On her kindness

I've had a bad cold this week, nothing serious, but enough to slow me down.

I've been feeling shaky mentally for a while now. Nothing drastic, but enough to slow me down. I'm in a foul mood more often than I like, being avoidant even about activities I love, increasingly unable to imagine enjoying things, my sense of perspective is a bit all over the place and I am wondering if it is time to start with the dried frog pills again -- not to drug myself out of my sense of dissatisfaction, not to medicalize a perfectly reasonable response to an uncontrollable and dangerous world, but to correct or ease or change whatever chemical or structural characteristic makes my fears so overwhelming that I resort to avoidance, displacement, or numbness.

The thing is, I don't really believe it was the antidepressants or the three and a half years of therapy that got me out of this last time. I think it was the continual reassurance of other people caring for me, doing their best to help me despite the difficulties (and I know I did make it difficult, for it was so hard for me to trust), making it clear that even if I don't understand why, I am valued and cherished and loved.

That support has not been withdrawn. On the contrary, it is very real and very ongoing. If you are reading this and you are someone who knows me, please do not think I don't notice that you care. I do notice, and I am grateful, but sometimes it's still hard for it to have any effect. It's as if another layer has been peeled away, and the fears that disabled me in years past have been replaced by some newer ones and some older ones, and suddenly my need to understand why I am loved -- so that I can keep doing whatever it is, you see, and so control my fate -- outweighs my ability to accept love I do not think I deserve. And the messages that I don't deserve love echo from a church that systematically excludes me and my loved ones and a society that makes it clear that the poor are to be discarded, right back into childhood fears of violence and abandonment. My ability to see myself as a beloved child of God disappears in a puff of Pelagianism. My ability to trust God to love me even though I am decidedly imperfect evaporates. I don't understand, and I can't trust, and so I am afraid. But I also have this desperate desire to improve things, to act on behalf of God in the world, to heal the sick and bind up the brokenhearted and all that priestly stuff from Isaiah. Christ has no body now on earth but ours, said Teresa of Avila, and I want to be the hands, the feet, the eyes -- even while I cannot imagine I will ever be anything but dust, not loved, not hated, not even noticed. And the danger of that is that without the sense of belovedness, without the knowledge that I am valued and cherished and loved, all my works are forced and manipulative rather than joyful. I will not be able to refill the well from which I draw water, and eventually I will be too tired and dried out to continue being unkind to myself while I try to serve others and will lapse into apathy or selfishness or despair. I know this is how it goes. I've been here before. It's not kenosis, a joyful self-emptying, a costly but beneficial surrender... it's sort of the opposite of that. But I don't know what else to do, I don't seem to have any control over my sense of being loved, and so I keep going through the motions, hoping beyond hope that if I keep going the doldrums will clear, waiting and watching for some subtle shift in perspective and meanwhile struggling against my instinct to withdraw, hide, hibernate, conserve what I think I have left -- as if any of it is mine.

I am already weary, already thirsty. I keep saying, on Twitter and a few other places, that I know this will pass, winter is always a bit difficult, I know I will be okay. But what I need to remember is not just that I will be okay but that I am already more than okay, that I am already valued and cherished and loved, and this is not contingent on anything I say or do or think or believe. I need to remember how to be kind to myself while being kind to others, I need to remember how to accept the kindnesses others offer.

Only say the word, and I shall be healed...

War On War

Here is my dilemma about war:

Clearly, war is never what God wants for us.

Equally clearly, God does not want us to stand by while innocent people are slaughtered. I can condemn so many wars that have happened in my lifetime, but over them all hangs the spectre of gas chambers, concentration camps. I condemn violence but I cannot endorse genocide.

Lord, have mercy.

Regardless of how we let the world get to the point where the Holocaust could happen, regardless of the undoubted economic incentives for wading in, I think we reached a point where the atrocities would not have stopped with anything short of a war. Regardless of the knowledge that history is written by the victors, I cannot say we should not have fought. I don't know that anything else would have worked. Maybe it would have -- but I don't know.

Christ, have mercy.

We? I wasn't even alive during WWII. I am much-removed from the danger of current wars, even while I am (along with anyone else who uses oil) complicit in creating the conditions where they can happen. And so my disgust with war and violence turns into a sort of self-loathing, a need to seek forgiveness for my part in all this. And that, in turn, isn't what Remembrance Day is "supposed to" be about at all, is it? I can hear the patriots protesting, "It isn't all about you and me, it's about those who gave their lives!"

Lord, have mercy.

What did they give their lives for if we continue to behave in ways that cause war?

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

What am I on about? What do I mean, "if we continue to behave in ways that cause war"?

Here's my understanding of what causes war: War is caused by the fear of death, and our constant striving to hold it off or delay it or make it more comfortable.

Lord, have mercy.

War is caused when we see what someone else has and want it for ourselves even if it means hurting them.

Christ, have mercy.

War is caused when we value our own comfort over the lives of someone else. That's what the Holocaust was about, and that's what Afghanistan is about, and that's what the Gulf wars are about, and every other war I can think of.

Lord, have mercy.