On Learning to Luff, with two Effs

Alright, look: I hate sentimentality just as much as the next guy. Valentines day is a recent memory, at the time of this writing— and this year it deliciously lined up with Ash Wednesday: with trip to church, with smearing ashes on my forehead and thinking of death.

Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"--a movie I've not seen-- has a scene where the Woody says "Love is too small a word.  I Lerve you, I Luff you, with two 'F's.'"  It's schmaltzy, but I, too, spell Luff with two Effs.  I’ve said it before: my girlfriend is my guru. “On Messiahs and Monkey Gods” spent a bunch of time talking that way. And periodically, I need to revisit that theme. I stick by my thesis: my relationship with my Jackie is the original big effing deal. But it’s much more serious than a bout of “she makes me so happy” swooning. By and by, it'll become clear why that's the case.

Jackieface

Let me say, first, that I’m starting from a “wounded self”—an identity that, in its codependence, collapsed the boundaries of my “self” instead of expanding them. This leaves me “care taking” or helping people to make me feel good about myself. I also tend to see relationships as a solution for my insecurity. That’s the “codependent disclaimer. It ain’t fun. I didn’t create it—it has its roots in early childhood— but making sure it doesn’t run my relationships is an “all the time” task of adulthood.

Since starting Under the Influence I’ve seen how problematic a dualistic mind is, and how many different processes dualistic thinking derails.  It has changed religion, recovery, romance and knowing what's right.  It separates me from God, me from sanity, me from my girlfriend, me from the very perceptions that make up my reality.  Remember: when I think dualistically, I always judge and reject parts of myself. I’m always engaging in “either/ or” thinking.

Let me give you two examples of how dualistic thinking helped me to cook my own goose.  First, by the time I left the monastery, I had become conscious of my own addicted mind. In my Charleston, South Carolina ACA group, I’d experienced my woundedness as a source of intense community. By the time I got to Chicago, I got the bright idea that I ought to try to find a recovering addict, and date her.  At least, I theorized, she’d be able to understand the addicted mind.  

Be careful what you pray for, y’all. I ultimately found that recovering alcoholic. Our connection was instant and intense: our wounds were both shaped like early childhood, and their solutions were apt to be shaped like drugs. She’d spent more time with the latter, and I, more time with the former.

The connection was instant, and ultimately superficial. She was a spiteful drunk, if ever there was one. In the end she relapsed, ultimately leaving me to return to a former, abusive lover. Mature reflection says I dodged a bullet. I’ve since balked at her efforts to be in continued touch—I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life, y’all— but she did teach me something.

When I dated her, I was dating three people: the obstinate, unrecovered alcoholic, the unpredictable recovering alcoholic, and the sane recovered alcoholic.  I put it in my file cabinet and moved on.

Go back a little further: when I was in college, I went to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with a group of college students. While there, I felt, for the first time, God’s presence in emptiness. I was in the church alone, and felt the pull of the enticing empty space. That was very important.

In the monastery guesthouse, during that same monastery trip, I pitched woo, in a PG-13 sense, with a brunette college girl. We dated for a while. Life had left neither of us jaded or bitter yet. This, too, was very important.  With italics and everything.

It would have been nothing but fun, but the other half of that monastery trip—the pull of the “presence of absence”—was romancing me too.   Contact with God and contact with her was pulling my cranky young-adult heart in two directions.

Please don’t read this next paragraph as a hymn in longing for lost love or whatever—that unfortunate girl and I were two halves of a mess far too hot for the cosmic dice to roll out a healthy relationship—but the fact is, when my dualistic mind got ahold of both romance and spirituality, it made me think I had a choice between one or the other.

The intervening years have taught me much.  I've stopped trying to pray by focusing my attention or breathing--I'm too nervously OCD for that.  Lately "hearing and feeling" are my mantras, and they work better.  I've learned that I'm an uncomfortable expressions of the Logos:  I long for God.  But I also don't know everything and I'm powerless over a score of small time addictions.  I want oneness, but spend my days dualistically rent asunder.  I'm going to suffer and die.  Since I started Under the Influence I'm more and more capable of being cuddly with those unresolvable tensions.  It's worth remembering the other "big offing deal": the unitive mindset that's lately been part of my life "accepts and includes" instead of "judging and rejecting." 

