The Unlovable(There's a World Full of Us)

I've had some important people in my life who have had something in common- and perhaps it is more common than I first thought. It is a person, most often a son and father relationship, where the father has been more or less sadistic-usually emotionally, not physically. I've seen it in my women friends, also, but in my experience, more often with men.

The sadistic comes out in making the son feel, over and over, from infancy, that somehow he is just not making it as a man, or that there is something flawed or even evil in the son, something that has to be rooted out quickly and forcefully, so that his son can 'make it in the world'. This isn't tough love. This is fear on the part of the father, a fear that was perhaps handed down to him from his parents in some form: fear of failure, fear of oneself not being a good enough father. It is a warped love, and so ceases being love to the son.

What happens to the son? He is either berated, abandoned or critcized from his earliest years. Usually, I've thought, it isn't always all the sons in a family, but the sadistic 'discipline' (emotional abuse) may often focus on one son especially- and it seems to be the son who actually has the most masculine tendencies- perhaps the father thinks, "Ah. If I can just work on this one, he may have a chance to do something with himself: he's got potential". What actually may be happening is that the father, in his fear, feels most threatened by the stronger son. He feels that this son may get out of control and he may not be able to 'save him'.

The son then may take a couple courses: either he runs away physically; or mentally, by establishing a false self to please the father and placate him. Unfortunately, this sets off a cycle that may well end up in narcissism (the narcissist begins to put the maintenance of this false self at the center of his universe). Then the son grows into a man who cannot come out of himself to really love anyone, or to really recieve love. He has locked himself, his true self, away to protect himself from, primarily, the father-but as his father's influence recedes in reality, the son replaces 'father' with 'real world', 'commitments', or 'God'. He then relates to everything through this false self, which is actually not relating to anyone at all. He becomes essentially alone- and to be alone like that within oneself is a precursor to being in hell; we are not meant to exist like that.

The other course is that the son simply rebels. This is probably the most healthy, because it is in touch with reality. However, rebellion to any legitimate authority is a dangerous course, and can produce guilt and self-hatred, or again, narcissism. The best course would be that the son is strong enough to find other father-figures, healthy ones, who will discipline him in love and selflessness, not in fear. He can then develop in tune with the real world, the world that God made and will meet him within.

Only through right, sane, true faith in God can the son, wounded by a wounded father, begin to be himself, and to love himself as God loves him. This is the only cure: and it comes often through a very tough road of blind faith in God. Most often, as Aquinas says, the Lord uses normal means of healing- He doesn't usually zap us and we're set. Therefore, I like the term used by a great counselor I know: "Incarnational healing". This means, basically, that God uses people and relationships, incarnate realities (not abstractions or words) to heal wounds in people and relationships. The wounded person needs the grace to be able to trust God when he's been so wounded by the first father in his life, and the grace to accept love from whoever God sends to heal him. But as we know, the Lord gives everyone the grace he needs- and each person always, until death, maintains his free will to choose or to reject the love God continually sets before him. The free will part is good news because it allows even the most messed-up of us to make choices to get better and learn to love.

We are composite beings, beings whose souls are interspersed throughout a physical body-somehow! This means that, in order to receive full healing, we need to work at all these levels. When a person like the son I have been mentioning is wounded, in such a primordial way (by a sadistic father), he needs to be healed by being loved.

They say the saint is one who loves the unlovable. A narcissist, an angry (or worse, not angry) person whose spirit has been beaten up for many years, IS unlovable. This is their torment and it drives their existence. They can never find anyone perfect enough, or safe enough; they can never be satisfied because they are asking something impossible of another person. They do not truly see other people, often, until it is 'too late'. But then this is a grace: to be humble, to learn that you missed something so important- and then to be more open to the possibility that what you see as reality may be mistaken. Then there is a chink in the iron wall: and infinite hope! For the Lord always remains, waiting to insert love, usually through who He puts in our lives: friend, co-workers, religious, counselors, family members, a legitimate marriage-partner(or if that is not possible, Himself as Spouse of the soul).

