Fight

All of Life is a Trauma Response

The incarnation is a peacemaking act

The development of Christianity was trauma-based. .

The Fight response

The Jews of the time of Jesus were a people-group with a history of trauma; from their enslavement in Egypt, to the captivity of the ten northern tribes in Assyria, to Babylonian captivity. Trauma specialists tell us that trauma is not what happens to you but is the story that develops in you as a result of what happened.  The Israelites’ story told them that their law was the covenant that God had made with them to keep them from trauma, their suffering was a direct result of disobedience to God’s laws. God’s benevolence and protection depended upon keeping the law. They made meaning of the randomness of their suffering by narrating it within a system of order. Their scriptures promised them that obedience would protect them from disease, bad harvests, and would assure victory over their enemies. They would be God’s victorious people. To disobey the law would  result in terror, consumption, plagues, wild beasts devouring their children and starvation so severe they would devour their own children as well (Leviticus 26: 16-31 NRSVUE).  The first-century Jewish people believed that they were subjects of the Roman Empire because they had not been sufficiently faithful. This interpretation gave them a way to make sense of their suffering. Acceptance of blame and keeping pure gave them a feeling they could control their outcomes and thus reduce trauma. It was likely that any citizen in the Roman empire was a victim of or a witness to trauma and violence. Public and violent persecutions; crucifixions, beheadings, burnings, and being fed to wild animals in the coliseum, left a lasting imprint on how Christian thought and practice developed and has been lived out in the world since that time.  

One response to trauma was to fight. The fight response is a response to powerlessness that involves pushing back with power. It is understandable why Christians would be compelled to fight. The early church had risked much for their faith. Many had given up families, social connections and had risked persecution to convert to Christianity. It would have been important to feel that the sacrifice had not been in vain and thus important to defend their conversion with perceived proof, whether intellectual or spiritual. It is easy to see how living surrounded by threats would result in orienting oneself to life as a battle against one enemy after another.

One such fight was the defense of truth. Rather than a release of power and knowledge of good and evil, apologists have been fighting for centuries to give credence to Christianity through debate. Christians, rather than accessing grace by abiding in the weakness and vulnerability of Christ crucified, attempt to prevail through a demonstration of superior strength of knowledge.

The early church also made much of the fight over who was saved and who was a heretic – a fight that has continued to the present day.  We do not see an approach to the knowledge of good and evil, in which power through knowledge is relinquished but rather we see a reliance upon knowledge and dogma to limit and define who might be saved or lost.

The fight response was not just directed outwardly toward heretics and persecutors, but also toward oneself. In the early church, Christian asceticism often manifested as a fight against one’s own humanity and the quest to gain power over the impulses of the body - abstaining from sleep, bathing, sexuality, food and any other kind of human desire including grief, pleasure, and even laughter (Athanasius).  They abstained from speaking, joking, and laughing, and were encouraged to think of themselves as wretches and worms who are on trial before God (Benedict).

Even today, we see the leftovers of this fight response persisting in Christian practice and apologetics, purity culture, dogma and shame around our imperfections persist. Fights over correct belief contrast starkly to the apostle Paul’s example to “know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.” (I Corinthians 2:2-3. NRSVUE)

Fights against the flesh contrast starkly with Christ who embraced human flesh both in the act of his incarnation, and throughout his ministry as he embraced flesh that was seen as unclean. Rather than fighting against his humanity, Christ entered into it with all its desire, and chaos. Christ ate, drank, laughed, and cried with heretics and sinners. Christ did not see the body and its desires as a battlefield to be fought against, but as something to be loved and embraced. The incarnation is a peacemaking act, first demonstrating God making peace with the human body by becoming a human body, and then secondly by calling us to extend limitless grace to the other regardless of how offensive and unclean they may seem.

And that is the task for us – to release the fight response and make peace with unknowing, with different ideas, and with all kind of bodies and the things they do.  Including our own.

Democracy and grace

Instead - we let it go.

If you think about it, the idea of democracy is a political and societal practice of grace. 

