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Archives For March 2012

Live Passionately, Not Mindlessly (Part 3 of 3)

March 31, 2012 — 1 Comment

Our passions usher us into a saturated life. Extravagant fondness is the doorway into Oz, propelling us out of a gray-tone existence and into a Technicolor world. And once we have overcome our fear of the witches that await us, we are free to step into the realm of wonder.

According to the philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, we may encounter any phenomenon—an element of nature, a creation of man, another human being, an idea, an event or experience, even God—as either a saturated or poor phenomenon.* A saturated phenomenon is iconic—it opens us up to complexity and meaning, vastness and beauty, and a kind of energy that transports us into a place of awe. Or we may encounter the very same experience with no awareness, intention, or interest, and in doing so it remains (to us) a poor phenomenon. Poor phenomena are like idols, they strip the infinitely complex of its beauty and its power to inspire. They cage wonder.

At any given moment, we stand at this fork in the road.

The bad news is we tend to be a pretty mindless, inattentive people. Of course, the truth of this is hidden from us: we feel like our attention is constantly multiplying, because our attention is pulled in so-many-directions. As it turns out, though, America doesn’t run on Dunkin’—it runs on the ability keep you distracted from any one thing, convincing you that you need to buy that item or do that activity or go to that place. Multi-tasking has become an antiquated idea. We’ve become omni-taskers, trying to do it all at once. A thirty-minute business meeting gets interrupted by a dozen emails while the market plunges five percent. Or a therapy session plays out to the ping of an endless stream of text messages. Or the kids are demanding Netflix, Wii, and a Blu-ray all at the same time while the lunch burns on the stove and you’re trying to reply to six Facebook messages.  But as our attention “expands,” it is only getting stretched wide and thin, and we lose the ability to attend deeply to any one moment, or person, or movement. The world seems to thrive on our mindlessness, and as a result, everything in it is stripped of its capacity to inspire awe and wonder.

The good news is we don’t have to remain a mindless people.

We can become mindful of the awesome complexity in even the simplest things. Take a moment to watch a spider weave its web, and you will know what I mean. Did you know spiders use at least two kinds of silk? The sticky snare-silk is used to catch prey, while the spider walks around on the non-adhesive anchor-silk. And that’s just a spider web! Imagine the awe-inspiring, infinite complexity and depth of your child’s tears, or your lover’s heart, or your spouse’s wounds, or trade winds that carry radiation from a tsunami-shaken Japan to your front door, or tonight’s starry sky that delivers a light that departed those stars before there were humans on the Earth. Everything we encounter in the world can be a saturated phenomenon. And we have a choice. We can walk mindlessly through a world of idols, or we can mindfully encounter the awesome, expansive complexity of even the simplest things, and we can live the saturated life.

But how do we begin? How do we turn away from the distractions of a fractured world, and begin to develop a deep attentiveness to one phenomenon? I think the answer is embedded in our passions. You see, when the inattentive muscles of our minds are weak, we need serious help to focus, and when we find the thing we are passionate about, help has arrived. Because we adore the vocation or the work or the relationship, we come to it with an intense focus and a deep desire to become intimately familiar with its nuance and complexity. Distractions recede as our extravagant fondness takes hold. I know someone who is passionate about the interior lives of her children. She doesn’t write off her kids’ tears, or even their anger, to fatigue or hunger or adolescent hormones. Instead, she approaches the distress as an invitation to learn about the child, and to become extravagantly fond of who they are and what they are becoming. I know someone else who is passionate about how to use technology in the education of children. When the topic arises, so does he: he sits up straight, he moves to the edge of his seat, he starts to use his hands when talking. He attends the best conferences, regardless of distance. There is no book he won’t read. He grows increasingly attentive to the ways in which each of his students is responding to the smart-board. I know someone who loves to write. When he is hunting for the right word, the rest of the world fades. When he is on the scent of an idea that has infinite value to him, his attention to the craft is singular. And he revels when his words leave the world a better place. Our passions saturate the object of our desire.

And the expansive saturation we experience in our passions is contagious. Because once we have touched and tasted this kind of deep knowing, this thrill of discovery, this awe of the bottomless complexity, and the peacefulness that can come from a harnessed attentiveness, we will want more of it. We will want all of life to be soaked in the glory. The dance of light on the ceiling as our eyes open in the morning, the banter of the kids as they brush teeth in the bathroom, the fragrant bloom of an April morning, the vivid colors of a world emerging from a long winter, the story of a close friend, the quiet smile of a stranger on the train, or the unknown sorrow in the eyes of the girl brewing your coffee. When all of life becomes saturated like this, our hearts explode with passion.

