need for it, vs. the desire to give it, at this time seems to grow), or the reflection would be cleaned up and beautiful, regardless of the quality of the performance. (The one doing the unconscious reflecting hates this truth.)

5) And here’s the really, really good news that can remove all concerns about #1 through #4: we all – each and every one of us - have equal access to His Perfect Love any time we choose to ask for it and open our hearts to fully receive it, and it resolves all conflict, forgives completely and forever, and powerfully redeems all shoddy performances, instantly and miraculously, and this comes with faith and obedience.

6) A useful corollary - knowing the above from much iterative experience, is that you have two choices of approach to “learning how to love better”:

first, you can consciously “try real hard,” from an unconscious place of “I suck at this” (this is just our human nature, you know), and you can strain and strive to learn all kinds of intelligent and useful rules, tactics, and techniques, which, based on your unconscious belief that “I suck at this,” will only further remind you of that after you inevitably demonstrate to yourself that it’s true, when emotions and feedback overwhelm you and all your best “efforts,” and then you’re in a deeper hole than when you started, or,

secondly, you can simply remember that you don’t have to strain and strive to get your particular brand of loving right, in your brain and your emotions (where all your nightmares live), and you can just relax and revel in getting your equal access to His Perfect Love right, in your heart and spirit (where your dreams and visions live).

The work of loving is more leaning into it (while not feeling or knowing it) and letting go of all feelings, knowledge, and safety and trusting “it” more than you trust yourself (while the outcome remains mysterious and unknowable) than it is climbing and straining and striving to get it right, to reach some proverbial peak of experience that your knowledge and skill must navigate and achieve, based on clarity of the goal and the approach, and having a good plan, where you get to triumphantly create the outcome through your own effort. Yea, good luck with that.

Human and God's response to our brokenness

“One common human response to the experience of our brokenness is to attempt to fill our lives with all kinds of substitutes, whether these be work and achievement, alcohol and drugs, relationships and sex, or all kinds of miscellaneous material things and recreational activities. We tend to live in a society driven by various forms of addiction. The sad irony is that these ways of ‘numbing the pain’ do not achieve anything real and lasting. They tend to push us farther and farther from God’s truth. They’re usually just attempts to manage or deny or avoid the pain, when, in reality, they only feed our feelings of bitterness, self-loathing, and utter hopelessness. Addictive and avoidance rituals are inevitably self-defeating.

Another false ritual on our part is to believe that we can overcome suffering and death on the basis of our own self-corrective powers. Some self-help programs are built around the belief that all negative feelings can be eradicated if only we summon our own inner-strength to overcome them. This is less a strategy of denial than a strategy of self-illusion. It assumes that we can think or will ourselves beyond feelings of sorrow and brokenness as if such feelings were not integral to our human reality.

Another common but false ritual of coping with brokenness is cynicism. It often expresses itself in the form of rebellion and in the belief that there is no final purpose to our human lives. Frequently, on the basis of broken relationships, cynicism takes cold comfort in the conviction that all human ideals and commitments are only masks for selfish, self-serving acts, that human decency and fairness and true love are all just sick jokes. Cynicism denies the possibility of human fulfillment and love. As such, it is a strategy of delusion.

Constructive rituals begin with the acknowledgement that to be human is to change and grow, and that to change and grow is to move through many different life-experiences, both positive and negative (which are really neither, just human experiences). In order to become an adult, one must leave behind the things of childhood. To grow in relationships is to be constantly prepared to ‘let go’ of past ways of relating -- even past relationships themselves. It has been said with much truth that life is a series of ‘little deaths,’ a path of continually ‘letting go’ of what we have been in order to become what we are called and destined to be.

It is also said that to live is to change, and to live fully humanly is to change often -- or, if you like, to die to ourselves in order that our new selves will emerge. Sometimes it is only through an experience of loss and grief that we are able to begin -- or re-enter -- the journey of change and growth. In any case, the only positive way of coping with deep hurt and pain in our lives is through the ritual of acknowledgement and the strategy of learning to ‘let go.’ Here, we learn to surrender ourselves fully to the unsolvable mystery of life.”

-- Dr. Gerard Hall

”Dear God,
I am so afraid to relax and open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands and heart
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.
And what you want to give me is love -
unconditional and everlasting -
with no way to earn or lose it.
Please invite and teach me to receive.
Amen.”

-- Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life)

“Growth begins when we accept our own weakness; transformation begins when we accept our own death.”

-- Jean Vanier

Our deliverance and freedom is the gift He gives in response to our brokenness and accepted, admitted, and total defeat. Given our inherent limitations and penchant for self-destruction, it is a very worthwhile deal – in fact, it is a no-brainer
and a full-gainer.


So, let go of all “headier” matters, and "dive in" to the Great Mystery that is His arms.

We are not meant to “get things right” ourselves in this crazy human existence, but to fully and richly experience things together, to see where we can always change and grow closer, to keep learning more and more about the nature of God, ourselves, others, and the world, to acknowledge our tendency to cling to our knowledge as security and truth, and to learn to let go of that more and more, to dive into His arms with totally reckless abandon, once having learned that we can truly fly only in faith and complete surrender.

