We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, "Hello? Is athere anyone there?" We can pray, "Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?" We can say anything to God. It's all prayer.
Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy--all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toard something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Was my prayers answered? Yes, although I didn't get what I'd hoped and prayed for, what I'd selected from the menu. p. 30
There are a lot of prayers in the world, some of them better known than others. The serenity prayer is one of the most famous institutionalized prayers of the world, a greatest hits of prayer. The best known version says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference...A sober friend once said that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much. p. 31
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people's lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I acept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am.
Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon--say two-ish?
Thank You in advacnce for Your company and blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.
p. 34
It is easy to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it's harder than we would like. It's a package deal, though...
We and life are spectacularly flawed and complex. Often we do not get our way, which I hate, hate, hate. But in my saner moments I remember that if we did, usually we would shortchange ourselves... p. 45
Most of us figure out by a certain age--some of us later than others--that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don't have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the complaints department. But if you've been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
I admit, sometimes this position of gratitude can be a bit of a stretch. So many bad things happen in each of our lives. Who knew? ...We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It's all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it's all part of the big picture. p. 50-51
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
The marvel is only partly that somehow you lured them into your web twenty years ago, forty years ago, and they totally stuck with you. The more astonishing thing is that these greatest of all possible people feel the same way about you--horrible, grim, self-obsessed you. They say--or maybe I said--that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks that he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you. p. 56-58
"Thanks" is a huge min-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interestedin our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humnbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable.... p. 60
....Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth...
We can't will ourselves to be more generous and accepting. Most of us are more like the townspeople of Shirley Jackson's "the Lottery" than we are like the Dalai Lama. I know I am. And this is what hell is like.
It obviously behooves me to practice being receptive, open for the business of gratitude.
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
I have found that I even have to pray for the willingness to give up the stuff I hate most about myself. I have to ask for help, and sometimes beg. That's the human condition. I just love my own guck so much. Help. then I try to be a good person, a better person than I was yesterday, or an hour ago. In general, the 10 Commandments are not a bad place to start, nor is the Golden Rule. We try not to lie so much or kill anyone that day. We do the footwork, which comes down mostly to paying attention and trying not to be such a jerk. We try not to feel and act so entitled. We let others go first. p. 62-64
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace. Maybe you won't always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. p. 65
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That's why they call it breathtaking. p. 81
Gorgeous, amazing things things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible... p. 85
God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say "I have HAD it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometiems quickly, but usually slowly. p. 85-86
The tide comes in and sweeps out our children's castles, and it hurts so much, and a wave knocks our father over, and he injures his back; he'll never be the same. We pray to be of solace, and to find the courage to let people have their feelings. We breathe and pray to stay silent while people find their own way through. (Well, we try.) We pray to stay calm when the earth shakes and explodes. The universe is always having spasms and eruptions. it's labor. that's how things get born. We rush in to help.
I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overract and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense of humor back. That we and those we love have lightened up over the years is one of the most astonishing sights we will ever witness. p. 95
"Late Fragment"
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me." C. S. Lewis p. 100
More than anything, prayer helps me get my sense of humor back. It brings me back to my heart, from the treacherous swamp of my mind. It brings me back to the now, to the holy moment... p. 100
You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and--hardest of all, at least to me--learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to teh very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.
Those are the basic instructions, to which I can add only: Amen.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)
The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of it's cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we, personally, do not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots--of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions. Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross calls this phenomenon "naive realism," the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, "as they really are." We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren't seeing things clearly. Naive realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are openminded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion. And two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren't, I wouldn't hold it. p. 42
Ross and his colleagues have found that we believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are really thinking. And when we introspect, looking into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. p. 43
Of course, many of us intentionally avoid a painful memory by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about it; and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling a painful memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval cues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory.
Psychodynamic therapists, however, complain that repression is entirely different from the normal mechanisms of forgetting and recall...Yet in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: the memories keep intruding.
...."Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated," says McNally. "The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible." p. 111-112
...happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they either talk and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it." p. 166
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.
We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters...in those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am."
....."I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws."
p. 166 & 167
...three possible ways out of the emotional impasse. [in work with married couples in which one had deeply hurt or betrayed the other] In the first, the perpetrator unilaterally puts aside his or her own feelings and, realizing that the victim's anger masks enormous suffering, responds to that suffering with genuine remorse and apology. In the second, the victim unilaterally lets go of his or her repeated, angry accusations--after all, the point has been made--and expresses pain rather than anger, a response that may make the perpetrator more empathic and caring rather than defensive. Either one of these actions, if taken unilaterally, is difficult and for many people impossible. The third way...is the hardest but most hopeful for a long-term resolution of the conflict: both sides drop their self-justifications and agree on steps they can take together to move forward. p. 210
...For his part, [Nelson] Mandela could have allowed his anger to consume him; he could have emerged from that prison with a determination to take revenge that many would have found entirely legitimate. Instead he relinquished anger for the sake of the goal to which he had devoted his life. "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy," said Mandela. "Then he becomes your partner."
Virtually the first act of the new democracy was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The goal of the TRC was to give victims of brutality a forum where their accounts would be heard and vindicated, where their dignity and sense of justice would be restored, and where they could express their grievances in front of the perpetrators themselves. In exchanged for amnesty the perpetrators had to drop their denials, evasions, and self-justifications and admit the harm that they had done, including torture and murder. The commission emphasized the "need for understanding but not for vengence, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [humanity towards others] but not for victimization." p. 211
A wise man once said "an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." p. 218
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu ~500BC
Ross and his colleagues have found that we believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are really thinking. And when we introspect, looking into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. p. 43
Of course, many of us intentionally avoid a painful memory by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about it; and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling a painful memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval cues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory.
Psychodynamic therapists, however, complain that repression is entirely different from the normal mechanisms of forgetting and recall...Yet in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: the memories keep intruding.
...."Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated," says McNally. "The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible." p. 111-112
...happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they either talk and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it." p. 166
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.
We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters...in those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am."
....."I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws."
p. 166 & 167
...three possible ways out of the emotional impasse. [in work with married couples in which one had deeply hurt or betrayed the other] In the first, the perpetrator unilaterally puts aside his or her own feelings and, realizing that the victim's anger masks enormous suffering, responds to that suffering with genuine remorse and apology. In the second, the victim unilaterally lets go of his or her repeated, angry accusations--after all, the point has been made--and expresses pain rather than anger, a response that may make the perpetrator more empathic and caring rather than defensive. Either one of these actions, if taken unilaterally, is difficult and for many people impossible. The third way...is the hardest but most hopeful for a long-term resolution of the conflict: both sides drop their self-justifications and agree on steps they can take together to move forward. p. 210
...For his part, [Nelson] Mandela could have allowed his anger to consume him; he could have emerged from that prison with a determination to take revenge that many would have found entirely legitimate. Instead he relinquished anger for the sake of the goal to which he had devoted his life. "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy," said Mandela. "Then he becomes your partner."
Virtually the first act of the new democracy was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The goal of the TRC was to give victims of brutality a forum where their accounts would be heard and vindicated, where their dignity and sense of justice would be restored, and where they could express their grievances in front of the perpetrators themselves. In exchanged for amnesty the perpetrators had to drop their denials, evasions, and self-justifications and admit the harm that they had done, including torture and murder. The commission emphasized the "need for understanding but not for vengence, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [humanity towards others] but not for victimization." p. 211
A wise man once said "an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." p. 218
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu ~500BC
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