But I should probably warn you—a saturated life is also a life in which our hearts break with compassion. The things we love become saturated with meaning and purpose, but so do the things that have been gnawing at our conscience, the things that make our hearts ache and our eyes blur. We may no longer be able to pick up a t-shirt off the rack and experience it as a poor phenomenon.** In a saturated world, it’s a shirt with a story. The cotton was picked and separated by impoverished hands in the South, and then it was shipped half-a-world-away on boats sailed by men and women who don’t see their families for weeks at a time so the little stomachs at home can be full. It’s assembled in Thailand, or Vietnam, or China, by people earning a wage that barely keeps them alive and in conditions that will ultimately jeopardize the life for which they are so steadfastly fighting. A saturated life is a glorious one, but it may also become a life lived in the full awareness of a broken world. This is the mystery of our passions: they may usher us into life and death, joy and sorrow, glory and gore, all at the same time.

Yet there is good news, even in this. Especially in this.

Because, when you can enter into the death of things and bring life there, when you can enter into the sorrow of life and experience joy there, when you can enter into the violence of the world and find communion there, you discover that you are truly free. Death cannot terrorize you, sorrow cannot disable you, and violence cannot isolate you. Our passions are the doorway into the saturated life, and the saturated life is complex—glorious and painful—but it is a life saturated with freedom.

Are you ready to open the door into Oz?

* I actually know very little about the philosophy of Marion. What I know was relayed to me like a game of telephone. For more about how that happened, you can go to my Facebook page, where I share an anecdote about the origination of each post. You can also click here to learn more about Marion.

** I first experienced the “saturation” of retail clothing when I read, The Divine Commodity, by Skye Jethani.

What’s Your Story: Do you find wonder in anything that the rest of us may experience as mundane? Do you want to share it in the comments below?  Or, if you are reading this by e-mail or RSS feed, click here to comment.

 Note: If you would like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe by e-mail in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter or Facebook. And, as always, thanks for reading. It’s a gift.

In Mindfulness & Gratitude, Purpose & Meaning , , , , ,
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Live Passionately, Not Fearlessly (Part 2 of 3)

March 23, 2012 — 18 Comments

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” –Ambrose Redmoon

Living stories defined by our passions, with a sense of purpose and vocation, instead of being seduced by our skills alone, can be absolutely terrifying. Take it from me. I grew up a timid kid, and not much has changed. That’s why I married my wife. She had a tattoo and studied in Spain and jumped out of airplanes and seemed to dare the world to keep her from doing what she believed in. I was in awe of her determination.

But for many of us, maybe even most of us, stepping out of the safe harbor of our skills, and into the vast openness of our passions, can feel dangerous. Like stepping out of a plane at ten-thousand feet with only a bag of nylon strapped to your back and some stranger’s assurance that it will be good. Like free-falling. And while plummeting can be exhilarating, it will be scary. In my psychotherapy practice, I’m a witness to trembling souls who ache to step into the free-fall of their passions.  At times, I see my reflection in them.  And I think we fear making the leap for at least four reasons.

People will think you are crazy. When you forsake the seductions of skill—achievement, accolades, wealth, security—most of the world will see a fool. And that kind of judgment may cut you deep, because at your quivering core, it will probably feel foolish to you, too. In the film Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella is living the American Dream. He has a big house, a bountiful farm, and a beautiful family. Outwardly, he is a picture of success and well-being. His skills have served him well.

But he is dying inside.

So, when a supernatural voice in his cornfield exhorts him to pursue his passion for baseball and the redemption of his father’s baseball hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, by replacing his crops with a baseball field, it awakens a passion he is helpless to resist. As Ray levels his cornfield, we witness a jarring juxtaposition: while Ray is coming to life and talking to his daughter about Shoeless Joe with a contagious energy, the townspeople look on with a biting skepticism. We overhear them ask the question, “What the hell is he doing?” And then we hear the response, “He’s going to lose his farm…damn fool. “ You may not be plowing under a cornfield with your passion, but you might end up leveling a career, digging up a way of life, or turning your back on a harvest of some kind, and the on-lookers are going to scoff.

