During the early days of my son manifesting an early onset of Bi-Polar disorder the path ahead looked very dark and very hard.

What made the time difficult was the looming outcomes and the toll those outcomes would take upon our family.  We were in Newfoundalnd and Labrador at the time and it seemed that the official solution for mental health issues was a fatal confrontation with the police.

While the medical and educational systems pointed us to policies and practices designed to help the individuals responsible for those policies and practices failed either to have the skill or the will to be a help.  My wife and I invested so much energy into being parents we were in danger of losing our ability to be husband and wife.

Social services also told us, point blank, that there would be more help for my son if my wife and I were not a couple.  So, when you feel like your marriage is falling apart already wouldn't you be tempted to sacrifice what's left for your child?

So those looming outcomes were 1) the potential that the first real treatment for my son's Bi-Polar disorder would be a bullet from a police officer's service revolver and 2) that to get my son the help he needed my wife and I would have to sacrifice our marriage.  We didn't find those outcomes acceptable.

Who was with us during that time?

That's tough.  Nobody envied us our situation.  People in helping professions were prepared to help, we needed significantly more than they had to offer.  There was no end of family and friends willing to support us.  There was absolutely nobody who was able to carry us.  Ultimately we were forced to put our son in voluntary care and it almost killed him.

Finally we left the island and came back to Ontario.  Both my wife and I took a tremendous leap of faith and the hand that caught us has been the hand that has held us ever since.

We trusted in God to be present for us, no matter what that would end up looking like and we certainly weren't trusting that it would be a happily ever after ending.

How did we stay open?  There was no way to close it off.

There is a peculiar type of wrestling that I have endured in difficult times.  I am convinced that I am falling.  I am convinced that God will catch me.  I simply do not know how long I will fall before I am caught.  And while you are falling all I know is that I haven't been caught yet and I am beginning to fall further than I ever have before.

How much further must I yet fall?

That is the struggle.  And I have no idea what God is looking for in these moments.  Is it my complete and utter surrender?  I did that quickly and still I fell.  Is it me standing my ground and pushing back?  I did that an still fell.  So I do not know what lesson I was meant to learn.

I do know that I survived a very long fall, not just myself, but my family as well.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Recall a time in your life when the path ahead looked dark and hard. What made the time difficult for you? Who was with you during this time? How did you stay open to the pain and suffering? What role did you faith have in your life at the time?

Periods of unemployment have vexed me. Frustration is the feeling. But the path ahead? "Dark and hard?" No, blessedly not.

I realize that at 66 jobs don’t come easily and I have always enjoyed the buzz, challenges and fellowship of work, paid or not. And I have got good at making my own… I have play scripts and book manuscripts completed and nothing to do with them. (I've had four books published and a several plays produced professionally, but I’m out of the loop and it’s hard to get material looked at these days. And I don’t have a lot of marketing flair when it comes to my own work.) Besides, writers are widely expected to work for nothing these days, and many do.

Then see that my frustration is in fact just an irritated ego, and relax again. There's nothing too "dark and hard" about that.

My wife is a wonderful, endlessly interesting and beautifully spiritual woman, a minister, a mother and grandmother, a generous and appreciate persoon and a loving, patient companion… my best friend.  So I don’t have space for a lot of personal pain and suffering. I try to do my best for my companion in life. That’s my most significant role and it gives me a strong sense of purposeful satisfaction.

My faith is pretty much who I am: full of questions, excited and excitable, often insensitive, but always seeking to engage more deeply. And engagement pushes aside any shadows that “pain” and “suffering” may cast, along with any anxiety about the path ahead.

Well, Jesus doesn't appear to look forward to it.  He is accepting of events.

Jesus also appears to see a way in which his suffering is going to be a benefit to others and with that in mind, permits it to happen.

I have to admit I struggle with whether or not those are things that I ought to emulate.  I do not look forward to suffering and yet, I will weigh positive outcomes against pain and suffering expected and it is not unusual to determine the pain and suffering to be a worthwhile investment if they move me closer to my goals.

Which gets dangerously close to doormat territory doesn't it?

Perhaps the redeeming quality of pain in every situation is that it has an appropriate person to carry it.

