Good to Be at Church? It's Been a While...

[Another segment exploring my very first Artist's Way journals from 1999, listening in for what I hear today...]

Good morning all. … I am...I don’t know. Sad? Unsettled, afraid perhaps? A little lonely, I think, after such days substantially alone. I am feeling distant from myself too, let alone God. It’s Ash Wednesday and it’ll be good to be at church. And with choir friends. I’m living in fear again, more vividly and unpredictably. … I just don’t know how to do my dissertation work without it taking over my life. … The twins arriving soon will be quite a task as well. Come July, wow. 

There are lots of things that drew me into this particular entry of 1999. [edited summary below] The strongest eye-brow response, however, was the realization of Ash Wednesday 1999 and “It’ll be good to be at church. And with choir friends.” This touches some of the energies that have driven this whole project’s beginnings, so I want to spend some time here. 

I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve said that first sentence--years, maybe? When was the last time it was good to be at church? I was in church on Ash Wednesday this past week, to sing an anthem and lead in the hymn-singing. I was asked, and I said yes. Was it good to be at church? Well, of a sort. It was worth doing, somehow. It wasn’t good as I used that word back in 1999, however.

Those words hearken me back to the days in which I still had choices to be in church...or not. They were days in which church was a safe haven for me, a community that held my life and desires for love. The choir, mostly, which became my primary social-web in these dissertation years of little classmate/grad school interactions. These were days of intellectual passions and explorations of anything that caught my heart-sense, with felt-holy invitation to something More that would make a difference. I had believable dreams of theology as a vehicle for transformation of the world. I had an all-in trust that while the church could be fragile and flawed--I wasn’t blind to that, ever--my sense of the Holy was untarnished and unbreakable. Wow do I miss those years, those words meaning that.

I did not know in 1999 that this goodness would never last, at least if I were honest and curious, which for me means true to whom I would become. My first ‘faith-fracture’ was serving as an intern at the battered-women’s shelter in Trenton, where I was broken open to see much more fully God’s utter lack of protection of vulnerable women and children. My bearing witness to this suffering, then my increasing outrage, split me down the middle. I remember the October evening I left the shelter, mostly home from the 25 minute drive back to my dorm, before I became aware I was crying. Something in me was completely disassociated from another part of me. Never before had I felt such anger...finally at God. And yet within months, I was companioned by elder-singers in the Touring Choir to name the anger, feel it whole and righteous, and eventually, to let it go into a broader living space for the Holy. Over a glass of chardonnay, at the outdoor tables in front of the Met, I was asked, “Do you think God’s not strong enough to withstand your anger?” I remembering laughing aloud. Something came back together in me, and I began to trust again...provisionally at first. Eventually, the Sacred Abundance was simply too obvious. I was back to all-in devotion. Healed fractures are stronger than the unbroken bone, so the saying goes. Scar tissue is thicker than unblemished skin. This journey then repeated itself over the years from then to about seven years ago--unbreakable trust and devotion, breaking open, then a return to a larger living space for the Holy.

Something is different in these years, and whatever it is has lasted for a much longer time. On the one hand, my current sense of the ‘larger living space for the Holy’ nearly blew my life out of the water it was in. These seven years have been stunning, enlivening, soul-opening, terrifying, demanding, utterly Holy and utterly shattering of that Holy. So it strikes me as strange, for instance, my use of the word God in this 1999 entry. I rarely use that word anymore, unless I’m holding space for someone else’s faith journey. I’m perfectly content and satisfied to be doing that holding-Work--it’s sacred, spacious, and creates more of me somehow. What we would name a ‘calling,’ in the Biz. But the Silent Treatment in me for ‘God’ remains true as well. ‘God’ is so silent today, even though theological-practice unto wisdom is loud and engaging. This basically means I don’t know of what or whom I would be speaking, were I to speak of ‘God.’ The word itself is too conflicted a symbol. The paradoxes to hold within it are too heavy for me to sustain. And trust me, I've done the research here. I've drunk this chalice to the very dregs.

