Before his current season of studenthood, N (my husband) was a community organizer. Part of his job was to meet with people one on one in the neighborhoods where he worked to determine what people’s self interests were. Organizing around what people already want is way, way easier (I didn’t say easy; I said easier) than running yourself into the ground trying to rally support for things people couldn’t care less about.

During those years of organizing, N and I had many conversations about self interest, and the ways it seemed to knock heads with the altruism pushed in the religious environments in which we moved. In those environments, self interest was often equated with selfishness, and was therefore something to try to tame and eventually, ideally, get rid of altogether. The goal was to have God’s interests at the helm (or, I suppose, have these genuinely become your own). How to define God’s interests was and is and ever shall be a whole nother truckload of worms.

The more we talked, though, and the more we lived and observed ourselves and those around us, the more we came to see self interest as not only the air we humans breathe, but actually something, when gotten conscious about, that’s healthy. Something we actually trust more than altruism to keep “good deeds” truly good. If I can be honest that I’m giving money to a beggar because I want to feel less guilty for the wealth I enjoy, and not because I actually care about this person in front of me, I have more options for figuring out whether I’m comfortable with not caring, and if I don’t care, why that might be, and if I do, whether tossing a few coins is really how I want to express that. Self interested good deeds with an altruistic veneer on top are a wonderful recipe for dehumanizing people, I think, for using them harmingly, and not actually helping in ways that are needed.

So I guess my first point is that I think all of us are self interested, and all (most? all sounds so extreme) of our good deeds are at their roots attempts at meeting our own iterests (for feeling important, establishing ourselves as nice or generous, not being lonely, staying out of trouble, not pissing someone off), and not only do I think that isn’t bad, but I think it’s good, and that getting conscious of what we’re actually wanting is the best way to avoid hurting people, and even the best way to actually help people. If I know what my self interests are and try to understand what yours are, we can negotiate a mutual sort of playing field where we both benefit. Mutuality seems like the safest place to be–no matter who in a pair has the most age or money or positional power–the best space for humanizing and protecting and truly serving everyone involved, not the least of which (and I mean that) is you or me.

Trying to empty ourselves of self interest seems to me to be the best way to nourish blind spots, and the best way to push our truest needs and motivations underground where they have no choice but to express themselves subconsciously, which is to say in ways we aren’t choosing, which is to say in ways we can’t evaluate with our conscious minds and values. I’m guessing some of the darkest things in our world, some of the ugliest abuses, could have been avoided were people free to acknowledge their self interests (sexual, emotional, vocational, intellectual) and find conscious and healthy ways of meeting them in mutual sorts of exchange.

The second point I want to make is that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. I’m thinking here about people we really care about, specifically. Because those are the ones we can get caught in cycles with, cycles of being so driven by our need to make them like us, or be happy with us, or prop up their egos so they don’t pout or get mad, that we lose sight of our other needs, which include honoring and listening to our own selves. It is a painful lesson to learn that people in our lives cannot be everything we want them to be (can’t meet all the needs we thought they could or should); it is a freeing lesson, though not always painless, to learn that when we can’t be what others want us to be, that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. (Can you tell this is a pep talk aimed at me?)

But what do you all think of self interest? Does true altruism exist? What are ways that religion/spirituality can free us toward humanizing involvement with the needs around us, and not something that only masquerades as such?

During the season that was the epicenter of my internal shifting–the religious and worldview-shifting I’ve begun talking more about here–I was in a state of constant dissonance. The worst of it lasted about three years, I think. It was dissonance between the me of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, and the me that was newly getting born. The two felt like totally different people, not the natural unfolding or growth of one, and when I finally found myself on the other side of the storm (abyss?), I felt like I had amnesia. It felt like my life before age 25 was mostly blank, and the people who had known me before that point were vestiges of some other lifetime, their attempts at interacting in the present with the me of my past things I watched as a third-party observer. “Now, I know I used to know how to answer this sort of question,” I would think to myself, “but I can’t for the life of me remember now.” I would hear people using my dialect of Christianese, and recognize it, but not have words to answer back. Sometimes I wouldn’t even understand anymore what the words meant at all.

The last five years (I’m 30 now) have been a lot about exploring the world anew–a world far more vast and full of Life and Light and Wisdom than it used to appear to me to be–and about building a new sense of self and identity. They’ve been about releasing the “I’m not this” way of defining myself that was so much a part of that tumultuous season of change, and trying to figure out who and what I actually *am*.

Which brings me to the point I’m really wanting to make, which is that I think even those of us who experience things that shake our worlds to pieces–deaths or illness or break-ups or life just going radically different than we ever wished or imagined it would go–even those who experience such things carry inside of them the worlds and identities that they used to inhabit. There aren’t two of each of us, or four or sixteen or a hundred (however many life-altering experiences we have); there is just one.