You are going to mess up. A lot. Even if people don’t question your sanity, they will be quick to point out your mistakes. But I can’t think of a better way to kill your passion than by trying to do it perfectly. You’re walking a new path, and it’s probably an unfamiliar one, so you are going to stumble. When you do, people are going to be there to point it out. And even if you could hide from the criticism of others, you won’t be able to hide from yourself—the worst critic is probably going to be inside of you. That critic got there the hard way: it was carved into you with words, both intentional and unintentional. As it turns out, sticks and stones aren’t the only things that break us.

People may not pay any attention at all. I’m not sure which is worse, for people to call us fools and tear us down with criticism, or for us to do the thing that is closest to our secret heart and have no one take notice at all. We spend our lives trying to earn the benevolent attention of parents, teachers, peers, and the barista at Starbucks. Our skills give us the best guarantee of an audience. But following your passions may take you out of the limelight and into lonely territory. It might feel like you’re free-falling all by yourself. And if there’s anything worse than taking a risk, it’s taking a risk alone.

And, finally, I think we are afraid to leap because there are no guarantees. We live our lives seeking stability, assurance, and security. We pretend that we can guarantee a particular conclusion. So, when we forsake the safety of skill and seek the danger of our passions, we unmask the illusion of certainty and leap into the terror of who-knows-what-comes-next. The landing may not be soft, it may not work out, some stories don’t end the way we want them to. It may cost you a paycheck, or a reputation, or a relationship. I suppose, depending on the passion, it could end up costing your life. And that kind of fear paralyzes.

So, our fears stand between us and our passions like an ancient wall, impervious to the erosion of time and the elements. We wait for the wall to crumble, but while we do so, precious time and life is ebbing away. I think we get confused and assume that we must first resolve our fears and the dangers of living passionately before moving forward with extravagant fondness. But that will never happen. Because living passionately is by definition to live on the edge of fear, venturing into the new and unknown with trepidation. If we want to get started with our passions, we are going to have to climb directly over that wall of fear.

In the field of psychology, a new approach to treating anxiety and fear has emerged in the last decade. It’s called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and it’s a paradigm shift. For decades, the goal of therapy was to eliminate anxiety by changing thoughts and behaviors. It didn’t work. As it turns out, if you plan to live, you’d better plan on fear as well. The growing wisdom is that we do not eliminate our fear; rather, we learn to accept it, decide that we value something in our lives more than we value the absence of fear, and then we courageously go after it. In other words, when your path is riddled with fear and uncertainty, you had better be extravagantly fond of where that path is taking you.

And so, we discover that the passionate life is also the courageous life, because we begin to walk directly into fear, with an extravagant fondness for the stories we are telling with our lives.

After completing his baseball field, Ray Kinsella looks upon it, and we learn that the sentiments of the townspeople echo Ray’s own thoughts, when he whispers, “I have just created something totally illogical…am I completely nuts?”

But Ray says it with a smile.

That’s what living passionately does to us—everything gets turned on its head and it may be scary, but the fear gives birth to life and purpose and meaning. The frightening becomes thrilling. Foolishness is transformed into pleasure. And we mess up along the way, but we discover that we wouldn’t have it any other way, because when we start to follow our passions, they become like oxygen, and living them becomes like breathing. We don’t wait for someone to applaud the perfect breath; we breathe because there is no life without it. And even when no one is noticing, living in the middle of our passion teaches us we can tolerate loneliness and the loss of attention. We discover the attention was cheap and living with purpose has a value we couldn’t have fathomed, and we wouldn’t trade it for a crowd of any size. And we come to experience the truth of the really good stories: they don’t necessarily end safely. Some of them end with the beloved character dying with purpose in the middle of their passion: loving a wife and kids through a terminal cancer, giving the last hiding place to their child with the soldiers at the door, or jumping in front of a bullet or a bus or a train to save another life.

So, maybe there is a guarantee: that regardless of how we go out of this life, we will go out on our own terms, living passionately. We jump out of the plane. We step out of our skills and into the vast uncertainty of our passions. It feels crazy, we make mistakes on the lonely way down, and the landing isn’t guaranteed until it has arrived. We fall with fear and trembling, but our heart also hammers with the extravagant fondness for what we are doing in the world. And if we’re going to land hard—and we all do eventually, don’t we?—we may as well land in the midst of the things we love, the things that bring us life and joy, not nursing a 401k, but instead nursing a world back to life and creativity and what is good.

