Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

The comments on my previous friends-locked entry (locked only because I wrote rather too freely about occasions of grief I'd encountered in my ministry to leave it open for all the world to read) gave me a lot to think about. In particular, I was struck by cindywrites' suggestion that grief isn't something that anyone should ever get "good" at, and that those who try to quantify the process of grieving and present it as stages to be worked through may be missing the point -- that tragedy and pain and grief are part of the brokenness of this world and not what we were created for, originally.

It occurs to me (not for the first time) that as a "professional" minister, I am probably too quick to try to regard grief as a scholarly problem, rather than deal with the terribly human messiness and longevity of pain.

While standing at the photocopier for a couple of hours on Thursday, running off seemingly endless copies of author contracts that needed to be mailed that day to meet our deadline, I had ample time to try to sort out my real feelings from my academic categories.

Here's what it comes down to: my semi-obsession with trying to analyze and control grief has much more to do with attachment issues than with my failure to detach (or "de-cathect") from those I've lost.

I keep flashing back to the "camel's back" metaphor I so casually threw into that earlier post:

". . . my first impulse when I see someone in pain is to move quickly in the opposite direction, before sympathy and empathy can kick in and make their problems my problems or add that last straw to my camel's load of grief and rage and fear and depression. So, there's a certain rush that comes just from managing to overcome my own terror and walk into the home or funeral parlor or hospital room in the first place."

I realized, upon further reflection, that the ability to overcome my fear of "getting involved" or being touched by other people's pain was largely dependent on my ability to think "It's not me; it's Christ in me" or "It's not me; it's the pastor-me."

Otherwise, I feel as if my "load" of grief and pain and rejection and disappointment was filled up nearly to the breaking point by the time I turned 13 years old. For a long time after that, I tried to insure that only people whom I really didn't care about too much were allowed to enter my circle of friends and family. I wanted to insure that nobody else would be able to hurt me very much. I couldn't do much about those who were already INSIDE my circle (my parents, my two siblings, my three remaining grand-parents, and the memories of dear friends I'd had to leave behind with each move to a new church, school, and state in the past three years), against whose disapproval or dislike I had no insulation, but I could try not to increase my risk/ exposure.

Of course, it didn't work out perfectly, but by and large, I spent the next 8 years either alone or with "friends" I didn't really like all that much and whose inevitable loss would only be inconvenient.

Then, when I was just a couple of weeks short of my 20th birthday, I spent Christmas Day feeling totally alone and friendless in a hotel room in London and had a "rock-bottom" experience in my addiction to pseudo-self-sufficiency. I was forced to accept, finally, that I'd never be good enough to earn God's love and grace, and to lower my barriers enough to allow for the possibility that Christ had already done all the heavy lifting and major deciding for me, and I might just have to TRUST God on this one.

After that, I did take occasional baby-steps towards opening up to new people. But my progress was greatly slowed after several months, when I found out that my new and first-in-many-years best friend, who made me feel as though I could do anything I set my mind to, had her own "issues," including a habit of lying and using everyone around her to try to make up for the parental love she'd lost at too young an age. Oh, well.

But that little bit of break-through did open me up enough so that, when the outrageous idea of going to seminary (instead of library school or some doctoral program in History or English) after college graduation was put into my head, I was eventually able to take that leap of faith, even knowing that training for pastoral ministry would challenge me on all my weakest points (my fear of public speaking, my debilitating shyness, and my own difficulty with the "trust" aspects of faith, as opposed to intellectual knowledge or belief). When I rolled into Princeton Seminary for the first time, as a scared and stressed-out 21-year-old, I did so with the feeling that if they had really known me, they never would have admitted me. But as long as I was there, I figured I'd never find a safer community in which to let down my guard and try out a new way of being me in the world. I proved so adept at faking self-confidence and friendliness, that within a few days I was being mistaken for a senior student by other newcomers. I made friends -- good friends, real friends whom I still care about and keep in touch with to this day -- and I survived challenges and crises with their help, and got very good grades, and discovered that maybe parish ministry wasn't totally impossible for me, after all. So, after graduation and a year of full-time internship as assistant to a veteran pastor, I girded up my loins and went through the laborious process of finding a first call and jumping through the final hoops for ordination.

Unfortunately, along with learning that the "thrill" of many aspects of parish ministry disappeared after I'd proved to myself that I could do this or that task really well at least once, my first parish also taught me that parishioners were not and should not be my friends and family. I learned that parishioners (at least in the kinds of churches that seemed to fall in love with me and want to call me) didn't want to see my frailer sides: they needed me to be someone they could look up to, and count on me to be someone who would forgive their weaknesses while not burdening them with my own. I learned that "boundaries" were essential (and they are). But after I'd been let down or rejected by a few more friends and colleagues (including the male seminary friend I'd been engaged to, off and on, for years), my boundaries began to bear a striking resemblance to my old walls, keeping the rest of the world at a safe distance, except for the handful of seminary friends I trusted and the family I'd been born/stuck with.

When my two grandmothers (my last gradfather had died halfway through my seminary career) died within the same calendar year and in the same county where I was then serving a parish, I found myself doing the "pastor" thing, helping to organize and speaking at their funerals, rather than being one of the mourners. In my pastor-persona, I could deal with grief on a safe, superficial level, and not let it get "out of control" or touch me too deeply (at least, not consciously).

If it weren't for the alternate "safety mask" provided by the written word (and now by LJ usernames!), even the non-church-related friends I'd made during my last full-time parish work might never have gotten to know me and become real friends. Only the fact that some good and kind people went out of their way to befriend me, and the fact that I then moved several states away and began writing very long letters to those friends in order to ease my isolation, allows me to count missmurchison and some others among my real life friends today.

All of this is an extremely long-winded way of getting to the point: I've realized that, on some level, I want to believe that there is an end to grief and pain -- short of the eschatological end to mourning promised in the prophets and the book of Revelation, I mean. I want to find some way to empty the "tank" of pain I've been carrying around since I was a child, so that I can (theoretically) finally be strong enough and well enough to run the risk of letting more people get to know me, with the possibility that they might then die or let me down or leave me, and that I would feel pain at their loss or have to work at re-building relationships.

But now that I put that down in black and white, I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't just another "rock-bottom" revelation waiting to happen. Looking back to that Christmas Day when I was 19, I can clearly recognize the foolishness of the "God-can't-really-love-me-or-save-me-until-I'm-good-enough" attitude that I was forced to begin to abandon that day. Is "I-can't-love-anybody-else-until-I'm-strong-enough-and-pain-free-enough" just as silly and self-defeating? And is the remedy the same? To admit that what I want is impossible and start taking baby-steps toward a new, more potentially life-giving way of dealing with the world?

While I was running off all those copies, thinking about my "tank" being already full-to-overflowing with grief and pain kept leading me back to that late-night conversation between Captain Sheridan and the visiting preacher in the Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, 'No Hiding Place'"--where the preacher urged Sheridan to share his worries with (not pass them off to) someone else, before the fact that his "worry tank" was so obviously full prevented his people from being able to tell him things he needed to know. So, he finally let Delenn in on some of the problems that confounded him, to serve as a sounding board, and when she thought he was getting a little too good at thinking like the Shadows, she dragged him off to the interfaith worship service. Just thinking about that scene makes me feel happy, now.

And that's one of the reasons I think I'm so passionately fond of some TV shows, like B5 or BtVS or the classic Trek: I look to them for inspiration and for a way of practicing "walking through the valley of the shadow of death", in hopes that the terror of the unknown will turn into the more tolerable fear of the painful-but-doable known ordeal.