Catching Myself in a Lie

Drama exhausts me.

Particularly my own.

Particularly when I catch myself in a half-truth or even a lie.

“How is that possible?” you ask, “to catch oneself in a lie?” Let’s find out.

Not surprisingly, Ed Sullivan’s been on my mind a lot this week. Without getting creepy, it is a bit like a presence has returned to my life, my mind, with some compelling sense about it. I don’t mean by this that some figment of my experience has returned from the grave or is haunting me or even is. I simply mean a renewed awareness of him and our short time of listening together.

This renewed awareness has several components to it. I feel a new need to honor the integrity of who we were in some new fashion. I’ve ordered an Easter lily for my congregation’s celebration of Easter morning this year, “in memoriam, Ed “Sully” Sullivan of Newtown, PA.” I have a faint whisper within me of the intensity of devotion I felt for him, though only at a minute portion compared to the experience then. He feels like a companion as I mean it today, before I knew how I would mean the word ‘companion.’ Perhaps the newest thing is seeing him as one of the teachers of this path, a teacher I’d not recognized as such a teacher.

The rude awakening for me in all this was catching myself misremembering about the ring. As I read my journal from 1998 last week, my own script, I was sensately surprised to be reminded of a connection between the anam cara ring and him. But it was reminded, because I had described the ring in its origin just this past December, in a particularly intense experience of “letting the ring go” to receive all. My experience of last week, though, did not begin with or include such a memory. My experience of last week felt like an awakening to Ed as a companion I had never felt as a companion. Reading the connection between him and the ring felt like a totally new association. The piece of "rendering incarnation" did open with a sense of being confused again, for the first time. Not inaccurate here either. How could I have been clearly reminded of something about which I, at the time, had no recollection? Am I losing my bloomin’ mind? As I compiled the blog-record for back-up’s sake last night, this discovery felt really uncomfortable. It seemed like I had written falsely, been caught in a lie. To myself.

Anything from this point on becomes rationalization or justification, of course, but I really am curious. How could I have un-remembered something that was so intense just this past December? Or perhaps a better question, what might it mean, this divergence of memory in a creative act of forgetting?

My sensitive, raw places always beckon first. “It’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Lisa.” I hear in my head. My husband and I live within a community whose median age is 71, so that one’s received easily from my context. Then there’s the constant quest for some dramatic narrative in which to be a part. This is the drama of myself that wears me out. I steward it fairly well most days, which means watching its bemusing twists and turns of egoic flailing. But on days like this—in misremembered discrepancies like this—this aspect of who I am wears me out. Where is the off-switch, I whine next, making a drama out of the drama.

With a bit of remove, offered by writing’s balm, I do find myself a bit fascinated by the role such discrepancy ultimately played in this intense “re-encounter” of sorts with Ed. “Insight” is not unlike a drug or adrenaline for an academic, after all. To realize something you had not seen before is what we live for. As you can imagine, this gets harder and less frequent the longer you stay with the same subject, discipline, inquiry. The old joke goes: academics are those who learn more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing. To re-encounter what you are learning with the surprise and felt-devotion with which you began becomes more and more impossible.  This is a particular bind in theology, when one gets accustomed to handling holy things (to cite a friend, Clift Black). If you truck in the Holy all the time, how do you avoid the boredom of familiarity?

I don’t think that’s “what happened” here, but it does offer some food for thought in what did happen. At root, part of me knew very well that the ring’s associations originated with Ed Sullivan and so its meaning would be intertwined with him from the start. In my strange experience of reading an old journal from 1998, I misremembered that association amidst receiving important words I needed to hear for just such a week, a next step along the path. Another part of me arguably hid that recollection within a creative act of forgetting. I had never understood him to be a companion like I mean the word today—a fellow-traveler on paths of Spirit, tinged with devotion in both inward and outward dimensions—and now I do.

The distance of years makes this rediscovery inordinately compelling. I’m bemused that a Hospice patient with whom I visited nearly fifteen years ago could still instigate a renewed and renewing path of awakening in me this year, this week. I’m reminded of how fragile each of us is as we yearn to contribute to the world around us in small and large ways, even as we are so very small, regularly inconsistent, even incoherent at times. It’s amazing we do as well as we do, I think. Mostly, I’m relieved to have this off my chest in some way, as Holy Week beckons and I listen for how to be faithful in the days to come. In such listening, at least for me, do I find rest for my soul, release from my labors, a balm for the weariness in me…most acutely from my own internal drama!