February's Sadhu of the Month

When I say "my girlfriend is my guru," I suppose I'm overselling it a bit.  Ideally, a guru is a realized-being who actively guides his disciples.  My Jackie and I are both very awake people, but neither of us have been inducted into Sri Ramakrisna's "sadhu of the month club."  In reality, Jackie and I are, for each other, nothing more than what the brothers were for each other, back in the monastery.  Jackie is my mirror.  For better or worse, she shows me myself.  

Let's reexamine both "unfortunate ex-girlfriend lessons" in light of what my Jackieface is showing me.  When I dated the recovering alcoholic, I was dating 3 people.  Perpetually, the relationship was three potential crises with one big smile pasted on it.  On the other hand, dating Jackie is secure enough to slow down and be more complete.  In last week's post, I talked about the 3 selves Catholics bring to the table.  Jackie is the kindest of mirrors: she shows me when I'm being a schmuck, and it's safe to admit it because she's not enduringly fazed by my schmuckery.   It's true, she shows me when I'm being my true self.  But I also see how entitled that can make me, and what harm entitlement does to our relationship.  She reminds me that my desire to transcend needs to be balanced with naps, reruns of "Catfish, the TV Show" and the doing of dishes.  If I ever become fully divinized, it'll be (in part) because she made me feel safe enough to let go of self altogether.

At one point, feeling a "presence in emptiness" was a revelation.  I made a life out of examining it.  In the monastery I came across the words of Teilhard de Chardin.  "Union Individuates," he said.  Two people, as they unify, become more secure in separateness.  Back then this blew things wide open.  I started noticing all sorts of distance in love itself.  Suddenly all of the scriptural examples I referenced in "Broken-heartedness, the Bride of the Logos" began jumping out at me.  As I said in "Messiahs and Monkey Gods," the first couple of years of dating Jackie made me realize, with the help of the hindu god Hanuman, that separateness could be a good part of God's plan, not just a consequence of sin.

The fact is, Jackie and I are both different enough, and connected enough, that (for the first time in my life) the "pull of empty space" lives in the same small space as the rated-PG pitching of woo.  The fact that we're two different people, with different needs--these days, it's this that provides the "empty space" where I call shenanigans on what seems to be divine absence till it morphs into revelation.  Any time she and I need different things, it's rough.  Any time we're both caught up in our false selves, it's rough.  But we cut each other slack.  I give her space for naps, and for caffeinating afterward.  Even when I'm cranky and stressed, she's still willing to kiss my face.  We regroup, and get back to busting each other's chops generously.  It's funny.  And it's normal.  And it's God's presence.  All at once.

One last thing: being over-attached to affirmation made me, for years, identify love simply by the parts that made me feel good.  One night, a back-burner moment of insight finally boiled over.  I realized that I had, in Jackie, someone safe enough to accept both the good and the bad as part of the whole.  I realized that, previously, I'd been chasing the intimate side of love and dodging its distance--and I realized that I didn't have to do that anymore.

In short, as Robert Masters says in his book about spiritual bypassing: I'm learning to "release love from the obligation to make [me] feel better."  Doing so, he says, is a key part of intimacy being a real gift of self. 

After my existential soup got all over the stove, I emailed the permanent deacon who serves, (sometimes much, sometimes little,) as my spiritual director.  He's the father of one of my two adopted brothers from monastery days, and very much a "bonus dad" to me.  In any case, I told the Deacon about all I had cooking relationally, that I felt I had a new and different opportunity these days.

He said "It sounds like the vows" and they rang through my head. "For better, for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health."

"I agree," I replied.  Then I flexed my theology nerd muscles, a move the Deacon is used to. "Who knew," I asked "that marriage would be the sacrament most capable of healing an unhealthy dualistic mind?"  It was a rhetorical question. But the answer is, I certainly didn't.  Now, though, I do. I do. I do.