Shunning the Light

I just finished my first year of grad school in counseling psychology. Half-way through the year I was given my first patient. This is because my school only wants to screw up people with amateurish counseling who have no choice but to go along.

So anyway, working with him was very hard. We would dwell on the bad parts of his life, and all his problems, and mostly why everyone else in his life had failed him. But whenever I tried to give him a complement, or tell him how courageous he was being for facing his problems, or show him how he was improving, he would brush me off. He couldn’t take the good stuff, only the bad.

I am sure you know someone just like that. Most likely you see a lot of yourself in this person. It is very hard for almost everyone to take complements. We are afraid they are insincere, that the person complementing us is just humoring us and telling us what we want to hear. We are uncomfortable with any attention on us, and get especially flustered when we are surprised, and we are almost always surprised by good words. We don’t expect it and don’t like it. It is like suddenly someone put a spotlight on us and says “You are a good person. Now talk while everyone stares at you.”

We are afraid that if we accept a compliment it means that we are committing to make this compliment true. If someone told you that you are a very good piano player, but you didn’t think you were, you would somehow try to let them know that this wasn’t true. You would be afraid of the expectations of having to be a good piano player when you are afraid that you aren’t up to that standard. You would be afraid that people would know you aren’t that good and hate you for pretending you were.

Most of all, we are ambivalent with success. We love it and hate it. We move toward it, but then hide from it. We feel can approach it but never possess it. Why don’t we become great? We are afraid of our own greatness and what it would do to us. Greatness will change us, and we don’t really like change. So we say we want to become more like God, or become a better husband, or a better student, but we also do things that sabotage our efforts. George Weinberg, in his book The Heart of Psychotherapy calls this “shunning the light”. We avoid the light because we fear what it will do to us. We are more comfortable in our own sinfulness and problems, and are much more comfortable in the mundane and trivial. Is change possible? Only if we allow ourselves to see and love the goodness and potential inside of us and to allow others to see the goodness in us, as well.

Old thoughts

I found this journal entry I wrote during the worst of my depression, and it made me happy.

Jan 7, 2007

My thoughts want me to believe that my life is too much, that my struggles are too hard. That I will always be overwhelmed. God, don’t let me believe them. They want me to believe that I can’t change the patterns in my life. They want be to believe that I have tried and failed too many times and that I am foolish to try again. They want me to give up. But God, I want to believe that the next times will be the one that takes. Always the next time.

Centering

This is something I wrote early this year

When I was in high school, I had a friend who told me that every time she was in the car and her family drove by an accident, her mom would turn down the music, and they would give a quick prayer. I thought this was a great idea. But since I lived in a small town and didn’t drive often, it really didn’t change my life.

Soon, everything changed. I moved to Downtown Chicago, one block from the notorious Cabrini Green housing project. My first night I heard gunshots outside my window. I was amazed at how often I heard ambulances. Almost every single time I heard an ambulance I said a quick prayer. I still do this, whenever I hear an ambulance, no matter what I am doing or whom I am with, I stop and pray, usually just for a second. This process has changed me, and not necessarily how I thought it would. Yes, it made me more sensitive to hurting people and made me more aware of what was going on around me. But most of all, it changed my perspective. I have called this “centering”, bringing my priorities back to the most basic categories, death and life. When someone is being rushed to the hospital, all that matters is life or death. When you have a heart attack, your job doesn’t matter, your marriage doesn’t matter, your past doesn’t matter, even your health doesn’t matter. All that is important is that your life led you to this point, and you will either live or die. We forget our mortal-ness, we think as little as possible about everyone’s impending death.

