A couple of weeks ago I watched Phantom of the Opera (the movie) for the first time.  I have no idea how it compares with the stage production, but as it was, I really enjoyed it.  Since watching it I’ve thought a lot about the ways the show depicts so much inside all of us.  So much inside of me.

The scene in the dressing room where Christine meets Raoul for the first time since childhood, though – that was hard for me to watch.  Not the part with Raoul, but the part after Raoul leaves, where the Phantom gets jealous and possessive and Christine says to him (he’s still speaking to her from hiding), “Angel, I hear you.  Speak, I listen.  Stay by my side, guide me.  Angel, my soul was weak, forgive me.  Enter at last, Master!”  Oh, that was hard to watch.  Hard to hear her desperate pleading, offered to the tyrant she mistook for a god.

It was hard to watch because that was me in that scene. 

I have phantoms, too.  Things that pose for a long time as promise – promise of safety, of popularity, of being in on some insiders’ game – but that ultimately reveal themselves as threat.  The hardest part about that dressing room scene was the way it reminded me of the phantom I mistook for God for so many years.  A God who really seemed to talk to me, coach me, comfort me, stay faithfully by my side.  But who had a really awful flip side, too.  One that was gamy, pouty, insecure, demanding, self-centered.  One that would intentionally cause me harm in order to make me a better person.  One that would objectify me in order to get his own agenda accomplished, and be glad when I bowed my head and broke my will and silenced my voice in order to make that possible. 

He wasn’t all bad.  No – if he were, he wouldn’t have had such power over me.  Christine wouldn’t have been mesmerized by her Phantom if he had shown his cards too blatantly or soon. 

But he wasn’t an angel.  No.  Most definitely not.

I think phantoms come in many forms.  I think they can be blogs.  I think they can be self-talk.  I think they can be clubs or churches or jobs or people.  Alcohol, even.  Pornography.  Anything that’s magic for us, pulling us in with a sense of promise, making us lose ourselves and our better judgment in a swirl of assurances of wished-for things…or warnings of all that would be lost without them.  Our phantoms do all this, but simultaneously seep poison into us.  Jail us.  Demonstrate themselves to be dictators, twisted and jealous lovers.

I want to be free of my phantoms – the ones posing as God and otherwise.  I want to cultivate my inner Raouls, and friendships with outer ones, cause Lord knows I can’t get free on my own.  Lord knows the second our phantoms whisper in our ears, we’re melting again, swooning again, relocking our handcuffs willingly.  “Don’t leave me,” we say to our offended kings.  “I’m sorry I thought about freedom.”

In my moments of clarity, I say no to all that.  I say no to captivity and darkness.  No to un-gods.  And I sing a massive, operatic YES to freedom.  This kind of move may not let me live anymore in the magic of a personal “angel,” like Christine long thought she had.  I may no longer sing the songs that such “angels” can inspire.  And I grieve both losses.

At the same time, though, I think life outside the caves, outside the haunted opera house, is magic enough for me right now, and is full of hope and love and light around so many turns.  This makes me so happy.  This truly makes me want to sing.

"Thomas Merton once said that the spiritual life is essentially to love.  One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone.  If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we are seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons.  This has nothing to do with love.  To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God."    ~ Paulo Coelho

To me, this sparkles.  I don’t think I agree with it on every level, or in every circumstance, but I think it’s a really important alternative and challenge to the ways love often gets defined.  Historically, so many of my good deeds have been far more about my own needs to be loved and admired, or at least liked and approved of, than about actually loving people.  Their quality has been just so different from the quality of actions rooted in the communion Coelho speaks of.  Actions that flow from such communion often have the warmth and gladness, for me, of what it feels like to be in love, no matter what age or gender or relation to me the beloved happens to be.

My husband is reading a book called Chimpanzee Politics, in which a scientist documents 6 years of observing power dynamics and pecking orders among colonies of chimpanzees.  Fascinating stuff.  Apparently the author notes that those who study chimps long enough often face destabilizing questions.  Chimps are so much like humans that they force you to wonder just how fair it is to classify them as animals and us as, well, not animals - different, civilized.  When questions like this are asked, worldviews and self-definitions get wobbly.

We were talking about this this morning, wondering whether it might be true that no matter what you study, if you study it long enough, and with enough openness to the broader implications of your discoveries, you will inevitably face a crisis.  Or many of them.  Sure, crises come to varying degrees, and with varying amounts of pain and disruption.  But the thought is that they come.  They happen.  My crises came initially with impassioned study of religion.  But scientists face them, too.  Physicists.  Mathematicians.  Psychologists.  Anthropologists.  Even Joe Bloe, diving deeper into self-knowledge.  Study anything deeply enough, and with that openness to broader implications, and WHAMMO!  Worlds collide.

The thought strikes me oddly today.  Makes me feel funny.  Like all of us go about our lives, creating through that complex mix of genes and experiences a sense for who we are, how the world works, how the parts fit together, why things are the way they are and do what they do.  We create extensive webs of things to take for granted.  But in the process we’re all of us, far more than likely, really, really wrong about a lot of it.  Maybe most of it.  But we don’t know it.  And in fact we need to not know it in order to feel…normal.  Stable.  Like we’re not walking around in some science fiction novel where appearances are or aren’t what they appear to be.  Talk to anyone in crisis and you’ll get a sense for how wobbly and fluid their world has become.

Despite all the crises I’ve faced in recent years, or maybe because of them, I think I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad my web of things to take for granted is getting put back together, and I don’t even care that despite my best efforts, big chunks of it are inevitably going to be wrong.  I need it.  I need a web.  I need something to hold me up in this crazy world of relative space and time.

There is much to mourn in this world, much that deserves seriousness.  But you know, I think the opposite is true, too.  Like this, for example.  I love it.

The book meme that’s been traveling the blogosphere recently knocked on my door (via Bobbie).  Shall I be a good sport and open up?

1.      Total number of books I own

Maybe hundreds?  Those who have helped us move the last three times, or rather their backs, are probably the ones with the most accurate count.

2.      The last book I bought

Just bought four at once last month, used:  Rachel Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings and Kitchen Table Wisdom, and Paulo Coelho’s By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Pilgrimage

3.      The last book I read

Hmmm… This is a hard one, because…I have a confession to make:  I finish very few books.  Even ones I really, really like.  Come look at the books in my boxes and on my shelves and you’ll find a very large number with little bookmarks still in them.  My husband still gets on my case for the time I read all the way to the last four pages of Crime and Punishment and then didn’t pick the book up to finish it for at least another year.  Surely some psychoanalyst could have a heyday with this habit.

But…let’s see.  I read most of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last month.  I read three quarters of the way through Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections not long before that.  I read big chunks of about 20 books on ritual in May.  Many of those were really good – books on what rituals are, why rituals are important things, examples of rituals that individuals and families have created to honor different occasions in their lives.  One called Rituals for our Times was one of my favorites. 

Is that enough?  I could go on…

4.      Five books that mean a lot to me (and I have finished every one of these!)

Shusaku Endo’s Deep River

Richar Rohr’s Everything Belongs

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter

5.      Two major books I read when I was a kid

L. M. Montgomery was a real favorite.  And Louisa May Alcott.  Oh, was the question books?  I thought you said authors.  Hmmm…the Bible?  That’s a major one.  I remember really liking Charlotte’s Web, and Heidi and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.