In democracies, we have theoretically agreed to hold space for differences and disagreements.  You want your candidate to run government, I want mine.  But because there are different choices, we can’t all have what we want.  So, we have (in theory) agreed that we will vote and the majority will get what they want.  Those who don’t get what they want agree (in theory) that they will wait until there is another opportunity to vote and maybe at that time, the outcome will be what they wanted.  We have decided that there is no way that everyone can get what they want.  It’s not possible. Not everyone will agree, or be the same, or want the same things.  Democratic systems have made space for that disagreement and difference and have decided (at least at their inception) that it is better to have the freedom to disagree and to come up with a peaceable way to make choices than to be told what will happen with no voice and no opportunity for change. Democracy manages the conflict that is inevitable between people rather than suppressing differences because when differences and disagreements are suppressed, war breaks out. 

(I keep saying in theory because we all know that no democracy functions just as it was intended when it was founded)

Grace is like that.  There are things we don’t like about others. With grace, we don’t try to make everyone agree with our way of being. We don’t hold people hostage emotionally, or in any other way just because they have transgressed (in our definition of transgression).  Instead, we let it go - that’s what forgiveness is.   We don’t try to change others to make them like ourselves, or like an ideal that we believe in, but we live at peace with them (at a minimum) and maybe even love them as they are.

Even inside ourselves, grace lets us make space for the parts of us we don’t like and live with ourselves peacefully without an internal war of guilt or shame raging all the time.

Sure, sure there have to be SOME rules for society to co-exist.  We can’t just all run around doing whatever, whenever.  I need you to stop at a red light, so you don’t kill me, and I want you to get a ticket if you don’t.  I want there to be legal consequences if you break into my house and steal things or hurt me or those I love.  But these rules need to be decided together with grace. If you want consequence A and I want consequence B  for the trespasser, how do we resolve it?  Who gets to decide?  Putting it to a vote to discover what seems best in the view of most people or voting-in people we trust to make the call are both democratic solutions that hold space for this difference of opinion.

Even inside myself, there is a part of me that wants to eat chocolate and binge watch all day.  There is another part of me that wants to be healthy and strong and not have a stomachache.  How do I decide which part gets her way?  Most of us are democratic about it and we give both sides a chance to “rule.”  We do a little chocolate eating and binge watching but we also eat some spinach and walk or go to the gym a little.  We give grace to the chocolate eater inside us and grace to the healthy part of us and we live at peace with ourselves.

 – At least in theory

A Date with Death

I wondered
why he looked so familiar
and smelled like earth and memory.

A Date with Death - by Gina Puorro

Death asked me to join him for dinner
so I slipped into my favorite black dress
that I had been saving for a special occasion
and let him walk me to our candlelit tryst.
He ordered a ribeye, extra rare
I ordered two desserts and red wine
and then I sipped
and wondered
why he looked so familiar
and smelled like earth and memory.
He felt like a place both faraway
and deep within my body
A place that whispers to me
on the crisp autumn breeze
along the liminal edges of dusk and dawn
somewhere between dancing
and stillness.
He looked at me
with the endless night sky in his eyes
and asked
‘Did you live your life, my love?’
As I swirled my wine in its glass
I wondered If I understood the thread I wove into the greater fabric
If I loved in a way that was deep and freeing
If I let pain and grief carve me into something more grateful
If I made enough space to be in awe that flowers exist
and take the time to watch the honeybees
drink their sweet nectar
I wondered what the riddles of regret and longing
had taught me
and if I realized just how
beautiful and insignificant and monstrous and small we are
for the brief moment that we are here
before we all melt back down
into ancestors of the land.
Death watched me lick buttercream from my fingers
As he leaned in close and said
‘My darling, it’s time.’
So I slipped my hand into his
as he slowly walked me home.
I took a deep breath as he leaned in close
for the long kiss goodnight
and I felt a soft laugh leave my lips
as his mouth met mine
because I never could resist a man
with the lust for my soul in his eyes
and a kiss that makes my heart stop.

Special thanks to Jason Valendy for introducing me to this poem.

The potential of receptivity

We create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart may have been one of the most emphatic on in encouraging unknowing. 