Sometimes when I am in the mood for righteous justice, I would watch “World’s Wildest Police Videos” with my brother Trevie. At least once every episode the host will say something offensive and insensitive, which makes for great television. But one day they were showing a video of a cop chasing a desperate woman. The woman’s family had called the police saying she was going to commit suicide. She was driving down the highway at over 90 miles an hour and the cop was doing his best to keep up. Finally the woman slowed down as she got to a bridge. She pulled her car over and climbed over the guard rail. The cop got out of his car and ran toward her just as she was getting ready to jump off what must have been a very tall bridge. She jumped..

and he immediately reached down with one arm and grabbed her. Then he, with all his manly protective muscles of justice, pulled her up. And it was all caught on his cop camera! But what was so amazing was that she went almost instantly from death to life. The moment she jumped she was as good as dead. And someone came and ripped her right out of the air and through her back onto the pavement and life again. Death to life.

My pastor was speaking on Acts 2, which talks about the practices of the early church immediately after Christ’s death. At one point the passage talks about when peter preached right after Pentecost and 3000 people got baptized and were saved. My pastor said over and over again 3000 people came from death to life. They were dead, now they are alive.

The silly school/cult that Annie and I belong to has a huge global emphasis. Students will sometimes give presentations before class about what is happening in Darfur or Sri Lanka and what agencies are able to help. Last class period one student shared in prayer request time (yes we pray at this school) that he was friends with missionaries that needed about 400 dollars almost immediately, and students were challenged to give. I loved it. When I think about what is happening, I go through so many emotions, feeling like I can’t focus too much or I will forget commitments here, consoling myself for not giving enough, convincing myself that God has given to me my local community that I can focus on. And then I remember my God, and I see how all of this I just thought is unacceptable, and I have no choice but to be overwhelmed and grieving for the things that grieve God. People are starving, and the God of fulfillment is filled with anger. People are lonely and rejected and the God of encounter hates it. People bring violence and hate against other people, and the God of peace weeps. I have learned that God gives us no excuse for not having compassion for this world. No matter if we are overwhelmed, or discouraged, or feeling removed or distracted, God wants us to help, wants us to give, wants us to sacrifice, wants us to pray, wants us to hurt, wants us to think. These matters are not trivial; they are about life and death

But there is something to being too centered. My niece Emma turned 5 a little while back. Emma constantly is hurling herself in every direction at once. Everything she feels she feels with all of her, with her very presence. What she loves she must squeeze. So it was very interesting to see what would happen when someone got the great idea to buy her a hamster for her birthday. It is a constant battle for Emma to not want to wake her hamster up and hold her every minute of every day. Since hamsters are nocturnal, Alana is consistently awoken in the middle of the night because Emma wanted to see if she wants to play. Emma’s older sister Anna recently asked why “Alana” is always so nervous. Poor Alana is not choosing to stay in perspective. Her perspective is forced on her everyday, and it can be very debilitating. Emma’s mother has wondered out loud about the strain on Alana’s microscopic heart. (Yes, I know that hamster’s hearts are not actually microscopic. No, I have never seen a hamster’s heart, and I couldn’t really say that is a life goal I have)

We consistently forget how vulnerable we are. Not just in physical terms, but in spiritual and emotional realms as well. We do more and more things to move us further and further away from the things that could potentially harm us. We make the goals of our lives security when God keeps screaming at us to not loose perspective. Our lives are consistently driving our perspectives out of focus. Because perspective is something that is so subjective and immeasurable, we think we can neglect it. It is not enough to wait for perspective to remind us what really matters. We need rituals, practices in our life that ground us, which bring us closer to the mind of God. We need to find a way to stand in the enormity of our fragility and still be able to function with the rest of our lives. This is not something that can be reached and then forgotten about. Centering must happen over and over.

I often think back to how I felt after September 11^th and I miss feeling that way. Life didn’t feel worthless. I felt the politics and niceties fell away as everyone was struck by their own mortality. People were able to hurt together, to stand in the midst of pain and agony and not flee. I remember such a strong feeling of wanting to connect with my friends, wanting something beyond what we were giving each other in our day-to-day. What was so amazing was that when I looked in my friend’s eyes I saw they wanted the same thing. Please take perspective seriously.