My former in-laws have been driving up to see us for lunch on the first Sunday of the month. father in law told me that he wanted to meet us on the fifth. I telephoned him yesterday to thank him for the treasures that he gave to my children. I also told him that if he wanted his friend and neighbor to join us for lunch next Sunday, that we would love to have him. His voice brightened at the thought that his friend would be welcomed.
This is beautiful, pigless.
I awakened this morning thinking: I've lost everything by which I'd defined myself.
And I was all about identity and what that is and self worth and how to carve out a new identity and internal versus external locus of control and oh, man ~ on and on it went.
I learned this, in my explorations this morning: There are three areas of self definition.
One includes our relationships with friends, family (Oh oh, you guys. That means Family of Origin and you know what that means, for me.), and peers.
One has to do with the sincerity of our interests ~ with the energy we put into the things we enjoy. (This would be where Thich Nhat Hahn and drinking our tea as though our joy turns the fulcrum of the Earth comes in.)
And the last has to do with things we own. Our appearances, our cars or houses, our educations, our racial or religious or sexual identities and etc.
***
I learned that, especially for those of us blasted into external locus of control through one kind of abuse or another, self worth sometimes becomes almost solely dependent on those externalized attributes of identity listed above. Today's cultural messages are all about externalized attributes of identity ~ things that can be bought or sold. How we present ourselves. Whether or not we are educated and to what degree. How our lives look to the outsider. And whether we can buy looking better by switching from say, Budweiser to white wine. Or listening to a different kind of music as part of a values system of good or bad when music is music, as stringent a reality as mathematics.
***
About that time in my explorations of self definition, I came to check in here and read:
"To thank him for the treasures that he gave to my children. I also told him that if he wanted his friend and neighbor to join us for lunch next Sunday, that we would love to have him. His voice brightened at the thought that his friend would be welcomed."
And I realized that what matters in defining ourselves and our lives is not outcome.
It is faith.
Intention matters, but we can hold whatever intention we want and outcome is still outcome. So, what matters is faith. In ourselves and in the rightness of the goodness of our intentions, whatever the outcome.
Whatever the outcome.
My outcomes? Don't look so good, you guys. So, I know they say we should not compare ourselves to others. But sometimes, what we do have is something so different than what we were sure we did have that we compare ourselves to ourselves ~ we compare our what is to our dreams or our certainties regarding what the future would look like.
We cannot wrap our heads around the hurt of it, and the seeming loss.
But this beautiful story pigless, reminded me that what matters is believing in ourselves and our people and the courses our lives have taken, whatever that looks like, today or forever. What matters is that we not write the end of the story even in the secret depths of our own hearts. What matters is our faith in the intentions we've held, and still somehow hold onto, in the face of the outcome we experience.
That is who we are. That is what Viktor Frankl was telling us. It isn't about whether a child battles addiction or mental illness. It is about the intention we hold, and have always held, toward our children, toward ourselves, toward our lives and our (in my case, roaringly dysfunctional) families.
This is where we (I) have been falling apart. I am forever questioning where I went wrong because I am basing decisions about who I am ~ about who we all are ~ on outcome. But...I have zero control over how a thing turns out. Maybe, no one does. In this story you've shared with us this morning, a miracle happened and a tide was turned. Had the tide come in, in the usual way, you were fully prepared to meet it. But in your intention pigless, there was room for the generosity of a miracle to occur.
Whether it did or not, you held space for it.
And somehow, one did. Or the beginning of one. And part of its fruition was your faith in the goodness of your very personal and individual intention for yourself and your understanding of how to live a life. Maybe, that is what faith is, after all. Holding space for the generosity of a miracle whether it happens, or not. Even, or maybe especially, when no miracle happens, and when something very bad happens, instead.
That's the tough part.
It almost doesn't matter how a thing turns out. What matters is holding faith with our highest selves, with our kindest selves. It matters that we see clearly, that we not go comfortably into denial about the hurtful things. That matters. But who we are is not about what has happened to us. It truly is about somehow holding faith with ourselves and our people ~ estranged or just plain whacked out as they are or as we are ~ and even, with the courses of our lives.
That was the thing I lost, pigless, when Daughter was hurt and my Family of Origin did what they did.
Faith: Holding an openness, a generosity of heart, where something unforeseen then may, or may not, occur.
And now, because I know there were struggles for you in deciding how to respond, and because you responded from your highest, kindest self, and because you shared all of it with us here...I have it back. I wasn't foolish, or foolishly in denial, to have believed in my people, or in myself, or in the goodness at the heart of things.
There was a time when a quote about faith was at the bottom of my posts. When I lost the capacity to hold faith, I took that quote down. I felt punished and lost, and became cynical. I named myself foolish for having believed better for any of us than what I saw with my own two eyes.
Here is the quote in its entirety.
"Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet: it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, the old Eternal Now."
Joanna Russ
On Strike Against God
***
So, this morning, rather than search through my quote box to find this quote, I googled it. And learned that Johanna Russ was a lesbian, and a feminist, during the 1960s. I read other quotes of hers.
Amazing.
How to define ourselves, to ourselves, from the perspective of our highest, most ethical selves. That is what Johanna Russ has to teach us.
Me.
In her lifetime, the unmarried, and defiantly determined not to be married, childless lesbian feminist writer in blindly misogynistic 1960s America, Johanna Russ was labeled degenerate; was ridiculed and caricatured and actively hated.
But somehow, she refused to hate herself. Instead, she was somehow able to hold faith with herself ~ was able to hold faith with her highest, most ethical self.
Faith.
This ties in to that phrase that has come so clearly to resonate for me lately: "Do not
fear rejection."
Thank you, pigless.
This story about your life has been a catalyst for me in defining the meaning of my own. How extraordinary that this should be so.
Maybe, another little miracle that changes everything and reaches into forever.
:O)
Cedar