What’s Your Story: I suspect I was just scratching the surface with my list of the reasons for not following our passions. Have you encountered other fears that held you back? Did you overcome them to pursue your passions and, if so, what did you value more than your fear? Please feel free to share your story in the comments below, or if you are reading this by e-mail or RSS feed, click here to comment.

Note: Next week, I will post Part 3 of this reflection on living according to our passions. I think it will be entitled, “Live Passionately, Not Mindlessly,” and it will unpack the ways in which our life is expanded when we follow our passion. If you would like to be notified of that post and future posts, you can subscribe by e-mail in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter. And, again, thanks for reading. It’s a gift.

 

In Psychology, Purpose & Meaning , , , ,
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Live Passionately, Not Skillfully (Part 1 of 3)

March 16, 2012 — 21 Comments

Human beings can endure anything.

If they have a purpose.

In the daily lament of a psychotherapy office, the truth of this is articulated to me by bewildered souls whose search for comfort and happiness takes a backseat only to their search for meaning. And I was reminded of it again, several weeks ago, by the tears of my eight-year-old son. His teacher had called again, but this time to let us know that she was worried about his demeanor while completing his schoolwork. She used the word “depressed.” So, I took him to the College cafeteria (because any conversation is better with all-you-can-eat donuts and bottomless Gatorade), and I asked him about what he was feeling at school. Before the words were out of my mouth, pools of tears were in his eyes, and through trembling lips, he said, “It’s just that God gives everyone a skill, and mine is school, and I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

Can a stomach cramp and a heart melt all at the same time? Let me assure you, they can.

We talked about the skills he sees in the people around him: one friend is “tough like a man at everything he does,” another friend has a knack for humor, and he described some people as “brainiacs.” What I said next made him blink hard and look at me like I was crazy: “I don’t think God gives us our skills. I think we get our skills by accident, like we get our hair color and eye color.”

And maybe you think I’m crazy, too. The faithful among us might even think I’m a bit heretical. But let me explain.

In my office, I’ve begun to notice a recurring source of misery in a very counterintuitive place—right in the middle of our finest skills, abilities, and talents. We hone our skills and build our lives around them, but a feeling begins to grow inside, and it is completely disorienting because isn’t everything working out as planned? This embryonic dread is sometimes described as hollowness, or emptiness. As we begin to swell with it, words like pointless and worthless begin to surface. And before we know it, we’ve given birth to a burnt-out life, we hardly recognize our loved ones, and we are desperate for a roadmap in this crumbling story.

I think we write our life-stories with our skills because that is what makes sense to us. Our skills create stories characterized by great achievement. Or the possibility of ridiculous wealth. Or the power to step on the necks of others, rather than being the one who carries the boot prints of life. Or the false (but oh-so-comforting) sense of stability and security that comes from knowing, with certainty, that we can handle the task before us. Or the very recognition and admiration for which the stomach of our psyches has been positively growling. And we are seduced into idolizing our skills by the people around us. Our parents swell when we bring home a report card with a bunch of As. Our coaches tell us how important we are to next year’s squad, and somehow echoes of glory emanate from the future. The awards begin to flow, and if nothing else, you can be skilled in showing up at school, and be awarded for perfect attendance. So we live the seductive life, but we slowly, dreadfully, discover that our skills don’t give us a sense of purpose and meaning. I guess you could say, our skills do not tell a very good story at all.

But something else does.

The dictionary defines passion as “a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything.” Extravagant fondness. I like the sound of that, because I think it holds the seed of purpose and meaning. To live passionately is to be extravagantly fond of the things that we are doing in the world. When we engage our passions, we begin to tingle with life, our energies multiply, and we awaken to a desire that is thirsty and satiated all at the same time. The teenager who quits baseball so that he can have more time to write poetry, because the lines of verse make his heart quicken; or, the opposite, the high school kid who quits doodling in his notebook and puts in three extra hours at the batting cage, because the shiver of a triple running up his arms makes his heart throb. The college student who changes majors way too late in the game, because the business classes are leaving her hollow, but gazing up at the stars on that astronomy field trip last month ripped open a sense of wonder in her that she wants to live in forever. We sell companies and go back to school to become a teacher, or we retire to start companies that employ only felons, because our hearts ache for the plight of someone who is not all that different from us. We pull the kids out of public school, because our fondness for teaching cannot be tamed and we are awed by the minds of our children. Or we start sending them to public school, because the desire to be a student again has been gnawing at us for over a decade and it has finally chewed its way through, and the passion we feel is like floating.