I think one of the most difficult parts of healing (or growing up, for that matter), the thing that takes the longest time beyond trust, is the process of integration, the process of finally sitting in the presence of all our former selves, and being able to say, “Hello, dear friends. You are all me.” Being able to recognize them as part of who we currently are, and have gentleness and acceptance, rather than shame or repulsion or feelings of alientation from the ones that embody such different values or drives or assumptions than we feel like we have now.

I’m in an integration phase of life right now, trying to learn how to hold in tension the me’s of all of my years. Trying to find ways to tell a Story about myself that holds all of these stories, that gives them all the sense that they’re Home.

For all the intensity of that last post, and the shards and threads bit at the end, I’ve traveled quite a ways from the center of that darkness. I’ve traveled to a land of much happiness, actually. If you’ve read here for any length of time, you know this. And this is precisely what I want to talk about today: the strangeness of healing.

What I find strange is the way that inner healing doesn’t happen all at once, all in one big chunk like the healing of physical wounds often appears to do. Last summer I cut my finger badly, and all year long I’ve watched that cut heal, first scabbing over, then releasing the scab, then becoming a dark red line that slowly faded to the color of the rest of the my skin. It’s appeared as a seemless progression.

Inner healing, though, seems different. Maybe there’s ways that it’s not, but at least as I’ve observed it, it feels like it comes in spurts. Or, maybe more accurately, like all the stages of the healing process stay inside of us, even when externally we’re living the scab stage, or just the fading scar stage, or the not even remembering we got hurt in the first place stage. The stage of open wound, or initial shock, or the early days of throbbing, mind-numbing pain–those stages mercifully don’t stay on the surface forever, but I think they live somewhere inside of us for good. And I really mean that–for good. Unless we could erase our memories permanently, I don’t see how they couldn’t.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to make peace with this year, or maybe the last few: that no matter how happy I feel, how healed and whole and glad for where I am and where it looks like I’m going, there will be times, even seasons, when those other stages of healing or woundedness will surface. It’s just part of how things go. Eventually I might not be surprised by this, and maybe after that, not annoyed. But regardless of how I feel about it, I think that’s how things go.

Some people think of the healing process like a spiraling staircase, where you simultaneously make progress upward or outward from the center of your pain while returning to the various stages of healing repeatedly, as the circle brings you round and round. And I think this metaphor works. I’m wondering, though, whether even that’s more linear than how we experience the process, and whether something else could help more with finding meaning in the midst of the yuck that resurfaces, in the midst of the WTF?! feeling you get when something you thought you were done with shows up again.

So here’s what I wonder: What if healing is like a magicians hat? What if deep in the darkest places of ourselves, at the very bottom of our hearts, all the pain of our wounds and our losses resides, the pain and the various stages of healing, the memories. And what if those things are not monsters, are not snakes or bears or lions trying to tear us apart or things we must cage or silence or muzzle, but doves. What if they’re doves that are ready, sometimes, to be released, ready to come to us as symbols of peace, maybe actual evidence of our movement toward that peace, and the process of putting our hands in our hats and finding them is not evidence of being stuck at all, not evidence of being permanently broken or weirdly addicted to pain, but rather evidence that more peace than we’ve known so far is on its way. And that the pain that is surfacing is not there to stay, but rather wants to fly away, out from our darkness toward light.

This, to me, is the realest, most wonderful kind of magic. This is the stuff that makes my heart sing, and my fists relax in a month when the bottom of my hat has been teeming with eager, bustling life.

Humor me for a second. Before I tell you what this post is about, I’m wondering if you can think of something you believe all the way to your toes. Like something really important. Maybe that your family loves you, or people are fundamentally good, or we’re living in the midst of unprecedented social change. That God exists. Think of whatever it is, whatever thing that you almost don’t need to talk about you know it’s so true, but maybe simultaneously can’t help talking or thinking or writing or preaching about. Just picture it. Hold it here for a second.

Now. Picture someone giving you the irrefutable news that that thing is not true.

I think of John Nash in Beautiful Mind in that scene where he’s been hospitalized and the doctor is talking to his wife about what it must be like to learn and comprehend that you’re schizophrenic, that those people in your life who are real like yourself, real like the ground beneath your feet or the sound of your own mother calling you by name—those people don’t exist. No one else sees them. Only you. What can you trust anymore, if this fundamental thing, this thing that helps you make sense of the world, or your life, or your work or marriage: when this bedrock thing itself can’t be trusted? I imagine very little.