On the one hand, I think I’m weary of being duped, again and again, with any sense of the Holy that will only need to be broken open again. What’s the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”? I don’t know what the count would be, but it doesn’t feel or look good for me, “Fool me 70 times 7? and shame on whom then?” I’m weary of trusting and then being duped again. This weariness lives alongside an overwhelming sense of the Holy, sometimes coming out as Rage, other times as the Silent Treatment. And the grammar there is intentional--is the referent of the predicate nominative the weariness or the Holy? I don’t know. I can’t tell if it’s the Rage that’s Holy, or the Rage erupts from a wound to be healed to re-welcome the Holy back into my spirit-spaces as intimate, as Friend.

Some part of me feels sorry for this younger me, even as I also envy her too. She has no idea the terrifying days of utter abandonment that are coming, or how horrified she’ll be to realize her family’s not the Cosby Show anymore, and the world creates so much more suffering than she could ever imagine. [To be fair, with an impish smile, my family’s not the actual reality of Bill Cosby in those days either, but still...]. I was emotionally and spiritually abandoned by my parents/family, my husband, my church, my colleagues--for growing beyond what they could consider (I see now). When I refused to carry her pain for her anymore, my birth-mother said plain to my face, “Well, you’re dead to me then.” My father stood by, unspeaking, when she said plain to my husband (in my absence), “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you divorced her...she’s grown so strange…” Part of me knows I have forgiven my family for these fragile-flaws when my path demanded more than they could give, but I will never forget them either. There are days when I envy that young self, who still believed her father and uncles were larger than life, her mother might be her best friend, and her theological work would change the world. 

But then I’m returned to a bit more realism, with the grief chasers I often refuse to swallow. The whole enterprise of ecclesiastical Christianity can smell rotten so many days of the week, from where I sit in academic isolation and attempted-loving pandemic support of a congregational pastor.

If I am not intentional about seeing the good, most of what I see is the political pettiness of folks, swamped in fear and reactivities of our day, and my husband’s inability to work enough hours to match his own obsessive sense of duty and obligation to ease their pain. The whole structure is set-up for all of us to look outside ourselves for what only the inner work each of us has to do can offer. They would rather believe he can ease their pain as religious services tendered for tithe. He would rather believe he can do that for them. Tending to his own pain is excruciating and too hard, most days. He thrives on duty and obligation, sugar and carbs to sweeten the deal. Of course, with intention and tenacity, I can see the shared journeying, the hopes shared in community, the good-intentions and good-hearts of people really doing the best they can do. But I so easily slip into judging the people who participate in such a community whose pace of transformation is achingly too slow for me. Particularly when my own pain or rage has been nicked by something. I’ll flame-throw the room with my rage, if in measured speech and surgical precision. None of this offers a pretty road for a seminary professor to be on, for herself, or her own loved calling of teaching/learning along others on the journey. Pointing out the hypocrisy of the church is like shooting fish in a barrel--it can be a good liberal party game, but it’s not that difficult or challenging. Even when it’s obviously true. None of us should stay there, in my view, including me.

So what is challenging, engaging, is staying with the tensions that won’t let me go anyway. Sitting with the feelings of being duped, for instance. It’s clearly an ego-oriented word, for one. Feelings of “should have known better” or “incompetence” come to the surface here. Why should I have known better? And I know I was not, am not, incompetent. Wildly successful, by most worldly terms. The natural-energetic counterpart to any act of trust must then be having that trust broken, in some way, intended or not. You do your best to be wise about it, of course. We try to discern who we will trust in our inner worlds, and we try to minimize the conscious damage as best we can. But trust means you will be disappointed. These words are the yin/yang of the whole of what is. Just as faith dances with doubt in order to breathe into life, trust always dances with betrayal. My grounded heart-sense of mind knows this… 

Or staying with the sense of envy then. Probably cliche to even go here, but I believe this is a generational thing for me, at the start. My older me yearns for the younger days back when… When intellectual passion could be met with books; when romance & sex seemed the end to all things loving; when the world looked and felt a little less daunting than it does right now… Back when… Then I wake myself up and shake my head. I am mis-remembering then how very challenging it was for me to find the resources that would nourish me, how I was really struggling while doing the very best I could do too. It wasn’t easier back then, it just feels like it from here. And I kicked ass to get here. I'm not only pleased about that, I'm damn proud (to teasingly quote my Grandmother, who thought 'proud' was a bad word). The younger me sits up, takes notice, and calls me out on it. Do what I did, ya weary lout! Get back in it if you want to live!!