And when we begin to live passionately, we birth an extravagant fondness for the stories we are writing with our lives.  I think that we must remember that our passions are always meant to tell a beautiful story, because we may be seduced into settling for something less. For instance, if we are “passionate” about video games, but our life is shrinking and our skin is growing pasty, it may have nothing to do with passion and everything to do with hours of fun and a brain full of dopamine. Because our true passions are expansive—they tell stories that are an invitation to freedom and peace and more.

As my son and I were sitting at that cafeteria table, and his head was cocked in an expression of immense skepticism, I added, “Maybe God doesn’t give us our skills, maybe the real gift is our passion. Maybe our passions are knitted into us, and maybe we were meant to enjoy them and to be creative in the world through them. Aidan, what do you think is your passion?” His lips had stopped trembling, and now he nibbled on the lower one thoughtfully. Then, those lips cocked to the side in a knowing grin, and there were again pools in his eyes, but now they were shimmering with glee. He looked at me with a peaceful confidence and said, “I love to learn.”

This time, my heart melted and my stomach flipped.

My son does love to learn. He is passionate about the world and how it works and knowing all about it. What story will his life tell if he holds on to his extravagant fondness for learning and refuses to get bogged down in his skillfulness at school? I’m not sure, but I can’t wait to find out. Because when our lives become a story drenched in extravagant fondness, I think we become a people of joy and energy and creativity and purpose.  And when our lives are saturated with that kind of meaning, in the worst of times we discover that we can endure anything, and in the best of times, we live our stories awash in the glory of the world around us.

What’s Your Story: I believe that we give a gift every time we share our story. Perhaps you’d like to share about a time you followed your passion rather than just your skills, and tell us about how it changed your life. Please feel free to tell one of your stories in the comments below, or if you are reading this in your RSS feed, click here to comment.

Note: Next week, I will post Part 2 of this reflection on living according to our passions. I think it will be entitled, “Live Passionately, Not Fearlessly,” and it will deal with the barriers that begin to arise once we have decided to live passionately. In two weeks, I plan to post Part 3, which will unpack the ways in which our life is expanded when we follow our passion. If you would like to be notified of these and future posts by email, please feel free to subscribe in the sidebar. You can also receive notification by joining me on Twitter. And, as always, thanks for reading—it’s a gift that you give to me.

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Losing Limbs and Finding People

March 9, 2012 — 5 Comments

Disasters seem to knit us together in ways that only collective pain can accomplish. On February 1st, 2011, Chicago was devoured by a blizzard that dropped two feet of snow in twelve hours. Medical offices were shut down, the grocery store shelves were anxiously emptied, and the dangerous race on Lake Shore Drive was brought to a deadly standstill (photo above).  So, the next morning, when men and women emerged into the vast whiteness, armed with shovels and snow blowers, what was the expression on their faces? Almost invariably, it was a smile.

A smile?

People laughed at each other from behind front stoops obscured by drifts. People met in the middle of half-plowed streets and shook hands. People coordinated rescue missions: the weakest were cared for while the strong banded together to clear their neighbors’ driveways and sidewalks.

What happened that morning, as neighborhoods came together in a seemingly joyful celebration of nature’s fury? Perhaps it was just a bunch of adults made kids again by Mother Nature’s snow day edict. But I think something more, something deeper, was happening. I think we human creatures hunger for community, for an experience to share and a common purpose within that experience. We hunger for a group of people who are in this life-thing with us. But I think our communal muscles have grown weak and atrophied with unuse. It may be that, in these times, the only experiences that propel us into community are disasters.

Disasters seem to knit us together, and the ties that bind us may be proportional: the bigger and more painful the disaster, the more widespread the community and the deeper our sense of connection. Do you remember when the Towers came down? Do you remember that evening, when Congress sang on the steps of the Capital, and even the most anti-jingoistic among us had itchy eyes? Do you remember the week afterward, when people of various political and religious persuasions came together to support and care for each other? Because regardless of your voting preference or how you parsed your theology, the pain was all the same, wasn’t it? Disaster brings pain, and pain binds, and bonds bring community. Perhaps community is the redemption of disaster.

In the decade since that disastrous day, natural disasters have become punctuation marks in the worldwide story. A hurricane named Katrina, a holiday tsunami in the Indian Ocean, a life-leveling earthquake in Haiti, and another tsunami that triggered a nuclear crisis that won’t be resolved for a century. Each wave of destruction reminded us that we are in this together, that our commonality exceeds our division, and that we have a responsibility to each other. But each time, that sense of community receded, because that sense of community is a feeling, and feelings come and go, and maybe we don’t believe it’s possible to transform that feeling into something that is real and tangible and growing in the world.