As in the “Alice in Wonderland” movie, which many will see and question, if not trash, and where for me the “vorpal sword” she wielded in the end represents the spirit of Jesus, our work is not to worry and fret about slaying our own dragons, but simply to learn to “hold the sword,” for the sword knows what it is meant for and what it is willing and able to do, if it is “called forth” in the hands of one who truly believes.

Redemption of human behavior

I don’t claim to understand human behavior at all (yes, that includes my own), although I’ve experienced and studied it intensely for a very long time, and with a very large number of people. I know I can’t ever really change another human being’s behavior (only choose my own) – in fact, I’m not sure I can affect it in any way, positive or negative, although that can be a very compelling concept and desire from time to time. However, with all that being said, I know I can create and hold a space for God to utilize and redeem it, starting with my own, and I’ve come to believe that that’s enough – in fact, that’s miraculously wonderful. Any other approach to understanding and relating to human beings is nothing short of totally exasperating.

I wrote the above, and then I took Heather to see the latest “Alice in Wonderland” movie, which the critics have already panned, because they say it’s basically Tim Burton at his incomprehensible worst, and do you want to know the strangest thing? Heather really loved it, and I really got it (what does that make me?).

So many of my female friends out there have at least a little bit of Alice in them, and I tend to be a rather twisted and whimsical combination of the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the Blue Caterpillar (which turns into a beautiful blue butterfly, leading the way, at the very end of the movie).

Yes, humanity can be truly crazy-making, whether you’re acting all polite and proper-like, well-mannered and all-knowing (the most insane of all in this world), or in full-out “tea and crumpets mode,” “around the bend,” so to speak, and if you can truly see this wonderful truth, it can make you feel really (and blissfully) insane in the midst of your crystal clarity.

The Mad Hatter: [from trailer] There is a place like no place on Earth (I think it’s on the way to the center of yourself) - a land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say to survive it you need to be as mad as a hatter.
[picks up his hat]
The Mad Hatter: Which luckily I am.

Alice Kingsleigh: Have I gone around the bend, father?
Charles Kinsleigh: [with a smile and a wink] Most of the very best people in the world have, Alice.

Alice Kingsleigh: This is impossible.
The Mad Hatter: Only if you believe it is.

Alice Kingsleigh: [as she is starting to believe, remembering her father’s statement] I dream up at least six impossible things before breakfast.

I relate to this, Alice, and feel the same way. It might be more than six, even. And people and the world keep demonstrating their utter craziness, and I keep serving tea, while mad as a hatter and smiling like a Cheshire Cat, waiting for the next “champion” (of their own life) to come along and dazzle me with their boldness, courage, and fantastic journey into freedom, where they learn that so much more is possible – more than anything that even our imagination can dream up.

Re-consideration

I am highly sought after for solutions to very difficult, if not impossible problems (even though I never have solved anything, for over 12 years now, and what kind of a marketing pitch is that?), at least that’s what it sounds like at first, but I am learning better every day. What I genuinely have to offer, for my own good as much as another’s, is silence, solace, and spiritual re-consideration, a kind of re-contextualization, where God gets to be God. My mind’s ears hear only cries for ending the pain, for fixing of the situation, but my spirit’s ears hear sighs for endurance of the pain, and learning of the deeper spiritual lesson. In this spirit – in the spirit of Silent Truth and spiritual reconsidering - I offer these little tidbits from a master of this distinction.

"The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the ‘Swing of the Pendulum’ - that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other to find the answer, all while the Answer awaits. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy (this ‘flavor-of-the-month’ remedy thing); it is the denial of the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive, he stands perfectly still. It is only when he is dead that he swings all over the place (remember the pendulum diagram)."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in "The New House" Alarms and Discussions

"At the center of every man's existence is a bold dream. Death, disease, insanity, strife and struggle are merely material accidents, like a chipped tooth or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove in any way that they are the citadel."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in "Sir Walter Scott," Twelve Types

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in ILN 9/11/09

"Complaint or criticism always comes back in the form of an echo from the ends of the world; but silence informs and strengthens us."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in The Father Brown Omnibus

"A frustrating inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered; a bold adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World

"Love means loving the unlovable (in your ‘opinion,’ not in His ‘actuality’) - or it is no virtue at all."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in Heretics

"The whole pleasure (and purpose) of family and marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in Introduction to the Book of Job

"The simplification of anything is always sensational."

-- G.K. Chesterton, in Varied Types

So, my friends, especially those of you who are reaching out for a fix to some dreadful dilemma, there is none (and this is NOT bad news, but extravagantly good), except to let the situation, the mystery, your Master, have you and inform you and redeem your experience and resurrect you for the next go-round. You will be so glad you did. Otherwise, have at the figuring out of a solution - gathering all the experts you can find, threatening and cajoling them into doing your bidding, until you tire and die from all the swinging. All of my life’s answers/solutions are being provided by Him (vs. figured out by me) the same way - after a certain very human amount of anxiety and strain, and then a very spiritually bold release and gain.