If by carrying pain and suffering in my body I can spare family or friend or stranger from experienceing it then that seems a worthwhile endeavour and yet, if I have learned lessons through pain and suffering is my taking on the pain and suffering of another going to help them to learn appropriate lessons or is it simply delaying this particular learning?

The world cannot be bubblewrapped.  We have to learn the dangers of sharp-edges at some point.

Grace and peace to you.

John

The answer for me in "how is the way Jesus entered into his suffering instructive for your life?" is found in the prayer that follows the question . . . "letting go of my fear and opening into God's living presence".

In my recent bout of health issues (not over, but hopefully gettin' better) I've seen where I am (and have been through much of my life) "holding onto my fears" and not fully opening myself into God's living presence.  I see how now, and in the past, I have let a "controlling nature" overtake me.  When things aren't going my way "in the face of hardship and vulnerability" or when "sufferning" enters into my life (emotionally, mentally, physically) I want things to be "my" way . . . I have to learn, and am learning, that there are somethings that I just need to accept, live through, and follow-through to the end . . . trusting in God to walk the journey with me.

How is the way Jesus entered into his suffering instructive for your life?

Faith and courage go together.

Fear is the temptation and the "enemy" when tough tests come.

Times of testing are pretty musch inescapable in life… and they can be extreme. Somehow, it is important to hold each dark moment in the context of the whole of life, and also to know that we are not singled out for particular suffering.

Jesus travelled the worst and the best paths we might experience, and proved that life is good and, in the end, can not be deformed into pointlessness or stripped of its value. 

That can be very easy to forget when we are hurting, unless we hold onto the truth that Jesus and his teachings are available to us, every moment —  within reach every step of the journey.

The suggestion is by no means a new one and there are, I believe, justifiable grounds to admit that there is some merit to the suggestion.  Many of us are not fond of our warts and so, if at all possible, we will not reveal to the world that we have a few warts in delicate places.

This would not be a problem if our image was completely false.  If that were the case we would go through life knowing that we were lying to others as frequently as they were lying to us.

The problem is how we project truth and falsehood at the same time.  Which means everyone must be on their guard against falshood even when truth comes to the fore.  That fosters an atmosphere of suspicion and until suspicion is checked it works against efforts to edify and create community.

Lent, at the very least, has pushed me past the comfortable pretenses which allow me to comfortably lie to myself.  I don't know that every fabrication that I cling to has been challenged nor do I know that every fabrication that I cling to has been challenged sufficiently to have it no longer obscure who I really am when I look in the mirror or when I present myself to others.

Grace and peace to you.

John

DAY 36 How do you react to the suggestion that each of us projects a false self to the World? How has Lent been for you a time to go deeper, to learn about the person God would have you be?

A ”false self” …“false selves”? I know of no effective, long-lasting way to sustain a "false self". And no way of wholly escaping one's "true self".

Mirroring the expectations of others is a basic social primate behaviour: submission to alpha males can save a lot of needless aggravation; pandering to one, standing over another, these behaviors can get us slices of their “stuff”. Even altruism has its returns… we see all of this and more in baboon troops and chimpanzee communities.

For many of life’s activities, this is the “get it done” convention: conform. We feign respect for jerks, obey the instructions of the powerful, keep low profiles, work hard at what we’re told to do and hope we don’t wake up one day, having faithfully followed orders, as a concentration camp guard with Russian tanks at the gate.

But “unreal selves”? Really?

If we are "busy"  aren't we victims of our own real "issues": aren't we making those issues "real" to ourselves. We fairly obviously have made life choices and set priorities for life that deny life.

Perhaps we don't want to know ourselves, or perhaps we want to justify our wrong-headed values rather than face them… we get nowhere by not owning our motivations as well as our actions. I went through a period of busy-ness and I know the buzz of persuading ourselves and others that we are busy for virtue's sake… the good of others, driven by a sense of unselfish benefit to others. But that is a delusion brought on by mistaken rejections of relationship with self, with life, with god.

Saints pray… they take TIME to pray… Jesus prayed… that is worth remembering.

Without the engagement of prayer behind them, our actions are just echos of our egos.

If we submit to “evil”, if we collude in its working out, does that mean we’re anything but “evil” ourselves? Are we really trapped, with no choices? Is that a justification? How “trapped” do we have to be to hang onto our innocence? As for our “real self”, isn’t our real self culpable — either for its complicity or for its cowardice?