Maybe a better question here is What does a full life require to be full...or what does it invite in fullness? What does refusing to trust look like, and can that life even be full? What is the life I really want?

Some words caught my attention this past week, or perhaps it was February 16th itself. When the snows are all gone and the ice has melted, you look down into the bottom of a well and witness a paradox: bright blue sky reflected on black water.

The secret of heaven is that I hide heaven in lowly sunken places where no one thinks to look.

Religion has never defiled Me. Technology does not annoy Me. … But the workings of deep, slow, and certain things...these I observe carefully and respond to adroitly. Their prayers are always heard.

There is no body, no leaf or bough or branch, no fallen sparrow or butterfly that passes unnoticed by Me. But all are embraced by Me, and reclaimed by Me, as a Loving Mother who forever knits the tissues of dying and decaying things into the bodies of living, breathing beings. I have been doing this forever. And so you must decide who you will trust. ...

Religion has never defiled Me…? Really? I remember gasping aloud, in denial and disbelief. This 'speaking' comes to a 'circle of friends' group called Way of the Rose, devoted to Our Lady, every 16th of the month. It's new every month, but a monthly oracular-feeling speaking is posted on the group Facebook page. Our Lady Speaks... Even allowing the stretches into mystery there, How can Our Lady say that?!? How is it that religion does not defile Her every week, even every day, in our world? And never? That’s a long time, with seemingly ample evidence to the contrary. Right? Has She not been present in Christian liturgy in my seminary today, for instance?!? She might as well be on the Moon... (smiling...giggling now...). Yes, the MOON.

I probably would have just let the words wash over me, but for the final sentence here: And so you must decide who you will trust… Notice now that the words are who you will trust, not whether?… Bob Dylan has a song that feels structured like this too. You’re Gonna Serve Somebody… It’s not like you can choose to serve, or not… It’s a question of whom...or what…

What am I trusting...? More than Her...? Can I trust Her? Do I trust Her, even provisionally?

I founder a bit here, not quite knowing how to proceed, or what else needs saying, except that's all I've got for now. No answer that feels honest. This is already longer than will be good for my small group tonight, but so much of it has been necessary. Maybe I’ll just lower the bar a bit, from my beginning. It’ll be good to be at church, I said, which meant one thing in 1999, though probably couldn’t mean the same thing to me in 2021. Not only am I different, the church is changing too, if at a slower pace.

How is it good today to be at church? (Again, note not if or could it be, but how?) I love to sing, and for that singing to be a valued contribution in my husband’s congregation today. It feels genuinely me, particularly as I change all the masculine pronouns that I feasibly can, and it allows me to be seen in something genuinely me as well as being supportive in Brian’s work. He can become vulnerable to congregational gossip and the pettiness of the disaffected if ‘his wife’ does not attend ‘their church.’ It is good to be finding my way to deeper transparency, which feels more honest to me, in these words, which often arise as I am sitting in a pew. It is good to see friends and colleagues of Brian, some of whom I even traveled to Israel with last February. In those small ways--which are not small from whence I come--I will say today, “It will be good to be at church."