So how does the saint love the unlovable? The pattern is how Christ loved. He laid down his life. In practical, daily terms, this means that the saint must have an over-abundance of God's love flowing through him, so that his heart can become a stepping stone for another, especially the unlovable. As Our Lord said to Blessed Angela: "Make yourself a capacity, and I will be a torrent of love through you." Through saints and potential saints making themselves capacities, wounded people continue to have a chance to experience true love, over and over.

True love can come in a friendship, a marriage, a family relationship. But the saint has to remain primarily in love with God. All his source of strength is the Holy Spirit. And he must be a person of prayer and commitment to the Sacraments, the Sacraments which nourish both body and soul.

Most situations are people in a relationship or family who are mixtures of potential sanctity and woundedness in different areas. With God, and right religion (how we relate to God), these mixtures of love and problems can slowly improve.

My early years of romantic thought about marriage and relationships have been blown out of the water. And good thing, too. For I'm starting to see that real, deep love has romance, but of a different color than the tinny stuff we're brought up to expect. It is the romance of Christ with a soul, the King with the scullery maid. Romance between two people is lovely and real, but it needs to be in a situation that always has potential to grow into the love of God: in the tough places of commitment, of sacrifice, in the places where we must wait on God to help us. Asking God to fill us with His love, and thus to help with problems, especially amongst the unlovable parts of us, is how it can happen.

Union With God in the Tempest

A Reprint

In the movie Therese, there is a very simple but profound scene: a climax, a turning point. It is where St. Therese herself says in A Story of a Soul, “my life was changed, in the time it took to go round the turning of a stair"; it is her passing from one with the will of a child to one with the will of a maturing Christian. It the movie, this change is shown visually as Therese kneels before the crucifix in her room and stretches out her hands in imitation of the small ivory figure nailed to the polished wood.

In the following days and months, Therese begins to conform her will to the Lord’s. She starts with very small things, she starts with the denial of self: not complaining when something unpleasant is asked of her; not weeping when something is said which hurts her pride. Then she moves to actively conforming her will to the Lord’s, by taking that habitual denial and filling the residual emptiness of self with acts of love and kindness towards others. Her eyes begin to be opened, and she begins to see all that there is to do for others, in very small and unseen ways; and then, she begins to see that in the strange economy of God, even her small acts, although done “with great cost to myself” can accomplish big things- even to the point of saving a soul. She once said, “A soul can be saved in the picking up of a pin”-that is, in conformity to God’s will.

In her conformity to God’s will, she begins to realize, as the years go by, that her vocation is to be in the center of the Church, in the heart: “My vocation is love”. And sheis the saint who knows in a special way that all of us, especially in the beginning of our journeys, have the wills of children, to whom each small sacrifice is insurmountably hard- because she herself was "a small soul." The journey, the success, the contemplation, the union, the love: all are God’s, all are His gifts! Also in the movie, Therese, the Mother Superior says to Therese, “The closer you come to God, the simpler you will become”. This is also the essence of contemplation.

Therese in all of this, is following in the august footsteps of the other great Carmelites, like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. These two were people who had their feet firmly planted on the earth- they were of humus, of the soil, or humble- but they were also two of the great contemplatives of the Church, and the mountain of Carmel was their haunt: they seem to be very high above us, on the sun-kissed peaks of that misty mountain. St. Therese of Liseux comes to us three hundred years afterwards as another great contemplative, but a contemplative flower in the meadow below the great mountain. Her road to contemplation is simpler, smaller, quieter. It is as if the Lord grew the Little Flower to show us that contemplation is a call for all of us- for contemplation is, simply, living in the presence of God. It is the daily, hourly, minute by minute practice of being aware of, and living immersed in, a Presence which is all around us and has always been all around us.

The mission of St. Therese, I believe, was to show with her life, her little life, that all can accomplish this with the help of God. But perhaps some are wondering still, what is contemplation and why is it so important? How do I practice and accomplish this?

Dom Zeller says, “Contemplation expresses itself in actively receiving.” There is a passive receptivity, which is more like fatalism. Then there is the more fully feminine idea of active receptivity, which can best be visualized in the conjugal relationship described in the Song of Solomon. The soul, whether it be that of a man or woman, is always the spouse of the Lord- to His activity, we are actively receptive. He sees the image of Himself in us, and as we actively conform to His will, we are receiving Him. As we love Him, He pours Himself into our being.

