Almost a year and a half ago, my husband and I started seeing a fabulous husband and wife counseling team: Dr. James and Christine Schwarz. I know what you're thinking: how fabulous can they be? You're getting divorced.
True. They were not able to help us save our marriage. They are, however, doing a bang-up job of helping me. (No small feat, I might add!) Because of them I am finally beginning to understand:
- I am not responsible for all the evil in the world . . . not even all the evil in my immediate circle!
- I am not responsible for making the whole world happy . . . not even those in my immediate circle!
- I am responsible for my own happiness and fulfillment . . . my husband, friends, parents, children, strangers on the street are not.
- My best really is good enough . . . even if I fail. God Himself does not ask me for more than that; why should I ask it of myself?
- God's divine mark on me is a spirit of joy, excitement, and effervescence. Starving or disdaining that part of me is, at best, unhealthy and, at worst, sacrilegious.
- Every feeling is given to us for a reason, and we should embrace them, identify them, and use them to either enjoy our present condition or change it.
- I am not a victim--of my parents, my spouse, my children, the President of the United States.
- Life is a dance. I can't necessarily change partners, but I can always change the dance.
- God's grace and mercy towards my children is greater than my ability to mess them up.
- Stepping out in faith and watching God be God in my life is the most intoxicating thing I've ever known.
The only answer I can come up with is that the human mind has an incredible capacity to ignore truths that it finds too uncomfortable--or too confusing--to confront. HOWEVER: I have also discovered that the human mind has an eerie ability to heal itself. For a surprising number of psychological pains, the mind knows both the underlying cause and the cure. We just need to give it a chance to do its work.
Of course, if that work can involve sandboxes, ogre-princess figurines, friendship, and prayer, so much the better!
"If you would but listen!"
ReplyDeleteI think you will gain much understanding with regard to your suffering from this Theopolis podcast episode:
https://m.soundcloud.com/user-812874628/episode-711-how-god-changes-the-world-with-james-jordan
You have been sublimating deep and substantial desires into a gaseous and inchoate set of tropes, loosely shaped by a fairy tale movie and other worldly paradigms that have veiled your eyes to Scripture's powerful message, latent in Deuteronomy 32 and expounded in I Cor 15:35-38 and I Sam 2:6: that "the LORD kills and makes alive, he brings down to Sheol and raises up."
You do not yet seem to understand the kind of death you have been through and why: that your hopes have been buried NOT so that you forever despond like Bronte's Lucy Snowe, but so that you may "look to the rock from which you were hewn:" Abraham and Sarah who were as good as dead, and their desires with them. Yet, in that death, God worked His resurrecting power so that man may not boast, but seek him like those beasts in Psa 104, and those falling and crushed ones in Psa 145.
In the supreme counsel of His wisdom, God's path for us is the cruciform path. Hope must die in the fertile ground of faithfulness, before it fruits into the fullness of responsive righteousness, which is love without deceit (Psa 32), the honest answer which is “like a kiss on the lips.” Oh how good It would be to have an honest answer, and to repudiate all deceiving charm and dissembling tropes!
The "triumph of the therapeutic" has convinced you not to follow the cruciform path, and you are but half alive, flopping about like a comatose carcass sustained by electric shocks. You pull your punches and judgements rather than offend by truth, and you refuse to take up Wisdom's call to winnow out the dogs and swine from the pearls, and to fight to protect the pearls (Matt 7:6).
And so you go on, many of your tears maudlin in your half-drunken state of semi cognizance, your creativity hampered by an attempt to curry favor with a world of deceit, brokering a false reconciliation with a civilization whose vain philosophies extend from that restless achiever who substituted responsibility forresponsiveness, and "gave darkness for light:" Cain, the father of civilization and destroyer of living responsiveness and culture. He ignored and rejected what Hopkins embraced: "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things," namely Christ "who fills all things in all ways," killing what is mortal to clothe with the eternal.
You must die to those things which once substituted and deceitfully paraded as embodiments of your desires. The glory for which you are bound, the bastion which you are meant to be, will not arise out of the depths of sorrow (Sheol) unless you allow the God of resurrection to fully crucify and resurrect your hope and desires.
Heed Wisdom's call: give up your simple ways; hate what is evil, cling to what is good, and let the dead bury the dead. All your delight is to be in the pearls (Psa 16:3), and you must die to the dogs and swine, that you may be a fortress against them, just as Christ guarded his own from those religious impostors, those men of lawlessness who invoked God's blessing while trampling on his righteousness (Deut 29, Matt 23).
The antiphonal reply to 1 Corinthians 13 is Psalm 45: faith, hope, and love have no substance apart from truth, humility, and justice. To fight for one is to fight for all-- for God is one, and all in all.
Therefore lay hold of the cruciform path, that you may gain a heart of wisdom, and divest your light of that shroud which now occludes it.