The torment of nature is one form of disaster, but in my office, every day, I meet with people who have endured countless personal disasters. Whether it was a spouse who never thought it would go that far with their co-worker, or an older sibling who cared more about his libido than about a little-girl heart, or a car accident that changed everything, or the death of a child or a sibling or a spouse or a parent or a grandparent, the disaster leveled you and changed the face of your life. And the question is caught in your throat and it’s hard to breathe it out: what now? The answer can begin to take shape in the therapeutic space, because whether or not you know it, your disaster has already begun to propel you into the arms of community; in this case, it is a small and hidden community of two. And the work of the therapeutic space, if it is to heal you, will propel you into the arms of a wider community—friends and family you can trust, and people who share your passion and desires for the world.

Interestingly, the goal of the therapeutic work is not to somehow erase the disaster that brought you there, or to prevent all future disasters. To do that would be to cease living. Rather, we can become protected from the fullness of disaster by the birth of community. The film, 127 Hours, depicts the real-life disaster of Aron Ralston, a canyoneer who, in 2003, found himself trapped in a deeply isolated Utah canyon, with his right arm pinned between an immovable boulder and the canyon wall. After five days of parched survival, he elected to amputate his own arm with a dull knife, and he eventually clawed his way out of the canyon and back to the world. When I started the movie, I expected a tale focused on the resilience of the human spirit. But Aron Ralston chose to tell a different story with his disaster. The movie depicts him trapped in the canyon and recalling his decisions to live an isolated life, empty of community. The result, of course, is that no one knows where he is, and no one is going to come find him.  After his rescue, Aron Ralston changed his life, but it wasn’t to eliminate danger and to avoid disaster. He still hikes canyons. But he has a wife now, and a kid, and a network of friends, and they are attending to him—they know where he is, and sometimes they even go there with him.

Disaster propels us into the arms of community. But maybe we don’t need to wait for the next disaster to decide that building community is going to be the work of our lives. Maybe we can begin by remembering that the four walls we live within are a kind of illusion, an artificial barrier to community. Maybe we can remember that the people next door, and the people in the houses all up and down our street, and in the car next to us, and in the cubicle across the way, and behind us in the line at the supermarket, and on the other end of a blog post, are embroiled in essentially the same life-game that we are. They want enough food on the table, so the stomach doesn’t howl. They want their homes to be warm, their bodies working properly, and their children thriving. They want to wake up with a sense of anticipation, to fall to sleep with a sense of peace, and they want everything in between to be saturated with a sense of meaning and purpose. And, always, they want to feel less alone. Because when our arms are pinned in the canyons of life, we all want to know that someone is paying attention and that someone is looking for us in our pain. And even if we lose a limb, we want know that someone is there to carry us out of our canyons, and that they will be there for the healing. Maybe it’s time to decide that community is not just a feeling that wells up when disaster strikes. Maybe we need to become active creators of community, right here and right now. Maybe we should begin this hard, but healing, work. Yesterday.

In Community , , , , ,
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Marriage Is For Losers

March 2, 2012 — 369 Comments

You can be right, or you can be married; take your pick. I can’t remember who told me that, but I do remember that they were only half-joking. The other half, the serious half, is exceedingly important. This is why.

Many therapists aren’t crazy about doing marital therapy. It’s complicated and messy, and it often feels out of control. In the worst case scenario, the therapist has front row seats to a regularly-scheduled prize fight. But I love to do marital therapy. Why? Maybe I enjoy the work because I keep one simple principle in mind: if marriage is going to work, it needs to become a contest to see which spouse is going to lose the most, and it needs to be a race that goes down to the wire.

When it comes to winning and losing, I think there are three kinds of marriages. In the first kind of marriage, both spouses are competing to win, and it’s a duel to the death. Husbands and wives are armed with a vast arsenal, ranging from fists, to words, to silence. These are the marriages that destroy. Spouses destroy each other, and, in the process, they destroy the peace of their children. In fact, the destruction is so complete that research tells us it is better for children to have divorced parents than warring parents. These marriages account for most of the fifty percent of marriages that fail, and then some. The second kind of marriage is ripe with winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same spouse. These are the truly abusive marriages, the ones in which one spouse dominates, the other submits, and in the process, both husband and wife are stripped of their dignity. These are the marriages of addicts and enablers, tyrants and slaves, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.