Contemplation is, really, at its highest level, total union with God. But all of us who are searching for God, longing for Him, trying to love Him and obey Him on somewhere on the journey towards union with God. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as ‘static’ in the spiritual life. We all, every person, are either moving away from God or towards Him; and now, in these times, I think the movement towards or away is much more clearly life or death. The battle lines are being drawn now, like blood in the snow. The writer David Hart, in his profound article “Christ and Nothing” argues that now the choice for Westerners is between union with Christ or union with the self- and the self is, set by itself with no reference to anything higher, a nothingness. Our modern culture in the West is now largely built upon this principle- that there is no greater moral law than that which each person makes for himself. This is the abyss incarnated: it is the Body of Satan. And as we see now, the West is globalizing itself and its values through the channels of economics, cultural outlets like the mass media, and pure force.

Therefore, as Mr. Hart argues, the choices for Christians becomes clearer and clearer. One cannot be of the world and be of Christ. It has always been thus, but it seems now that the murky options are clearing away: each rival cultus, from paganism to Islam are being corrupted into the worship of self, or the nothing. This is the meaning of the process of secularization.

How is this all related to contemplation? Because Christians who must live in the now largely pervasive culture of the nothing must learn to be aware in deeper ways of the presence of God. The traditional, visual and accessible societal means of being encultured into Christ are disappearing. One thinks of the typical religious service and how they are largely centered around the ‘congregation’ rather than the ‘bringing of the congregation to God”. There are too many examples to enumerate.

This does not mean that we must eschew all communal religious activity. To the contrary- we must search out and cultivate those small communities of authentic worship within the Catholic Church, which enculturate us to the union with God. And we must make, as our goal, to be in union with Christ. Contemplation is the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute expression of this. It is the longing look at the One we love. It is waiting upon the Lord. It is being like Our Lady, in her fiat. And contemplation can only flourish in prepared soil: a soil fertilized with the prayers, Rosaries, small denials of self, ascetical practices appropriate to one’s state in life, consecration to the Lord through Our Lady. The highest means of preparation for the life of contemplation is the reception of the Holy Eucharist. In a paradox, this is also a union with God in an incarnate way. It is the capstone of the life of the Church- for the Eucharist is Christ. Our Holy Church carries within Her all the means to union with God: but now they must be searched for under the crustations of modernism which have grown on Her.

There are some general practices which help: and the books A Story of A Soul by St. Therese of Liseux and The Choice of God by Dom Van Zeller are my recommendations. The expert is probably St. John of the Cross.

I think St. Therese, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross, all under Our Lady’s brown mantle of Carmel (the same material as the Brown Scapular), are calling every soul who wants Christ and eschews the nothing, to aim for contemplation as a means of the soul’s survival in the tempest.

Miralee, Kensa, and the Crippled Lebanese Man

These three people are not related at all, in any way, except in my heart. They are especially colourful stones in the mosaic of people in my life, the many people who have some tie to the navel of the world, that is, the Middle East. They are in a special grouping: those pieces whom I cannot quite categorize, except to place them carefully together in the place on my mosaic in which the grout is prayer for the special grace of God.

Miralee was my nanny, my grandfather who cared for me when we lived in Afghanistan. I have dim memories of his wizened and gentle hands patting me on the arm, “Imjabeeb, Tamee, imjabeeb”; his quiet and sun-bleached eyes smiling, always smiling, until the day we left and they were wet and sparkling, with the words, “When you are big, Tamee, come back to visit me.”

I have never gone back-except in spirit, many, many times- for I am sure Miralee is dead, he was a grandfather in truth when he was traveling the dirt roads of Kabul, back and forth from our house to his. He was a Muslim, a simple man too, and like the poor can, he loved me with a care and purity. He warned my naïve young parents about the bad gardener and the packs of dogs outside, the scorpions the size of a man’s hand. I remember Miralee as the most pure gift of Fatherhood, a spark of older, wiser gentleness. When we left Afganistan in 1973, I had a recurring dream of the land engulfed in flames, totally destroyed. The dreams receded and were replaced by reality only a few years later. And as my own life entered into the metaphysical flames of confusion and uncertainty, the fate of Miralee and how he’d loved me were always in the back of my heart, because he’d given me his heart, many times over- and my soul has hope for his in the mercy of God.