* * * * * *

[Other things that caught my attention from my journal entry: I smile to realize I was already attuned to my ‘inner committee’ of voices, Good morning all. Julia Cameron’s work invites that awakening and a sense of how to honor each voice, if not be governed by the defeating ones for very long. “The twins arriving soon…” also caught my heart-strings, for a couple reasons. One, to be brought back to that time when my sister was pregnant with the twins, a variety of emotional currents there. But mostly, to feel the image colliding within me of Brian coming into my life within months, though I was not clear about any of that at the time of this writing. [Brian first met my sister after her Caesarean section surgery, when she was quite high on the drugs necessary. We’ve smiled about that over the years--not an ideal setting for first meetings, but in another sense, it may have been for the best. They are so very different, with little patience for one another. Or B has little patience for her, perhaps. Regardless...]. There’s something anticipatory and wondrous that rises in me, sitting with my 1999 lonely self, who is about to meet her life-partner (again, for the first time).]

Finding Annie (from 2015)

  

What does it take for a woman’s body to become her own?

A week before my 46th birthday,

I came a whisper’s distance from finding out,

from getting my first tattoo:

a tear on my left cheekbone,

another on my lower right cheek.

Two spots of aquamarine,

salt on blood, ink on skin,

signifying an entire lost world of feeling,

denied to women, denied to men.

 

On your face? my friend’s text read.

On your face?! erupted another,

in her body-wise ways.

ON YOUR FACE? shouted yet another,

stunned, seeing a gang-mark in the tears.

Murdered someone, have you? She teased.

Receiving someone, I tendered.

 

Long after I thought the discernment was over,

the discernment began,

welcoming a new force in my body

Adolescent Annie, driving my bodycar

without a license,

hands clenched at the wheel.

She wanted to be found,

Willing to mark my body with

permanent tears if necessary.

 

Because…

 

First, this body belonged to my mother,

whose lifework was to mother.

When I tried to grow up, leave home, she said

“How could you do this to me? You are dead to me.”

All chaste energies then belonged to my father.

“Faith has no feeling,” he said,

feeling his faith deeply in mine.

Then it belonged to my husband,

an ex-attorney finding his feeling life

connected to the church I had once served,

which he now calls his own.

 

My body has been this bridge to cross

for men and the women who love them

a safe emotional, erotic home

for the Seeking to find the Sacred.

 

Is it ever too late for a woman to learn

her own body is valued, beautiful

just as she is, holy created, holy enfleshed?

That she is not made “to be of good use?”

(thank you, Marge Piercy)

 

I felt a difference, began to receive

my own body as mine when mirrored

in the faces of women who loved me.

My face somehow mixed with their faces,

Seeing for the first time their shock, their sadness,

at permanent tears, etched in skin in blood.

I never want to mark their faces with tears.

What urged me to mark my own?

 

I'm glad Annie arose in her wordless way,

claiming this body as her own

as I am willing to enter into its mysteries,

receive its beauty and value,

know at the deepest core of who I am:

Our flesh is sacred, sparked with the Divine

through and through.

 

I think it takes a mark of welcomed need,

a gentle touch of women’s care, fierceness

finding a home in the heart, through the soul,

held in the faces and spaces of women.

No tattoos are necessary here

for the bodyheart to open, need and allow.

 

Annie is finally home, fully licensed,

slowly accepting that we don’t need a tattoo.

Still Within It All...We Are

I am not who I was even a month ago, so of course, neither is my dear anam cara, Lisa. So much to celebrate in our journeying, so much to grieve, and receive just as it is. How am I feeling about that tonight, this season of Lent, this week after a couple days of beautiful snow, sunshine and alteration of rhythms? 

I opened a metaphorical door this week as Lisa and I reconnected via phone, planting a second seed of wanting to see her, wanting to be in physical space with her. I had actually knocked on that door last week, though it was more a knock and go quiet. The image that comes with a smile is a little girl ringing the doorbell and running away from the doorstep. :) We both heard it, I think, but we didn’t move into any direct conversation about it. This morning, I actually invited us to open the door and look in, though I had not anticipated or planned on it. Perhaps it was the visceral yearning that arose with the image/idea of sitting in front of a fire for an evening, sharing stories and pictures and more… I am glad for that time for her and I noticed my own yearning spike with the imagining… So...a door opened, and I’m curious about its movement, its landscape within, beyond.