Think what Jesus might have achieved for himself had he been complicit with Rome, or stood a coward before Pilate… he might even have taken Herod Agrippa’s place if he’d played his cards right. Even Josephus, with just one prophetic dream to offer, did okay with Vespasian.

Having “unreal” selves on which to blame our collusion and/or self-interest does not make us less self-centred or less of an crony… and it’s no more persuasive or mature than blaming “imaginary friends” for breaking mummy’s vase.

The coercion we may or may not feel to play a “role”, “act the part”, be “one of” the gang, “go with the flow”, do “what’s best” for all of us… this is a measure of either a) the coercive force our society is using against us, or b) our own vacuity. And vacuity — real or affected —doesn’t buy back our “innocence”. “Innocence”, like virginity, is very difficult to retrieve. What it takes is ACCEPTANCE of god's forgiveness… acceptance means looking deep within our selves and looking beyond our selves That's when the fears fall away.

What would prompt you to quit your job? Knowledge that your employer’s business was acting dishonestly in an overseas market? Your employer’s making racist or sexist remarks or hiring decisions? Discovering that your employer paid bribes to public officials to get the contract you’re working on? Your employer’s forcing small businesses out of existence by delaying payments to them (I have seen local authorities bankrupt smaller contractors this way)?

What would make you a whistleblower? What would make you a rebel? The core Christian commandment is to love. And that calls us to be rebels for love’s sake. It takes courage.

Where do we find the courage to act as we must if we are faithful? The answer is “faith”. How do we build faith? Prayer… and, if we're "Chrstian", by being ready to follow Christ where Christ leads… all the way.

THAT is the core question here, not multiple personalities… it’s a very tough question but the only Easter question that matters.

-----

With regards prayer… I had an experiences in Glasgow that I still find beautiful and inspiring.

I 'd caught a taxi from Queen Street station to Queen's Park, a medium-distance journey. Afternoon rush hour was beginning. It's often a "flat" time of day. About half way there, the driver asked me if we could stop briefly. I said "sure". He pulled off the road into a small carpark, went to the trunk. took out a prayer mat, knelt beside the taxi facing Mecca. It was his Asr Salah prayer (it's the third of five prayers of the day, said when the sun starts waning).

He got back in the car, alight with joy. He apologised for delaying me and took me on to my appointment. When we got there, he absolutely refused to take payment. He said Allah told him not to worry about it. And he thanked me for being "so very kind". Kind? I had done nothing. I felt I'd shared in that driver's prayer and witness and felt joy myself. I'd been uplifted by his witness.

Maybe Allah/god is delighted when we do nothing sometimes.

"How do you react to the suggestion that each of us projects a false self to the world? How has Lent been a time to go deeper, to learn about the person God would have you be?"

Everytime I read the story about Jesus asking his disciples to stay awake with him because he is deeply distressed and agitated, I am reminded of how human Christ really became. I have often said in moments of distress that sometimes when turning to an invisible God I also require a God that has flesh and bones that I can see and feel. These are moments when I've searched out friends that can be supportive and I pray that they will provide encouraging words or just sit and listen while I wrestle through some of lifes problems. Yet here was Jesus asking for the same thing. Someone to listen and lift him up during a very dark night.

As I grow older, I sometimes notice how my children refuse to see the changes that are occurring in myself. When I was a younger mother I was I was more vibrant, strong and sure of myself. This is the mother they have imprinted in their hearts and their minds, but still, even though they love me they refuse to face the fact that things are changing for me and a little different. I'm not as sure footed as I used to be and of course my body is on a path of gradual decline. I don't run as fast, walk as fast or have the same physical capabilities as I used to. I have had to accept things long before they have and I have often found myself trying to portray the image of who they remember their mother to have always been. I want to remain strong for them for when they need me, but the fact remains that I'm not always up to it. When they see me a "little off", and not keeping in the role of the "caretaker", I think there are times they distance themselves from me. It's human nature I think that when someone who has been the one that supports, mentors, and guides you, that we would tend to pull back not knowing what to do when the one we are dependent on becomes dependent on us.