Kensa is my neighbor here in California. She comes from Morocco but of an American mother and an English/Iranian/Moroccan father. She is a mosaic within a mosaic piece- responds easily and naturally to pulls of compassion and virtue, but skeptical to any organized religion. She sees selfishness clearly and has no pretensions to the upper class being somehow better, yet also seems strangely, loosely luxuriant. She fits both in the Quaker Meeting House and belly dancing in someone’s sitting room in Morocco. We go on long walks and I talk sometimes about Christ and she questions me on hypocrisy and real love and politics; she is extremely reasonable but suddenly hurt and sensitive, putting the Hand of Fatima around her child’s neck. She understands the situation in Lebanon from a Western and an Eastern point of view.

Somehow, the Kensa I see inside does not fit with the secular, environmentally ferverous, international, third-culture kid. Her soul seems to be a religious one: in that when her children and her husband fail her, when she is faced with something raging like a fire in her life (as we all face, both failure and fire, in ourselves and in others) she will raise a metaphysical cry- and I hope that she will remember the little glimpses of Christ (I hope were see-able) she may have encountered. When she asks me what made me change into a religious person, and I say that I finally understood that God loves me- that simple truth- she does not say anything, there is a flat and closed silence. I do not understand this silence, and it grieves me. It as if she cannot grasp the paradox of intimacy and omnipotence I am presenting to her. But I love her, nonetheless, because I see something in her, like love set to the music that floats along the harbor-water in Tangiers. I have never heard it, I have never been to Tangiers, but I hear it in her. In some ways, she, like those of her father’s culture, has from the beginning of my knowing her, given her heart to our family and to me- the heart-giving of an open tent, a sharing of food, time and care. She treats my children like she does her own and catches them when they jump to her in the pool; she saw that Ana was ready to swim before I did. Yet, I know that also in this giving, there is great responsibility to walk therefore carefully, because once betrayed, even inadvertently, and the tent will never be the same. So I pray but know that I am not her answer- only Christ will be, as He is for the whole world.

The Crippled Lebanese Man is the only name I have for him- just a chance meeting outside a Catholic Church somewhere you wouldn’t expect to meet him. He told me something that brings Miralee and Kensa together, and places them in the context of the suffering in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel. “A Muslim,” he said, leaning on his walker, “will give you his heart if you approach him with open hands in peace. He will give you everything he has. But if you approach him with war he will fight you until he dies.”

Is this right philosophy? No. It lacks prudence, forgiveness and holy balance. It lacks the Wisdom of Christ: “Do not throw your pearls before swine”- that is, know with whom you are dealing- and “ be gentle as doves, wise as serpents”- that is, be gentle but with the firm constitution that survives to forgive- “ if a man asks you for your shirt, give him your cloak as well”- that is, in the context of detachment and love for your fellow man, but with no conditions of return- “ if a man slaps you on your left cheek, give him the other also”- that is, forgive all the way to the Cross.

So now the Semites are in a civil war- for the Lebanese, the Iraqis and the Israelis are all Semitic, all descendants of Abraham. Their lines of division are religious and political- but it is essential to remember, essential, that neither side explicitly has Christ informing it- except among small communities and individuals like Miralee and Kensa who are trying to follow the lights of love as they understand it, who are singing songs of love with their lives. We Christians are the salt granules who must answer those songs with the Word that will fulfill the nascent melodies.

The difficult thing is that the communication cannot come through UN Resolutions, armies, or frontal assaults. It comes when one lays his life down for the other in the Spirit of Christ. It is like a live-wire connecting one wire to another, passing the electricity along until all is connected: and there will be the Kingdom of God. And this is not a Western project- how presumptuous! No, it is a project the Lord started in the Great Command, "Go ye unto all the world, making all men my disciples". Nothing less will do.