These months have offered a familiar and regular sense of connection with Lis, via phone, but also the longest spells of not seeing her, of being unable to touch her, receive her hug, drop into the gaze... In many ways, absolutely nothing has changed in my sense of connection with her. I think of her regularly throughout the day, offering up a prayer when I do, sometimes texting to nudge in, often not texting in but smiling with the gift of her in my life. If I’m having a sad day, for whatever reason, sometimes I don’t text in and/or I feel a sense of lack, a wave of grief at how things have changed in our rhythms. I ‘see’ her life moving in new directions, sacred work I’m no longer directly connected to, with a feeling of fear and loss. Yet acceptance too. Breathing into nonattachment and prayer for whatever is our best life, hers and mine, ours. I recognize that several pathways of invitation have emerged in my own life with which she’s not directly involved either: embodied mythology, learning-walking with Dutchess, CrossFit… So we're connected as we've always been, and...in other ways, lots has changed.

I used to derive a lot of strength, even steadiness, within an idea of the two of us, an anam cara flow of being special, being necessary, being uniquely for-one-another in traditional and nontraditional ways. Devoted to the Sacred in one another--devoted to one another in the Sacred--with the passion and purpose our singular affection offered. Back then (and for years), if I didn’t get regular signals of this uniqueness, I felt threatened somehow. I felt grounded in the world because I knew who I was with her, in this Sacred Flow. I drew confidence and strength to BE more of who I am because she, we, held this extended energetic field together. [I don’t honestly know if this “idea of us” function(s)(ed) in this way for her too, though I suspect not. She seems less swayable inside, somehow, though we both smile at the very real phenomenon of “coming around again,” or “it’s my turn to feel overextended or vulnerable” now.] This “steadiness in the Idea” has been a governing storyline in me with her, with us, for as long as I can remember an ‘us.’ And it’s not untrue, in the end. But of course, it’s not the only idea, nor the only story of our Us.

I received a tremendous sense of visceral connection to my own body, simply by being with her so extensively these many years now. She is such a tactile person, and I desperately needed such normal tactile presence, friendship, deep belly love… For years. Decades, really. When I was unable to reach out to her, physically, or her to reach out to me, I could literally sense a panic attack starting. On the one hand, it’s endearing to yearn for someone so completely; on the other, it can get to be a heavy weight between human beings quite different from one another. This pandemic year has both forced and invited me to stay visceral, stay tactile, regardless of whether she is physically present with me. That's both a gift and (for me) a sense of loss too. Something in me felt Real or Alive because of my Need. I realize that the primary way I do this now--being in my body, for me--is CrossFit and dedication-health eating/food-prep, etc. My husband remains a largely untactile person, though I know he craves more human touch connection than we share. Touch for him is almost always sexual while touch is largely sensual for me, sexual sometimes. Nala shares her energetic field with me way more than my beloved Brian...and that’s okay, whether for now or for forever. So much of these years has been coming to love one another precisely as we are, without performatives or presumption. We are freer in this strange in-between time of a LOT of extensive time, he and I, with less tactile time. Lisa and I are freer with my own stability, steadiness here. I miss her. I yearn for physical space and time with her. And I trust it will come, feeling both familiar and quite different for us both. The part I wish were not true is that I can easily avoid intimate, vulnerable space now...and pretend it doesn't matter. I had to do that for so long, it's an easy defense-strategy for me. But then I turn insular and unresponsive, to myself or to others. I don't want to live my life like that...and yet I do, pandemic style. I know more ease inside if I just pretend my need to be seen/known doesn't matter right now...

