Of Presence and Presents

It seems like such an old pattern, one that's been mine since childhood: I'd rather go looking for distraction than be present in this moment. Distraction was the fuel that kept my addictions alive and growing while I was dying spiritually and relationally.

Distraction, being stuck, avoiding this present moment, all came to a head yesterday. Next week I'll be turning 46 years old. Last year on my birthday I decided to gift myself with no more binge eating. One day at a time, sometimes one nanosecond at a time, by the grace of God and my willingness, it continues to be a gift. I've often pictured my binge eating self as a ravenous animal tearing away at flesh, out of breath and still not satiated. I've certainly wanted to go there this past year. For today I ask God to help me choose not to.

I've been mulling over for a few weeks now what this year's gift will be. Centering prayer is the answer that's kept coming to me. Centering prayer places me right smack dab in today. One on level I see that as a huge gift. On another it seems like torture. Which is why I keep mulling it over, hoping another answer will appear. Yesterday as I went to do Yoga though, I decided that centering prayer would dovetail quite nicely at the end of my session. So I set my pocket timer for 20 minutes and began.

I cried from beginning to end.

From my journal:

"The tears just kept coming. First of all that I'm being called to this kind of prayer ~ that it will be my birthday gift to myself ~ as I acknowledged that I start to sob. The safest place ~held in God's embrace ~ feels so scary of a place to go. So I told God that. I cried out, "Daddy, I'm scared."
Then I got an image of one of my prayer candles, lit within me. Acknowledging the Divine presence within me I saw it expand and fill my being. More tears. What people have been commenting on ~ my peaceful countenance, my brightness, my radiance, is all His doing. His presence within me shining. Like a firefly who simply glows because that's what it's created to do. All I can do is surrender to God and being illuminated happens despite me. I can stop striving.
Then came whispering into my heart, "intimacy is found in me." And I laid there and sobbed and thought about where I've been looking for that intimacy. In that moment I knew that true intimacy flows out of my intimacy with Christ and that when it's present it's because Christ is at the core of it. Otherwise it's a false intimacy. In Him, With Him, Through Him.
The phrase "Merciful Jesus" kept coming to me. With Reconciliation tomorrow how else can I approach Him?"

Then today, as I met with Fr. Charlie, came more clarity into why distraction remains such an attractive option. One of my recovery heroes, Earnie Larsen has a phrase, "Who's driving your bus?" by which he means, whenever you find yourself reacting to someone, or a situation, what age are you? Is it your 5 year old self driving the bus of your life, the teenage self or your adult self? Where are you reacting from in that moment? My little girl self survived childhood by looking for distraction. It was a necessary tool back then. Back then. When I resist living in this moment I am letting my little girl drive the bus of my life today. Realizing this doesn't magically fix anything but it does give me a new awareness. It makes choice possible.

During the Sacrament of Reconciliation today Fr. Charlie emphasized two things:

God loves you as you are.
God's graces are being poured over you.
Know this.

Fetal Positions

It's Friday. Don't you just shake your head when you read such a silly sentence as if you don't know what day of the week it is? It's more for my benefit than anyone else's. I'm still really tired. I've been battling nausea on a daily basis for quite a while now. Also an increasingly painful area in my abdomen. On Monday I'm having a medical procedure to see if they can find the cause. Let's hope they don't. Let's hope they do. Does that make sense?

Before I write anything more please know how grateful I am for your prayers while I was gone. The week could not have turned out like it did on simple human willpower. Something bigger than all of us was at work. Well, doesn't that sound so trite. Something bigger than all of us is at work always. Last week I was simply very aware of it.

My trip to finish up the radio documentary was both grueling and good. My parents met me more than halfway. My mom softened instead of getting defensive when I spoke of the abuse. I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around that. And while it was an uncomfortable conversation - the producer told me later I sounded like I was hyperventilating the whole way through - we all got through it with our relationship intact.

In the radio studio I relived on tape an incident from my childhood. It set off every alarm bell within me that I was really crossing the line. As a child I was told point-blank-to-my-face by my mom that I was never to talk about what happened in our home. [Let alone do that on national radio.] My older sister consoled me by saying if I tell my dad when the program airs he will forget and miss it and my mom will never listen to it anyway. Small mercies of the aging process. After a 2 hour taping session I left for an AA meeting. Later that evening I was trying to cryptically tell my older sister - my parents were sitting right there - how intense the taping session had been. Eventually she came and stood in front of me and told me she could tell it had been intense because I looked about 12 years old to her.