Or rather, I don’t have to imagine. This was the experience of my early 20s. No, not being institutionalized for schizophrenia. Mine was the experience of pulling a thread, a little snag of something in my religious worldview, and watching the whole thing unravel, row after row, until much like that lamp I wrote about last time, only piles were strewn all around, wiggly threads freed from the straight lines and geometric shapes they had made only moments before. My world was pulled apart, and it confounded me that life itself kept on going, kept on turning like the earth was still in orbit, like the sun hadn’t just exploded and every means I knew of sustaining life and hope and meaning hadn’t just flung off into space along with it.

Not everyone loses something so important. Just like not everyone has a lover cheat on them, or a child die. Not everyone has awful memories surface, or gets a terrible disease.

But many of us do. And I guess I want to say a word, or a few, for how long it takes to recover from these kinds of losses. How working through the shock and the anger and the numbness and the disorienting, debilitating pain can take years, decades even. How learning to trust again—anything, let alone what’s associated with the thing that was taken away—often can’t happen in strides, but comes, if at all sometimes, in tiny little breaths, tiny centipede steps sometimes, and that anyone who tries to force it on us faster can make it come more slowly.

It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime, to trust again. A long time to honor the thing that was lost. And I think it takes a longer time yet to have eyes to see the things that weren’t lost, things that maybe just got hidden behind what was. To grow a stomach that can actually be filled on these things, a tongue that can taste their sweetness, even when the lost things still remain lost.

I’m standing among shards and threads of many colors, weaving back together my insides, my heart, even as I weave and build and search and find a life that has meaning, that once again feels filled up with God.

At the vertex of our couches sits a table, and on that table a lamp with a bead-fringed shade. The noteworthy thing, the thing that to this day confounds me, is the utter magnetism of that fringe. We cannot sit near it without touching those beads, handling them, spinning the whole shade so the row of them tap tap tap taps along our fingertips.

Needless to say, our baby likes them, too.

The problem for the baby is that we don’t want him grabbing the shade and pulling the whole lamp down. We’d prefer the toy upright (the shade spins better that way). This means he is left to reeaaachhh as far as he can from the arms of the couches toward those beads, only to brush them barely with a fingertip, maybe two, before switching hands and reeeeaaaaching as far as he can with the other hand in hopes of a better angle. If ever he actually grabs hold, one of us immediately loosens his grip and he has to start reaching again.

This is exactly how I felt for a long time with God.

While God hasn’t been a lampshade so much, a certain version of God has had the same draw. It’s the version you hear about sometimes at church—the one people sing about and give testimonials describing. The one in certain Bible stories. It’s a he, usually, and a lot like a person. Only more…spiritual. Super powerful. Super interested in all the details. He knows everything and loves everything…except sin, but even that he takes care of…and he wants people asking him for things, in fact likes this, because he loves giving people what they need and then some. Ask and it shall be given to you. If you worship him and honor him and listen for him and believe that Jesus takes totally care of sin, you’ll hear him (he’ll speak to you), and you’ll see him (he’ll do things obviously in your life), and you’ll feel how much he loves you, which is so much it’s almost funny. He’s like the dad and brother and friend and every once in a while mother you could only ever dream of having, all rolled into one.

I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s a lot of pull in that. I suppose there’s wistfulness, too, for a bit more privacy maybe, a day off from such unrelenting observation. But by and large it sounds nice. A lamp totally worth pursuing. Which is what I did.

I reeeeaaaached with all the Bible reading I could muster. I reeeeeaaaached with prayers and weekly fasts. I leaned over every armrest I could find, nearly to my detriment, joining prayer teams, planning study groups, doing missions (even in Africa!), leading worship, running kids clubs, running period (the body is God’s temple), moving to the inner city, earning seminary degrees, teaching Bible classes, ET AL, in hopes of catching the prize: Union. Oh, the thought! Handfuls, fistfuls, even mouthfuls of God! (If the baby had access, I’m sure the entire shade would be in his mouth.)

In all honesty, the longer I live the more it looks like that’s actually what I got. Or rather, never didn’t have, since God seems suspiciously inseparable from everything there is.

But defined a certain way, that prize was always just beyond my reach. It was visible, and that’s what was so maddening, luminous, even, in the light of so many songs and scriptures and heartfelt testimonials, but always either further than my fingertips, or taken from my hand the second I thought I took hold. This God, dear girl? This magnet planted smack in the middle of our living space? It’s only to look at. Because honey, if you do much more than that, the thing could fall down.

I’m here to say you were right (you being a voice I made up). It could and, well…did fall down. I got big enough and strong enough and finally grabbed that fringe tight fisted, and one excruciating, deafening crash later, I was lying, quite stunned, on my back among shards.