It’s so very strange for me to feel a bit less woven into a daily-divine-sacred flow with Lis, though we continue to dip into moments, finding ourselves in sacred-listening like we do. This has both focused me to be more active, for myself, and it’s been a thing of grief for me too. I love finding ourselves in the serendipitous Flow of Invitations together, both unexpected, unexpecting, yet Met in the Sacred, together, and as individuals. I recognize now that it was easy for me to trust her sense of Leadings way more than mine, to not explore something if we were not both going to explore it. Neither of us want that for me, I know, but...it was easier. :) Now, I find myself noting invitations for me that may or may not come up in conversation with her at all. Feels strange, but also just right. Her sacred work has become spiritual direction listening for several hours a day each week. I don’t need as much ‘seeing’ as I used to, and she needs her energies for her work more than she used to. I do smile and remember how sometimes it’d be an hour a day, we’d find ourselves listening, praying aloud, wondering at the strange Energies that were pushing us along so forcefully sometimes… Whew! We’ve surely grown and we’re more efficient than we probably were. We can find ourselves dropping down unexpectedly, for a couple moments, before returning to the daily rhythm of the Now. It's not like we're in completely different rivers, but our trajectories are different, and there seems to be a sensitivity about language in our differences.

One of the most substantial internal changes for me here has been trusting we will be returned to one another, in physical spaces, as way opens for her, for me. For years, I would attempt to anticipate ‘by what next day/time’ we could be together again. Then there were the logistical, mostly unplanned, but generously convenient ‘swing by visits’ for a quick shower, cup of coffee, a hug as the day would unfold. I am a woman who needs more personable contact in her life than comes ‘readymade’ with my family choices. Brian doesn’t need to tend this for himself--he already has more personable contact in his work than he can often digest, as the introvert he is. But even before pandemic things, I knew I needed to tend this for myself. So, circles of women, quick touch-ins with Lisa, on-campus work things (usually last as a healthy strategy, as the community is not as easy to be in as ‘community.’) Today, months into the global pandemic, I can breathe easily and openly into days on end, not knowing when I’ll get to see her again, but trusting way will open. I can go for days now, not anticipating seeing much of anyone beyond Brian, Nala... CrossFit helps this for me, of course, but that's a different kind of 'seeing' space. Mostly, I can be in the rhythms of my day without the edgy or panicky energies that would sometimes rise in my body prior to several days with little outside personal contact planned. I don’t think I’m back to the PhD or academic-hermit days I used to craft for myself, in near-defiance against needing anyone at all, ever. I’m too thankful for overwhelming abundance I’ve been Given to know...really opening into it these last seven years. But I've been returned to an ease with extended solitary time I've not known for years.

I know I”m not the same person I was, nor is she, so Lisa’s and my rhythms post-pandemic will figure themselves out amidst all that is new for us both. Not least of which for her is a booming spiritual direction practice and incoming grandchildren, the economy plan (one set of twins :)). But eventually, I’m hopeful for easy swing-bys and visceral connections that always bring me more into myself than the various ways I tend to myself and body-learnings now. I have much less idea or presumption of who we are becoming in these days-months, but I have no less wonder and curiosity that she and I get to be in this life together, however we are. One-ing, and Two-ing, like we do.

the Silent Treatment -- poetic form

My mother would give my dad the silent treatment,

sometimes for days, when they argued.

The house would shimmer and shake in the deafening quiet

My sister and I never knew what he did

or what she was so angry about

No one in the house knew what would break the cycle

of nothingness. No smile. No looking into the eyes.

Nothing that could suggest connection was necessary.

Curt words dealt with the home

Terse body language everyone could hear

screamed her rage with no sound.

I used to think my own dance with anger was anything but silent.

An F-bomb in quiet prose is more my style

A measured tone with surgically precise language

describing the offense, the affront to my world, my body

Lots and lots of words seems to be more my style.

I’ve learned the verbal choreography of anger

necessary in the worlds of men.

But seven years ago, I woke up to a Reality 

I had resisted seeing for decades:

the centuries’ long abandonment, the inexcusable abuse

of women, girls, little boys, all of creation.

Silenced. Shoved aside. Raped. Pillaged.

God protects us from nothing,

even if He sustains us in all things (says James Finley)

Goddess seems to have lost the battle, if not yet the war (says me).

She came too late, really, for this little girl to not be abandoned.

For many, this signals a rupture of faith,

a departure from the faith community,

errant in its ignorance

culpable in its persistent choice to neglect. 

But how do you leave something that is five decades

embedded into your very cells? your sense of purpose in the world?