But there is a third kind of marriage. The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the most. The marriage becomes a competition to see who can change in ways that are most healing to the other, to see who can give of themselves in ways that most increase the dignity and strength of the other.  These marriages form people who can be small and humble and merciful and loving and peaceful.

And they are revolutionary, in the purest sense of the word.

Because we live in a culture in which losing is the enemy (except in Chicago, where Cubs fans have made it a way of life). We wake up to news stories about domestic disputes gone wrong. Really wrong.  We go to workplaces where everyone is battling for the boss’s favor and the next promotion, or we stay at home where the battle for the Legos is just as fierce. Nightly, we watch the talking heads on the cable news networks, trying to win the battle of ideas, although sometimes they seem quite willing to settle for winning the battle of decibels. We fight to have the best stuff, in the best name brands, and when we finally look at each other at the end of the day, we fight, because we are trained to do nothing else. And, usually, we have been trained well. In the worst of cases, we grew up fighting for our very survival, both physically and emotionally. But even in the best of situations, we found ourselves trying to win the competition for our parents’ attention and approval, for our peers’ acceptance, and for the validating stamp of a world with one message: win. And, so, cultivating a marriage in which losing is the mutual norm becomes a radically counter-cultural act. To sit in the marital therapy room is to foment a rebellion.

What do the rebellious marriages look like? Lately, when my blood is bubbling, when I just know I’ve been misunderstood and neglected, and I’m ready to do just about anything to convince and win what I deserve, I try to remember a phone call we recently received from my son’s second grade teacher. She called us one day after school to tell us there had been an incident in gym class. After a fierce athletic competition, in which the prize was the privilege to leave the gym first, my son’s team had lost. The losers were standing by, grumbling and complaining about second-grade-versions of injustice, as the victors filed past. And that’s when my son started to clap. He clapped for the winners as they passed, with a big dopey grin on his face and a smile stretched from one ear of his heart to the other.  His startled gym teacher quickly exhorted the rest of his team to follow suit. So, a bunch of second grade losers staged a rebellion, giving a rousing ovation for their victorious peers, and in doing so, embraced the fullness of what it can mean to be a loser. When I’m seething, I try to remember the heart of a boy, a heart that can lose graciously and reach out in affection to the victors.

In marriage, losing is letting go of the need to fix everything for your partner, listening to their darkest parts with a heart ache rather than a solution. It’s being even more present in the painful moments than in the good times. It’s finding ways to be humble and open, even when everything in you says that you’re right and they are wrong. It’s doing what is right and good for your spouse, even when big things need to be sacrificed, like a job, or a relationship, or an ego. It is forgiveness, quickly and voluntarily. It is eliminating anything from your life, even the things you love, if they are keeping you from attending, caring, and serving. It is seeking peace by accepting the healthy but crazy-making things about your partner because, you remember, those were the things you fell in love with in the first place. It is knowing that your spouse will never fully understand you, will never truly love you unconditionally—because they are a broken creature, too—and loving them to the end anyway.          

Maybe marriage, when it’s lived by two losers in a household culture of mutual surrender, is just the training we need to walk through this world—a world that wants to chew you up and spit you out—without the constant fear of getting the short end of the stick. Maybe we need to be formed in such a way that winning loses its glamour, that we can sacrifice the competition in favor of people. Maybe what we need, really, is to become a bunch of losers in a world that is being a torn apart by the competition to win. If we did that, maybe we’d be able to sleep a little easier at night, look our loved ones in the eyes, forgive and forget, and clap for the people around us.

I think that in a marriage of losers, a synergy happens and all of life can explode into a kind of rebellion that is brighter than the sun. The really good rebellions, the ones that last and make the world a better place, they are like that, aren’t they? They heal, they restore. They are big, and they shine like the sun. And, like the sun, their gravitational pull is almost irresistible.

Notes: 

For more on rebellious love, read another post, Dangerous, Rebellious Hope (Part 3 of 3).

For more on marriage, read, Marriage Is For Liars, Your Marriage Is A Mess, or Marriage and Scooby-Doo (and the Freedom of Mystery).

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This post will be submitted to Rachel Held Evans‘ synchroblog regarding egalitarianism in marriage. 

And, as always, thanks for reading. It’s a gift. 

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