I've worked with Alzheimers clients and it's painfully obvious how many families rather than accept that a change has occurred in their parents lives, would rather pull away and lessen their visits. It seems when they say "that's not my mother/father" or "why bother"?, that they fail to realize that yes, this is very much your parent.

I've seen it here on Wondercafe. We've been privileged to share in stories of deep sorrow with Chansen, LB, Serena, Crazyheart, Neo, Mysts, Seeler, and sooo many others (please forgive me if I have failed to mention you) We have only mere moments to relate and then we return to our lives or "go to sleep", while those who are living it continue to "remain awake alone", bravely carrying on in authenticity and sometimes portraying a stronger image when necessary to the outside world.

Today, I'm thinking of Jesus. How so many looked up to him and how in his hour of need and despair he asked those close to him to pray with him and not fall asleep, but they did. Was it because they found it hard to face that this great teacher, mentor, son of God would even require them to take care of Him? A role reversal that was foreign to their relationship? His spirit was willing but his flesh was weak. Did he need a hug, encouragement and support for this great sacrifice he was willing to give? I'm sure of it.

Today I will try to remember to open my eyes to the changes in others that I may not want to see even though they may be asking me to.

waterfall, thank you for this. I have ( had many friends) but I have noticed that a few ( very fiew) have been constant Others have moved away. It is as if they are afraid that they will catch cancer or don't like to be reminded that they could get it too. This had been one of the saddest things that has happened during my illness. I am lonley. It is like after a death, I am told, that people flock around during the initial time but then disappear with comments like "we will have to get together".

Wc has been my Salvation along with  crazydad  and my family but I do miss friends.

It reminds me, waterfall, of everyone turning from Jesus and falling asleep.

I don't like to write about it. 

Identify some of the masters that are controlling the lives of many people today. Which of these masters are you most tempted to follow?

The masters are all within. We tease them into existence, we nurture them into being. Then we prostrate our lives before them. The new idolatory is all about wealth and its destructive chimera: money. A lesser idol is entertainment. Why such things become “needs” is a puzzle because they eat our lives… we make ourselves living sacrifices to them and I don’t know why.

The cruel thing is that, where we have power over others — as we all do — we are in a position to lure or bully them into becoming “human shields” for our own activitities. An employer, a government, a gang… groups like this frequently organise, articulate and find ways of enforcing this sort of bondage.

Freedom, to these people, entails costs and the costs are emphasized… along with the purported advantages of bondage. A kind of conditional bondage is pretty much the state of Canadian society, which is why it generates conflicts and injustices.

But I don’t believe for a moment that we are necessarily bound to “masters”, or that controlling others or being controlled makes us somehow “safe”. And the concept of “possession” (a necessary notion for control) is, I have found, an illusion.

Everything is owned by its own narrative.

You can never wash the sweatshop from that cheap Bangladeshi shirt; sugar cannot cover the bitterness of child slavery in that delicious chocolate. No plough can uproot the injustices done in the acquisition of that land.

What about MY narrative? It becomes a part of all of these other narratives and there’s no room for denial where these narratives intersect, as they do, in “all that’s holy”.

So “possession” — play-acting a fantasy of control — is an impulse of fear: it seeks to bury the evidence. In fact, it becomes ostentation and, to open eyes, ridiculous.

Control is very like drug addiction. It takes more and more to accomplish less and less and the only alternative — freedom, freely offered — gets harder and harder to accept with every needle.

So… some of the masters that are controlling the lives of many people today?

Denial is one. Denial is a very powerful master and has been for centuries. Denial is seeing things from  a single point of view, it is contrived out of existential uncertainty. It pushes responsibility under carpets, behind walls, out of sight.

Denial seeks to divorce actions from their consequences at their deepest levels. It isolates individuals in cells of guilt and distrust. The early Greek tragedians understood that the relationship between acton and consequence is inescapable. Shakespeare did. So did Jesus.

The alternative to denial is not, as many believe,  guilt.

Jesus’ teachings promise something wholly different: grace, forgiveness. But these liberating teachings come as a body of teaching… and denial again tempts us to hold bsck, to pick and choose — like the medieval church that sold indulgences as a way to free people of consequence. But the barbarities, wars and injustices merely flourished.