You don’t. At least not without spending the rest of your precious years

on this mysterious twirling sphere of abundant grace

fighting what is already a part of you.

Then I realized today that my mother was onto something.

What else can a woman disempowered in a dangerous world

do with her righteous anger, her abandonment as an infant

by the Sacred, a little-girl-to-be who wouldn’t know 

she was beautiful as a girl, she was perfect as the girl she is

until she was an older woman, nearly fifty years old?

She can give All That Is Holy the Silent Treatment.

The Silent Treatment

 Somewhere along the line, I learned that anger required the silent treatment for getting along in a family, in a household, in life for the moment. By and large, folks who know me and my father see I am clearly my father’s daughter. Verbose, inquisitive, service-oriented, intellectual. Those are characteristics of my father. But I’m also my mother’s daughter in many ways. My physical frame is largely hers, for one. I remember seeing on film my 16-year old self walk across the stage as accompanist to a high school choir. “I walk just like Mom!” I exclaimed, startled. I had not seen the physical resemblance so clearly before. My mother is the intuitive, the perceptive, though those things have waned in her later years, as her hearing and speaking have waned. I credit my own perceptiveness and intuitive sense to her, along with deeply repressed emotional capacities I’ve learned to welcome into awareness more often. Today, I’m newly aware that I’m my mother’s daughter when it comes to anger. We give everyone around us the silent treatment when we’re angry. 

Arguments in my home when I was growing up were always tense affairs, but they would also last for days. Whatever the flare-up was about, if Mom was angry, it would linger in the house, unspoken but simmering. You never quite knew when it was over. You couldn’t really persuade her out of it. Dad (the usual recipient and protagonist of this kind of anger) would simply get the silent treatment for ages. And then when it was over, for some unexpected reason, it was over. Life went on. At least until it happened again, which it, of course, always did. From the outside, it always looked like Dad ran the family with his domineering verbosity and intellectual prowess. It’s taken me years to see that actually, Mom’s anger controlled the spaces in a much more impactful way than I ever fully knew.

It’s taken me some time to see this behavior in me, because I’m a hybrid father’s-mother’s daughter. I use the exquisitely honed skills of a verbal-intellectual communicator that I have inherited from my father, softening them up with my own deep-feeling capacities and attuned intuitions, perceptions. The combination of these gifts, skills, tends to stave off much direct conflict in my relationships. My husband and I rarely have firey arguments. We have deeply engaged discussions that can cycle forever instead. Sometimes we just need a fiery exchange to break the cycle because we’re both such good verbal communicators. As such, I don’t give the silent treatment to my husband very much. To anyone I love, actually. I’m more prone to drop an F-bomb in a discussion, to alert to the anger in me, to break up the unending conversational cycle about something.

This morning it dawned on me, however. In the area of my most extensive and deeply raging anger, I’ve reverted to the earliest strategy I know: the silent treatment. I’ll get into the specifics in a moment, but it’s gotten me interested in the Silent Treatment as a strategy. I mean, how does it work, exactly? What does the one imposing the Silent Treatment get out of it? What does the one being Silenced get? What are the practical fruits of the whole business?

Looking with my 51-year-old eyes and heart, I realize it’s a strategy that makes sense for women in the society in which we’ve been shaped these last several decades. Women, especially those my mother’s age, didn’t really have an easy road to voice, after all. Financial dependence, fear of being ostracized (especially within Christian circles), deep familiarity with male-on-female violence in the home and beyond it… Anger was a fire that was too costly to let rage much. Better and safer to tone it down, repress it, hone it, use it. So the Silent Treatment is a passive-aggressive strategy quite available to women who wanted to survive the challenges of their day. It is a basic exercise of indirect power over what women could control: easy harmony in the home. 

