good grief

I've slackened my pace of writing on this blog. I write in many other places. Sometimes I write on facebook, which is not satisfying. At times I've been dissatisfied writing on the blog here: no responses; responses that miss the point; responses that are spam - though there have been responses of understanding, appreciation, and encouragement.

I do a lot of writing on small scraps of paper. Paper scraps that I arrange in a collage of seminarrational resemblance. I don't want to write a narrative so much as the feeling of a narrative.

I think now that no one is reading what I'm writing here, except perhaps Jami or an occasional friend, or someone who types a google search looking for something else. I think that it's a good thing to write in order not to be read. There are many things written for an audience - think : what is your audience. And so minnisters for years are encouraged to write for a group of 8th graders.

I don't know what it says for us that the intellectual development hoped for in our country is 8th grade. Or that the emotional develoopment might be even younger. In clinical pastoral education (CPE) I've learned that emotional deveelopment is muich more important for behaviour and wisdeom than intellectual development.

It's amazing what we can think. Yet the complexity of what we're capable of thinking is belied by the simplicity of our emotional reactions. Most people in our society are reactive. If our politics is a reflection of us, then we see, we feel, in a polarized manner.

So the question is not knowing more: it's knowing what we feel and why we feel it.

What can be done? How can we move beyond reactivity to, as W Bion might say, containing our good/bad feelings together when thinking about others: that a persoon can be good or bad, a mixture, and that our reactivity toward them, our desire to act out, to pull the passive/aggressive thing, is not in ours or their interests: that such reactivity forestalls communication and growth and relationality.

I recommend a mass reading of Alice Miller's Drama of the gifted child.

Our child rearing methods invariably induce trauma prior to cognitive devevlopment. When parental love is not provided in a nurturing manner, the child faces the crisis of the mother being bad. How to get the good mother back, he thinks. He discovers that when he pleases her, the good mother comes back. What happens here, though, is that many times, what is discovered is the mechanism of pleasing: where admiration, compliments, take the place of love. The child still craves love, but gets compliments instead. When the child wants love, he does behavior to get the compliments (this is where he gets the good mother). Over time a split develops, many splits really, where good and bad never reside in the same object at the same time. The child may grow up and his manner of compensating may lead to high levels of accomplishment. If not, it may lead to high levels of grandiosity. The child cannot face the fact that he is ordinary, neither good nor bad in absolute ways. Still the child has a chasm of unlovedness - a chasm that gets deeper and more secret as he becomes an adult.

Miller, Klein and others discuss this development of narcissism much more thoroughly, and I recommend them. But this is my basic understanding of what takes place.

Certainly I see this grandiostiy working in me, a grandiostiy that masks shame and that needs further accomplishment to substitute for love not received as a child. It's not that parents intentionally don't love their children: but I believe that often they don't know how. The baby gets quuiet when they threaten it - mission accomplished; the child behaves when he is spanked - mission accomplished. The child wins a prize, gets all A's, a scholarship, hits for the cycle - all is perfect. Except when the chld strikese out, gets all B's and C's (or that first F), flunks out - then the need is still there, to cover up that empty hole (where the shame of being the bad infant or the guilt of being the hurtful infant) that's still there, and now there's not a compliment, a plug of praise, to substitute for the love the child doesn't know how to ask for, has only sporadically received, and doesn't know how to give or receive (except that it binds with an object of enough emotional umph! to replace the original object that failed).

So what to do for this child. This is where the process of grieving comes in. I think a book like Kathleen O'Connor's commentary on Lamentations "Tear of the World" is helpful in this regard. Though I've found it helplful to read lamentations straight through in one sitting or the book of Job. These books deal with grief in complex and let it all hang out kinds of ways.

A reprint but a good one

Some months ago, when Columbia Pres next door had a yard sale, I bought a set of seats. This was no ordinary set of seats: this set was arranged together like theater seats. They were three simple seats grouped together. The frame was iron and the seats were wood veneer. Attached to the back was a hymnal holder and a holder for tiny communion cups. I could not believe my good fortune at coming across such a thing. It was a prize and evocative of an era when churches experimented with practical alternatives to pews. I figured that this alternative was about 1935 - 1940. Immediately seeing the possibilities of such a seating arrangement, Geza, who was with me, helped me move it back to my dorm. We set it out in the hall, across from a blank spot on the opposite wall. Geza and I sat there and toasted our good fortune to be in such a place and be sitting in such seats. He later told me that as he sat there he had a revelation: he saw how it was possible for free men and women, under the eye of God, to sit on folding theater seats, made of wooden laminate, and dream visions and see thoughts of visions, and visions unthought of, and dreams unthinkable. For that moment we were the most fortunate of men. Geza and I weren't the only people to sit in these chairs. Others told me of their experiences. Some spoke of recovery, others mentioned a feeling of peace. It was a pacific set of ecclesial theater seats, iron framed and wood laminated. It welcomed all. Late at night I would hear couples speaking in low murmurs; old friends would come during the day and reminisce. Often, when I was coming back to my room, I would espy evidence of solitary contemplation: a prayer written on a small paper scrap and inserted in the iron-work, a tear-stained handkercheif left on an armrest. Some might say I was mad, and I can be easily faulted for leaving these seats out in the hall. Like the Moor, I loved not too wisely but too well, and out of a tender heart I left them there. Their vulnerability pinching my heart with a sweetness transcendental and immanent - and now I am bereft of them. Mistaken for derelict and cleaned out with the other hallway detritus, they were removed to the dumpster's vicinity, and from thence further removed by annonymous hands into obscurity. This removal occured while I sat in a theater, in stadium-style seating,watching a space opera. How much I feel my infidelity, as if I had traded the form fitting wood laminate for the cold companionship of a cup holder and the mesmerizing thump of dolby stereo. How now I ache for the simple welcoming appearance of this set of seats in my silent hall? What dark force now grips myheart? A force of memory at once bitter and at once sweet. Sweeterbit? I asked, "Oh ecclesial theater seats, can it be that you are lost to me forever?" The night drew me out and I searched. The thickets of the brambles among the trees scratched and tore at my skin. I stumbled along stream banks and thrashed my way through kudzu. At last I came to my senses in an open field under the stars. I looked up at Orion and the Plieades. I navigated the zodiacal signs and my own ignorance rebuffed me. What is left for me now but to continue on, to live with my loss, and to let this minor grief merge with all the sad grieving that runs through the great world like a river with uncountable tributaries.