The last day of taping the producer and I drove to the land hoping to tape me finding some closure. I had no idea if that would happen. I don't remember what he asked me but all of a sudden the little girl in me was standing within my body. I saw her step into me with her feet in my footsteps. It was as if we were one except the top of her head only reached my knees. Then she started to grow and she grew until she fit my adult body. Her arms grew and touched to my fingertips. Her head reached the top of my own. At that point I started to cry and talk. That any kind of closure happened was a bonus. That it happend on tape - I feel a bit pissed about that because it was so private. But that's what I signed up for and I'll work through it yet. The producer was sensitive and left me alone after that. He walked back to the vehicle while I slid down the hill and had the moment I wrote about previously.

Later on I went back to the land with the buyer and his family. The most poignant moment in that conversation happened when he yelled out to one of the kids asking what he saw as he crested a hill. The little boy held up his arms as if he was a body builder posing and yelled, "Mother Nature." I was quite teary while I watched the buyer's kids and their friends explore the land with all the exuberance that childhood can hold. It felt right. I chose to walk across country to get back to my parents' house. I followed old cattle trails until I saw landmarks I recognized. I stopped at my sister's house to share my afternoon with her. My pocket held some prairie sage and a crocus. That little crocus dried in a fetal position which is ironic because I finally feel like I'm no longer frozen in that position.

Dropping Some Weight

"You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different." ~Secret Life Of Bees

I went through a phase in my spiritual journey where I was convinced that reading adult fiction was, if not evil, pretty darn close. After all, it wasn't true. Uh, ya - thank God people change.

Reading the above quote set me thinking about a conversation I had with my younger sister recently. She is working on a dvd for my parents' 50th anniversary celebration. Something that is a cross between a video and a powerpoint presentation. We have a brother who is a wiz with computers so she spent the weekend at his house getting the vision of the completed work out of her head and onto the screen.

My (two) sisters and I have kept up with one another over the years. My brothers have not. Not with each other, not with us. Any information I get about them comes through my mom. My older brother has been in my house once in 25 years and it's been nearly 20 years since my younger brother has been. To be fair there is quite a bit of distance separating us geographically but even if we had lived closer I am not sure how much more I would have seen them. My sisters and I would have been in and out of each others' houses often.

At one point in their weekend together my sister was telling my brother what was new in her life - that she was going to school and what her dreams were. He looked at her and said, "It's nice to see you have more direction than you had at 18." She shot back, "When I was 18 I was working 3 jobs. What were you doing?" Touche.

I was sitting on my deck the other day reading this book. When I read the above quote I got lost in my thoughts. I thought again about this conversation between my siblings. And I was thinking about how my brother still saw my sister as if she were still only 18. How he had her pigeon holed without much thought given to the 20 years that have flown by since then. He had an idea in his head about who she was and that was that. I thought of a homily I heard a few months ago about the dangers of boxing people in by seeing only one aspect of the truth about them. The priest said when we did, it became destructive truth. Jesus saw the truth about people but he didn't pigeon hole them by it. The priest said that to see one facet of truth about someone and have that truth enclose and define them with no hope for the greater Truth of who they were, was wrong.

No sooner had I thought about how sad it was that my brother hadn't given my sister any room to grow or change in 20 years than into my head came a barrage of questions. "How about you? How about only seeing your brother as the one who offered to take away your virginity when you were 17? And your other brother, the one who forced you to give him a blow job when you were 8? And your mother....isn't there more to her than the abuse she dished out? And what about you? Do you want your kids to pigeon hole you based on one incident of their childhood?"

Sometimes the Holy Spirit feels like a pair of boxing gloves socking it to me. I started bawling my head off as if I had been pummeled. I thought about Father Charlie telling me last month that it was possible to have a relationship with my older brother that was not defined by the abusive incident. I couldn't wrap my head around that. I thought about a movie Father Charlie had told me about - The Mission - where Robert De Niro is carrying a pack of belongings and how he loses his grip on them and they start to scatter. And try as he might, he can't pick them all up. He told me I could choose to drop the baggage I carry.

I believe forgiveness has layers. And over the years forgiveness has peeled away like sheets of onion skin paper. And I have no idea if I am at the bottom of the tablet of paper but I sat on my deck and said outloud, "Ok God, I forgive. I choose to drop the baggage. I choose to stop letting the baggage define me. I choose to stop letting my baggage define them." And I bawled and I bawled and I bawled.

And when the tears subsided I realized that by choosing all this I was also choosing to finally have a voice. That instead of jabbing my finger into their chest and saying, "This is who you are because this is what you did to me" I was now free to stand up and speak my truth with confidence. Now I could say, "This is what happened. This is how your actions affected me. But that is not the whole of who you are."

"You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different." ~Secret Life Of Bees

Touche, indeed.