We do something as brazenly dishonest, and similarly ineffective, when we hide our responsibility behind extended supply chains, believing there’s safety in numbers, by pretending to have no other options, by claiming over-riding responsibilities to systems and other people that sustain our self deceptions… rattling our slave chains and crying.

And, in denial, we exclude ourselves from the justice that, by our actions, we deny to others. We become well-armed “dogs in the manger” to the World’s poor and oppressed. And we become increasingly fearful.

We’re become ardent believers in “luck”, we are enthusiastic self-distractors with noise and entertainment, we hide by burrowing into busy-ness and “responsibilities”, we hide behind accumulations of ridiculous goods, we subscribe to ideas of collective responsibility as if justice is malleable and will be confused by numbers. Christians get into denial by quibbling over faith versus works, or by worshipping instead of acting.

And it’s ALL so utterly unnecessary.

Truth isn't death; truth is life. Isn't this the Easter story and its promise?

It’s pure (free, uncluttered, uncompromised) hearts we’re called to. And unequivocal love.

To engender that kind of love, I find I have to be open to awe… to total engagement. Then the fears evaporate and denial falls away.

This is what true freedom is: the freedom to live wholly in the unequivocal love that gives us wholeness of life.

So… Which of these masters am I most tempted to follow?

I’m find I’m drawn time and time again back to awe, and to gratitude for the beauty and abundance at my fingertips. Gratitude makes me care, gratitude makes me WANT justice as the soil under my feet.

To me, beauty and abundance form the language of god’s love. To deny it or control it, own it, exploit it or destroy it are the impulses that keep it from us.

To enter into it is to let go of the things that frighten, frustrate, compel or seem to defeat us. It's to find freedom.

I'll take a pass on naming the masters that are controlling the lives of others thanks.

The masters that I am most tempted to follow?  Expedience, Obstinance, Sufferance.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Recall a time when life-changing decisions pressed in on you. What guided your decision making? How were others affected by your decisions?

My BIG life changing decision was to quit a reasonably secure, interesting, well-paid career-path job that I enjoyed to support my wife and be the "at home parent" for our daughter (then 2) when my wife received her call to ministry. We were determined to have one of us doing fulltime parenting, at least until she was established in a school she liked.

In the Methodist tradition (a bicultural tradition in New Zealand) there was the discipline of itinerancy: moving on every several years… so my decison was not an interim one: it required me to  let go of an identity, of conventional "security" and, in time, of the land of my youth, which I loved. It was the best decision I have ever made.

Another good decision was to do the "sell everything and give it to the poor" thing that we innocently assumed to be part and parcel of such a call. Then we moved to a seminary apartment in the city for my wife's vocational training… and one of the first things they gave was was a parking permit for a car. We felt wonderfully liberated from all that. 

So, since then… led by call and curiosity, my wife and I have made 20 moves in 30 years in three countries: New Zealand, Scotland and Canada. The longest I have stayed in any one place in my whole life was seven years in a Scottish manse. Many of the moves were minor; several were massive.

Along the way, I became "Christian" if that's what I am. (I know some folk here don't think that's the case.)

We have found in the past that, at some point, we arrive at a sense of completion in a place… and then a gifted restlessness comes upon us. We'd find ourselves looking up and seeing the horizon. The restlessness would form around some new challenge, experience or adventure and becomes a call that we've never denied.

We have a keen sense of life as a pilgrimage: not away from the past or where we are, but toward fullness of life and liveliness of faith. That is not to say we’ve never had rough rides or landings, or times of pain, or been duped. And we have not found journeying in faith smooth or especially easy in all of the contexts we've explored… but even the worst of those times have been part of a flow… a continuity of growth and enrichment of our faith. Life has been "interesting" at times.

So, while these moves have all been life changing, they have been spiritually continuous. We’ve never been betrayed by the promises we have heard in prayer along the way and our capacity to trust and welcome strangers has been greatly enlarged.

Now, for the first time, we feel we may be "settling"… a life change indeed! But also a continuity… life is a flow, deaths are a part of it, letting go is as whole and necessary a part of life as the reaching out. In fact, I doubt whether reaching out is possible without a lot of letting go. Certainly, letting go makes the "now" more real.

How were others affected?

You never really know, even if you stay in one place. But we do have a lot of friends in a lot of places who faithfully keep in touch with us.

Our daughter has been the most affected.