He says that the place where God speaks, and works has less to do with right action, right emotion or right mindset and more to do with space. Eckhart calls this open space the “potential of receptivity.” He says that we create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us. “There must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that.” Eckhart affirms that this birth has nothing to do with good deeds or religious purity as we think of it but rather, it occurs in both sinners and saints – even those in hell.

Eckhart speaks of creating a space through the practice of silence and stillness that is absolute and is far more extreme than most Christian practices. It includes letting go of images, understanding, intellect, memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.

Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy. Many today consider him to be one the great mystics.

Meister Eckhart. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009

Not finding the lost

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily flood the room with a perfect a necessary darkness. - Heidi Prebe This is me Letting You Go.

Slain from the foundation of the world

The act of death is foundational to the very creation

Long before the incarnation of Christ or the crucifixion of Jesus, the death of Christ was at work.  In the book of Revelation, the author in his vision says that life is given by the “Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8, KJV)

The act of death is foundational to the very creation. In order to create, an infinite God, who filled all space and time had to make space for something else to exist – had to die in order for the world to live. It is this foundational death act that creates and gives life.

This is a revelation of the reality of things. We can see this in our bodies - cells have to die to allow cells to renew. When they don’t it’s a deadly cancer. All aspects of nature have to die in order for nature as whole to live. Plants die when they are eaten, leaves die on the trees each year, seeds fall to the ground in death. The engine of death is held in the DNA of life.

If we refuse to participate in this death, consent to this death - if we hold on tightly to power, control, certainty, survival in all its forms, no space is made for anything new to be created.

The impulse to reject

Grace must be emptied of power.

Grace must be emptied of power.  To be emptied of power, grace must first be entirely unconditional. Conditions to grace are means by which we “make sense” of something that offends our sensibilities of justice and fair play. Grace that requires action on the part of the individual is no grace at all, as it becomes tethered to an act of power on the part of the recipient.  Unconditional grace must also be unrelated to ideas of judgement of good and evil. 

The perceived knowledge of good and evil is a means by which mankind gains power over unknowing. It is the means by which we make meaning by assigning values to all things.  One thing is better than another, more beautiful, more desirable. Unconditional grace allows us to practice consent to reality without wanting to tamper with it by making it better, purer, holier, or safer. It is grace that allows us to see beauty in ugliness and God in all things and enables us to stop rejecting one thing over another. It is grace that enables us to cease crying out, as Peter did when he rejected the idea of Christ crucified, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NRSV). It is this very impulse to reject and the lack of consent to reality that Jesus rebukes as Satanic in this story.

Creating Beauty

I wonder if the very creation of beauty is somehow wrapped up in violence? 

Chasing beauty

Three weeks ago, I had cosmetic surgery.  Nothing crazy, just a little work to my neck. (I’ve always been obsessed about not ending up with a “turkey neck”)

Everything went great.  Easy peasy.  Healing was going great, hardly any bruising or swelling.  Some of  my stitches were out and then in the middle of the night on Day 8 I felt a sharp pain in my left check that woke me up.   I put my hand on it and could feel the swoosh, swoosh of blood pumping into my cheek.  My face and neck swelled up like a balloon. 

Hours later I was in emergency surgery getting my face opened back up to clean out all the blood, cauterize the vein and stitched back up. 

Only this recovery was different.  Lots more pain.  Lots of swelling.  The doctor made  two house calls to check on me those first few days.  Still, a few days later I had an infection, despite antibiotics.  More antibiotics, stronger.  Every day I went to the doctor and he pressed and prodded, pushing infection out of the tissues.  Two showers with Dial soap each day.  Silver sufadine cream on the new incisions.  Lots of pain and pain medicine.  And still, the infection persisted. 

So, tomorrow I get to go back to surgery for a third time.  To clean out the infection.

I’m angry, scared, defeated.  I want to cry all the time. 

But mostly I’m angry at myself.  Angry for doing this to myself.  And in trying to extend grace to myself I’ve been thinking alot about all this. Why I did it. What it was about.

The first time I had a neck lift I remember feeling a distinct sense of the violence I had inflicted upon myself just to look better.  I told myself then I wasn’t going to do it again and yet I did.  (Never say never).  I was feeling old, and wanted to feel good about myself again.

