A fear, anger, healing quilt

Fear

Yesterday I sang "He Shall Feed His Flock" in church. Singing's a spiritual discipline for me even when I'm singing music not considered "sacred." But I mention this song since I feel as though I've been living it recently. I have been gently led, even though sleep deprivation has made me alternatively paranoid, testy, grouchy, dim, anxious, and yes, grateful, desirous of improvement, and forgiving. This is a long-winded way to get into the insights that have woken me up tonight, but it seems relevant.

I realized a few days ago that I have been going for hours at a time without being afraid. That recognition stunned me. Life without fear was always something to be prayed for, but I hadn't really experienced it for more than a few minutes, maybe, in my whole life since I was 4 or 5. I liked to read about how "perfect love casts out fear," but it had seemed like an abstraction, one of those overly-holy notions religious people use to try to get you to shut up about your problems already. Only in the past few years have I considered how that phrase -"perfect love casts out fear"- could be descriptive. How would that work?

Well, the other day, as I mentioned, I was stunned to find myself not freaking out under the surface, not nervously scratching my leg, not anxiously waiting for the other shoe to fall, not racing my heartbeat to find a justification for my pathetic existence, not cataloging the character flaws that made it inevitable that I would soon and swiftly be cast out of society, and not entertaining any other paranoias. Wow, I know I sound like a basket case from that description, but I'm just trying to name all the little fears that usually plague people in small ways, killing their love and confidence and courage by a thousand nicks. What came to mind when I recognized that in fact I felt warm, and loved, and happy, and really free and full of love for others, was that here was my answer to how love worked to cast out fear.

I realized that I had been starving for so much of my life that every powerful emotion looked like food, even if it was poison. (Well, not every, because I'm not a moron after all, and I could plainly see that a lot of stuff would be bad for me, and thus avoided those obvious things). That's how the fathers described the disordered soul, in analogy with a sick person who is so hungry that he will eat poison just to try to assuage his hunger. I came to that recognition from the other side of it. God filled me with good things until I didn't like the rush and power trips that fear could give. They tasted like the nasty aftertaste of partially hydrogenated soybean oil, guar gum, mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 60, high fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate, modified corn starch, and their pervy industrial friends, whereas love was butter and eggs and wheat, oatmeal and maple syrup, beans cooked with ham hock and salt, salads made with vegetables from the backyard, dressed with real olive oil- real foods that meant something and satisfied and that my body understood. The metallic taste of misplaced fear was gone, and I started really meaning it when I prayed at Compline each night, "You have put gladness in my heart, more than when grain and wine and oil increase." A mouth full of laughter disdains the taste of fear.

Anger

Fast forward to tonight, when I woke up and felt a closed feeling in my soul. Wasn't there something on my to-do list with God? Oh, yeah. I've been meaning to make an appointment to go to confession - Reconciliation of the penitent, as we Piscers call it. I haven't been to confession before because, while I believe in the principle of formal confession being good medicine for the soul, I've just been Protestant for so long that it has taken me awhile to feel I had enough of a whopper to go through all the trouble. I'm totally into confessing sins, but I feel fine confessing to Andrew or another good friend. (Most days we confess our sins to each other before Compline, so there's not a big tally going from day to day). I decided a couple of years ago to make a life confession of sins, as a spiritual discipline. But my memory is too good, so I quickly deemed that idea impractical. Like, am I going to call up a priest and ask, "Do you have a few hours? I want to make a life confession. I have a list. But it only fills one flash drive. You have a computer, right?" Then I thought, screw that idea. I've already confessed 99.9% of my sins along the way, anyway, and been healed from most of what plagued me years ago. So why don't I just go through and find the big sins, and confess those. If it was blasphemy, I decided I'd go ahead and formally confess it even if I had Protestantly repented of it a long time ago, even with prayer and fasting. So I started praying and thinking and reflecting. Almost at once a huge problem arose. I was abused by several different adults as a small child and throughout my childhood, in many ways - emotionally (cusses, yells, name-callings, mental torment, threats of violence), physically (beatings, unfit punishments like scrubbing out smelly trashcans if a bag broke), and sexually (molestation, threats of sexual violence, exposure to porn as a child, verbal degradation of sexuality). Those things weren't my fault and weren't my sins, but I felt like there was something about them that I needed to confess to be really free of them. What could it be? The feelings of shame that were hard to shake in earlier periods of my life could be considered the sin of despairing of God's mercy. But that wasn't terribly convincing to me, because I knew I wasn't carrying that load anymore.

Finally, I stumbled on a good solid sin I could confess in relation to being abused: hatred of those who abused me. I mean the sort of hatred that I only felt safe dreaming about, where I thought how satisfying it would be to take a knife to the perverts who molested me. I mean, if you want to feel righteous anger, pedophiles are pretty defenseless against it. I would sometimes have rage fantasies about killing them a lot and then killing them some more. That was surely a sin, being that pissed off at someone, so angry that I would, in my heart though not in action, run them down with a Chevy and back up and do it again, then get out and kick them and kill them some more. Surely this was what Jesus meant by anger being like murdering someone in your heart. Well, so. I put that one on the list.

But once I noticed the sin, I repented of it every day. I got to the point where I realized that if I believed grace was real, I would have to claim God's mercy for the people who hurt me so badly. I took the anger and used it to write up a balance sheet- these people owed me big time - and I forgave the enormous (bigger than the national) debt. The rage fantasies ended, and I started trying to love those hateful assholes (though I will never trust them, obviously), owing to Jesus loves me. I even got to the point where I could think of them as just broken, not "hateful assholes" but really broken creatures who were misdirecting the gift of blessing by cursing instead. So my pencilled in list started changing. Sure, I could still confess to having once wanted to repeatedly murder the people who abused me, but it was no longer the prime real estate sin. Neither was hating them, because I usually don't hate those people anymore. I almost always love them now. Still on the list, though.

I moved on to anger. I was no longer raging, but I was still pretty angry at the characters who treated me like crap. Especially my relatives who hadn't changed (who had in some ways gotten worse). A couple of months ago, I settled on going to confession with this list (you know, you have to pad out these things so it shows you made an effort): blasphemy/idolatry (long past), murderous raging anger (past), ongoing anger at my relatives for abusing me. Well, crap. If you keep at something, are you really contrite? Have you really repented?

I set out to understand the anatomy of my anger. I prayed and waited. Then tonight happened. I woke up, and I suddenly understood: when you are angry at someone, you carry the weight of both your sin and the other person's. It's a burden too great to bear, even for any human, except the one who was also God. Anger is a double sin. (I'm talking about sustained anger here, not the fleeting emotion that can be usefully directed in the moment). It's so liberating to see this. Anger is an ant carrying a turtle on its back because the turtle ate his brother. It's the kite tied to the limb that tore its tail. It's a child shaking under the strain of trying to carry her mother's sins. And now I'm free.

I'll go to confession* and feel it like a balm softening the skin grown over what might have been mortal wounds.

Finally, as I thought of these things, I saw a picture in my mind of the old great grandmother God, the soft strong hands taking the shreds of our fragmented lives and quilting them into a beautiful wedding garment. A coat of many colors for a well-loved child. A wholeness and a place to be one.


*(when I get around to it, because I have a baby and want to go to a priest outside my local parish)