She is now a 30 year-old RN with three children in a happy, fulfilling relationship. She has had a considerable range of experiences in a number of cultures. She’s experienced life without luxuries or electricity, she’s dined privately with a Governor General, she’s been to schools in rural and urban New Zealand and semi-urban Scotland. One school meant a ferry-ride each way. One school was fairly poor and rough. Another school was a top shelf private school. When she was a horse-owning, horse-crazy 12 year-old, she produced her own radio show, called ‘Horse Talk’, in Wellington, New Zealand. She won prizes for her care, display and breeding of tropical fish. She’s well travelled, well-read and confident. She has good values, she’s articulate, she’s a great mother and she’s fun to be around. We’re very proud of her.

We don’t think our itinerancy did her any great harm. She now lives an hour or so from us. We see each other regularly.

Who around you is under stress? How can you support them?

Immediately around me? No-one right here, right now. Not excessively.

A close friend began cancer treatments recently and is stressed but draws ongoing consolation from an annointing liturgy her friends did before her treatment began.

We have some First Nations friends who were born into the stresses they are experiencing. Simply being with them a little from time to time restores us… they are very good at that.

Another friend has money worries. He has vastly more money than us, though, so we can’t help in a way that would end his anxiety. The support we can offer is just friendship, and that doesn’t make the problem he sees go away. I think he finds the anxiety a motivator anyway.

I can “get” that: I am stressed — a little — and motivated by the approaching deadline for a grant application to support a Christmas project at our church. The stress is very helpful.

Stress can be healthy; it can destroy.

Often it can be caused by self focus without self knowledge. Knowing oneself and respecting oneself proofs us against a lot of stress.

I find noise stressful these days… I know how cats and dogs feel about vacuums and other appliances. I seldom turn the radio on. We don't have televison. We live in a quiet semi-rural setting and I get my "noise" shots from the river, the birds and sometimes the music I play.  I am becoming more and more attached to silence. Just an "old man" thing, I guess.

Recall a time when you walked by someone in need. How did you feel? What was stirred within you? What might you learn about yourself and your faith through this experience?

Everybody‘s “in need”. If this question is intended to be about material need, I’ve walked past a lot of people, especially when I’ve had nothing to give. Years ago, I used to go halves with street beggars on whatever I had in my pocket —  on one occasion it cost me over $100. Nowadays I simply don’t think to put money in my pocket because I’m seldom going shopping. I actually don’t like money all that much. It gives me a prickly feeling a bit like lawyers' and dentists' offices.

And I am not sure that all poor people like money much either. It's often more of an immediate, utillitarian need for it. Money lets them eat or drink, but often alone. Sometimes, shared food or drink, a conversation, a piece of time can be as or more important. In Scotland I used to sit and have a smoke with a guy who dossed on the steps behind Waverley Station. He liked to talk. He said it helped him feel “normal”.

So, walking past people in need, how do I feel? Pained, yes. But curious, mostly. Compassion, yes, but curious. The beggar on the street shames us all. The beggar on the street reflects back to us the hard edge of our values and priorities.Hearing his or her stories has, in my experience, often been healing for me as well the beggar. You meet all types, good and bad and, like anywhere else… mostly good enough.

Their stories do often reveal a dark side to the ethos of comfort, though, and the vacuity of our idealization of wealth, of our cruel judgementalism. Homelessness is a condition that’s not hard to fall (or be pushed) into, even in a country as wealthy and “civilized” as Canada. And poverty, even if you’re not homeless, comes with a dehumanizing stigma… when our society or its Economy trashes you, it’s as though it hangs an sign around your neck inviting the ignorant better-off to keep kicking you, spiting you, mocking you… moving you on. You have to be a bit of a hero, or heroine, to be poor and survive, and hang onto a bit of dignity.

It’s a hard school, but it’s graduated more saints than your average MBA programme.

What might I learn about myself and my faith through this experience?

I have learned that it really could quite easily be me there on the street: the gap is one of circumstance.

And my faith? I suppose I have learned — from that sort of interaction and failutre to interact, but alo from all of my experience — that I’m right to value my faith as the most important thing to me: everything else can come and go without my being able to do much to affect it. Everything good hinges on faith… the great necessity is to trust the mystery, no matter the form in which I experience it.