After the infection set in, I had a couple of meditation sessions - hoping for peace, hoping for insight. What came to me was the realization that despite my promises to myself of ten years ago, what I had not done is learn to love myself.   Like really. I mean, there are a lot of things about myself I love. Even a lot of things about how I look that I love. But not my whole self. Not without reserve. Sometimes I see pictures of myself and unless they are just -so:  my hair is good, the angle is right, my makeup is good, etc., I hate what I see.  I can’t seem to learn to love it.  In one of my meditations, I had a distinct experience of loving myself, every part of myself.  The soft, flabby parts, the parts with brown spots, the saggy, baggy parts.  All of it seemed beautiful and wonderful in that moment.  But it was fleeting and the truth is I know that given a few weeks for the trauma of this face thing to wear off, I would go get lasers done on the spots on my hands.  I just would. 

Today, when I came home from my pre-op appointment, feeling like I want to cry all  morning, somehow, the beauty of my life started rushing over me. I touched the purple flowers on the vitex tree as I passed it.  My cactus are blooming.  My lantana are blooming.   Everything is green and lush and beautiful.  I thought about my life and just how breathtakingly beautiful it has been.  Even the parts you might say were ugly.  Even my first marriage which I’ve always said was my greatest regret.  But if you think about it, I got to marry and have children with a great love of my life.  I got to experience one of those relationships that is filled with SO much pain and so much ecstasy too.  Not many people get that.  I thought about my marriage now and how it is the most tender, beautiful thing I could ever imagine.  It brings me to tears.  I’ve gotten the gift of being with a man who loves me in a way I honestly didn’t know existed and still to this day find hard to take in.  A relationship that has changed my life and the lives of my children in ways I know and probably to depths I have no idea .  I have three utterly beautiful children.  Not just utterly beautiful physically (which they are), but utterly beautiful souls.  They all have such depth, such intelligence, such light in them and also such rich and honest darkness. I have two amazing - and also beautiful stepchildren - who are intelligent and thoughtful people with whom I’ve become friends and who I love and respect. I have just the best friends who love me and whose friendships have been seriously life giving. I have three siblings who love me and would do anything for me. I’ve just had the absolute cutest grandson ever.  He and I have our secret. We know how hilarious the whole thing is – this life.  We smile and laugh at it together.  One night, we swam through twinkling lights and dark blue water together.  We know what we know about how beautiful swimming through life is.  The twinkling lights of it and the dark, deep waters of it.  And I’m about to have a granddaughter

My house is beautiful, the trees around it are beautiful. I’ve loved and been loved by four beautiful dogs and now two beautiful cats. 

 My life is so excruciatingly beautiful. I sometimes wonder how it’s possible.

I got to thinking about how beautiful this world is. Beautiful in a way that can hardly be expressed. All of life is a yearning for beauty. The seeds in the ground, the buds on the trees, the bees gathering pollen. The sex that everything and everyone is having and the incredible beautiful creatures it creates.

Even the hours we spend earning money, so we can buy beautiful things.  The effort we spend trying to be beautiful, stay beautiful.  Sometimes painful effort.

As I get older, sometimes I look at young people and just think about how beautiful they are and they don’t even know it.  Their smooth skin, their thick hair, their white teeth, their firm bodies.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry. 

The sunsets, the mountains, the milky way, the butterflies, the bees, the flowers.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry.

When I was on my psychedelic journey this spring, all I could think was how beautiful the entire journey was.  What I saw ,what I felt, the tears I cried, the grief I felt, the death.  

But it seems I missed it.  Or I would have been able to see how beautiful I am.  The wrinkles, the sags, the brown spots.  All of it.  

So I enacted violence upon my face to make it more beautiful.   

Is that what we do to try to create beauty?  Is that where violence comes from?  We want a beautiful world, an idealistic world that fits our idea of beauty – our IDEOLOGY of beauty .  And we cut and tear at it and at ourselves, and at one another in violence to try to get at it.  To get it to look the way we think it should. Often though, instead of creating beauty, we create scars and wounds and infection instead.   Because we can’t see the difference between real beauty and an ideology that seems beautiful. We can’t take in that beauty must also include imperfection and death. There can’t be one without the other.