There’s a legend in Jewish lore about a universe preceding ours, one so filled up with God that it broke into gazillion pieces. POW! So filled, in fact, that the light itself broke apart. Now each of us is, or at the very least has within, a piece of that light, and lives among the mingling of broken universe and broken light. It is our world, and our God, we’re commissioned to mend.

Here’s what I wonder: I wonder whether that lamp I so tenaciously reached for, the one that seemed so totally whole and so totally desirable for so long, was already broken to begin with, already part of this universe we’ve inherited that needs mending. I wonder whether knocking it over was the only way I could ever come to know obviously what that lamp already was: shards of God-light and broken stuff mixed.

I can’t put that lamp back together (believe me, I’ve tried). I can’t have the God I thought I wanted. But what I can do is handle the pieces now, freely. There’s no danger of anything breaking. Those beautiful beads aren’t attached to a form anymore, aren’t set just so to catch light. But I’m thinking many of them actually are Light, or flecks of it, and I’m willing to spend a lifetime with so many others, picking through pieces not just of that lamp, but of our world, finding and being and putting back together God.

Since I’m sure you want an update on these mites, we think no new ones are coming into the house, so all we have to do is wait the 3-4 weeks it takes for the ones that already made it inside to die off. I only look like I have a mild case of chickenpocks this time, as opposed to severe, so I’m happy.

But enough on that topic!

Today I want to talk about being alive. I asked N the other day who the most alive person he knows is, and we ended up having a great conversation exploring what that means. Who is the most alive person you know? What makes you think of them that way?

It seems like there are different ways to understand alive. Maybe one is about the opposite of being numb. People who are always trying to be as present as they can be to what they experience, to what they feel, to who they are. Who don’t seem like they’re running from something. People who don’t want to ignore the daily news and are uncomfortable with the way it’s impossible not to sometimes. People who feel joy and sorrow and anger and fear and peace and worry and everything else. People who aren’t numb. People alive this way aren’t always having fun, but I think they’re not always tormented, either. They probably have the greatest capacity for joy.

Another way to think about alive could be people who have an enlivening hope. Something their bodies or minds or souls are yearning toward and working toward and feeling glad about. People connected with a sense of mission, a reason for being alive, a fire in their bellies, whether that be for connecting with another person, winning a medal, making some discovery, landing a dream job. Knowing God, even, or trying to make the world a better place. Aliveness in this sense is about the hope, rather than duty or the desire to avoid something negative. By and large, I think people alive in this way like to get up in the morning.

But what do you think? Are there other ways of looking at this? Like what does it look like for parents of collicy newborns to be alive? People with chronic pain? With significant losses? Is the greatest potential for aliveness somewhere inbetween the extremes of tranquility and suffering, or can it reach to these extremes, too?

Yesterday was a really hard day.  I don’t feel like talking about it here, or showing you what my eyes looked like when I got up this morning.  But I will tell you about a surprise I woke up to.

The mites are back.

(post title courtesy Judy, via Fran)

The first year of parenting can be full of insecurity.  So many millions and billions of people have done this thing, this raising children thing, that it’s easy to feel like everyone else knows something you don’t, some secret code for doing the right thing.  Like when your baby trucks along on a given schedule, for example, and then up and changes it on you.  Or when the baby next door is doing one thing, but the baby in your lap can’t do that thing, has never remotely come close to doing it.  Or vice versa.  I’m sure the same goes for teenaged babies, too.  Probably all ages.

So when you come across other parents who feel the same way you do, the same kind of insecurity, or even if they’re not insecure, are just facing the same sorts of things you are, there’s a kind of peace in that, a kind of grounding, where you realize this club in which you thought you were only faking membership?  You aren’t faking it.  Nobody really knows what they’re doing.  And even if they feel like they do, their baby is not yours, so what works perfectly for theirs probably isn’t fair to impose on your kid, in your situation.

I was driving home from the library today, feeling bummed about not getting more accomplished on my book, when the thought occured to me that as much diversity as exists among infants, like, say, at what month they grow teeth, or when they learn to speak or crawl–all that diversity that pediatricians are constantly telling new parents is normal, only grows exponentially with time.  The nurture side of the nature-nurture equation gets more and more diverse, and with it our genetic responses to it.

So it only makes sense to relax a little more into being who each of us is, parenting our own selves like we ideally would offspring:  accepting that we are who we are, not the kid next door, not that other writer or teacher or parent or pastor, not that person we’ve always assumed we would or wouldn’t be.  We are us.  And that’s entirely normal.  Normal for what it means to be human.  Our stage of development, regardless of anyone else’s, is the only place we can be.