I wonder if the very creation of the beauty of the world somehow wrapped up in violence?  Is that why we have the metaphor of Christ slain from the creation of the world?  Before the creation of beauty it was just unified -- formlessness and void.  Peaceful perhaps, but no beauty.   And God had to enact violence upon gods-self to create a space for something other than gods self.  Kenosis.  The death of god, the emptying, the nullifying, the cutting open and rending apart, the opening.   God as ideological perfection making space for something else so that actual beauty can exist. Slain from the foundation of the world. 

The sensuality of a baby

The experience is animal in nature. Visceral.  Sensual. 

We have a new baby in the family.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a baby. But I was there for this birth, and for the first week of his life, and for most evenings for the past month and it has been beautiful.  But what has struck me is how earthy, how visceral, how sensual the experience of a baby is.  From the birth with the pain and the moaning, the tearing of flesh, the blood and the fluid and the shit.  To the immediate latching on of the baby to the breast. 

Then weeks afterward.  Weeks filled with blood and pain for the mother.  Weeks of sheer survival - trying to get enough sleep to not lose your mind entirely.  Weeks filled with the joy of milk coming into the breast and the unbelievable rush of the baby latching to the breast and eating.  The smell of the baby, the velvety feel of his head.  The warm heavy weight on you and your bodily response to it – better than any relaxation pill you ever took. 

A black rotten cord that falls away, and diaper after diaper of shit. 

You rejoice at a great belch, and a great shit coming out of this soft, velvety creature. 

You are constantly analyzing whether or not he’s eating enough, pooping enough, sleeping enough,

…..the prevailing experience is animal in nature. Visceral.  Sensual. 

Smells, bodily functions, body fluids, bodily connections.  One body feeding on another. Two bodies so connected that when one cries, milk falls from the breast of the other.  One body so connected to another that even when no sleep has been had and it’s the middle of the night, love so strong reaches out to this creature that is keeping you awake and he is the most beautiful creature on earth. Nothing is more sensual than this. Nothing makes you feel more alive.

It seems to me that modern culture has sanitized life. We are clean. So clean that we don’t smell of anything human most of the time.  It’s all perfumes and body products and we are offended by human smells.  I’m the worst at this.  I hate the smell of body odors, breath, farts, urine.  But the baby...every poop, every fart, every smell of him – washed or unwashed – is amazing.  We’ve sanitized the human body visually as well.  We don’t want to see rolls of fat, or cellulite or stretch marks.  Blemishes, flaws.  We don’t want the body to be too human.  We’d rather see bodies that look perfect.  But babies … we love the rolls of fat, the “stork bite” on the back of the head, baby acne. We love bald babies and babies with hair that stands straight up.  We love wrinkles on babies.  We have no expectation that babies will look alike or fit a certain mold.   We have sanitized all aspects of life and death. Sex isn’t even sensual – it is as sanitized as the rest of it.  Bodies that look perfect and perform perfectly.  But the thing we cannot sanitize is a baby and in this way it is the most sensual creature on earth. 

Connecting to your own life

We are picking and choosing what to be present to. 

I was speaking with a woman who said that she was dissatisfied, but objectively if she looked at her life, she had everything she had hoped for, down to the last detail.  She didn’t know why she felt disconnected from her own life in this way.  She is a deeply spiritual person. She has a daily gratitude practice, and yet still feels disconnected from her own life in some way.  She said she feels like she is writing the story of her life and is on Chapter 3, but seems to reside internally in Chapter 15. 

To say that the issue here is living in the future rather than the present is true, but I wondered, what keeps us from connecting to the present?  I suspect that many of us, when we can be present find that the present is lovely. I suspect we find that what makes us suffer is when we connect to the past, or to the future.

Could it be that what keeps us from staying connected to the present is that we are only trying to connect to the parts of the present we like?  We are picking and choosing what to be present to.  Gratitude practices are great, but they might only connect us to part of our lives - the good parts - if we fail to be grateful for the suffering. 

We know that when we shut down sorrow, we shut down joy.  When we shut down presence to the suffering, we shut down presence in general. 

To connect to life, one must connect to death.