So how it works… First, you refuse to speak to the one with whom you are most angry. You deny them access to your eyes, and you neglect their needs as much as you can get away with. [We would still eat family dinners together, for instance, but they would be strained and even quiet. Mom still functioned as homemaker, but she made sure Dad was really uncomfortable. Us too, for that matter.] For prolonged periods of time, the one imposing the Silent Treatment gets to create her own world with direct disregard of those who have angered her. There’s a smug feeling of “see? You’re not that important to me after all” while life goes on in as much disregard of the other as possible. There is also a false sense of freedom from the anger, driven by the anger itself.

The one being ignored, if he’s honest, feels the power inflicted or imposed, if unexpectedly or indirectly. There is a daily/hourly consequence for having transgressed whatever boundary was transgressed. A natural reaction may be just that, a reaction. A mirroring of “it doesn’t matter to me either,” for instance. Or more often, we would see a retrenchment and refusal to see that any boundary was transgressed at all. A refusal to get curious about what made Mom so angry. A refusal to consider that it mattered or was important. 

The stalemate could go on for hours or days. Enough time for the rest of us to wonder...what does the Silent Treatment offer? What does each participant “get” for keeping the dynamic alive?

Today, I can empathize with my mother’s need to have some control over her environment, in her own life. Dad is a dominant presence, conditioned to control the spaces with his voice, his curiosity, his intellect. The Silent Treatment reinstated a balance of power, of sorts. Mom controlled the spaces for a while, not him. He couldn’t force her to speak when she simply refused. So this also gave her agency to refuse parts of her life that weren’t of her own agency. She became more of an autonomous person, in that sense. 

The one being Silenced could keep on “being right” by refusing to be cowed in the Silence. I don’t know many human beings who don’t choose the feeling of being right. It’s quite seductive, at least in my family. And a refusal to show that the Silence was any different, that it was uncomfortable or unwanted, meant that no apology was forthcoming or considered warranted. Participating in the entire dynamic meant that being right about whatever sparked the fight in the first place was more important than getting curious, trying to see or sense the feeling(s) of the other, reconciling the relationship. 

So the Silent Treatment creates a holding pattern in which neither party needs to get too close to the rupture, the anger. This ‘buys’ a sense of security or safety that can be necessary, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending upon the boundary transgressed. This strategy also provides a way of being rooted in one aspect of consciousness--being right, at almost all costs--while refusing another level or invitation to consciousness--being curious, being willing to see all things as interconnected, interdependent...which would mean his/her part in the rupture is more significant than “being right.” 

One thing was crystal clear over the years of watching the Silent Treatment control our home from time to time: one never knew what or when would break it open, would end the Silent Treatment.

So there’s the rub for me as I realized this morning that I’m relying on this strategy of the Silent Treatment in a pretty large portion of my life. There is a deep lava flow of anger within me, which can erupt into a controlled but exhausting rage unexpectedly. Whenever the disempowerment, shaming, silencing, neglect, outright abuse, or abandonment of women/girls touches my life, I can be taken over by the fires. Rage. Tears. Sadness. Reactivity. It’s less volatile than it used to be, but it’s always with me.

I know enough about anger to know it wounds only (mostly) me, but I honestly don’t know how to reconcile my root-tradition’s utter abandonment of me as a woman, of women for centuries, with the so-called charism and gifts of this tradition (Christianity). I do know I cannot ‘leave’ that which is in over four-decades of my body-soul memory. So I remain…and I don’t deny the gifts in (much of) Christian traditions, particularly for so many I serve. But I no longer have access to these gifts, directly, for me. It’s literally been years since I felt I could enter into any prayer of direct-address (to a personal Source-God/de-Spirit) for myself. I hold this space for directees and students all the time without sense of dissonance, but for me? My yearning for the Holy waxes and wanes, in a fragile dance with my grief, my rage. 

Praying in any direct address to either God or Goddess who abandoned me/us feels like complicity in this abandonment. Offering up anything of my own intimate life in devotion to this One? Sawdust in the mouth and airways.

This morning, it dawned on me in no uncertain terms. I’m doing the only thing I know as a woman to do when she’s angry in a world that is dangerous for women: I’m giving God/de the Silent Treatment. You refuse to speak to the one who has transgressed the boundary. You deny access to your eyes, and you neglect their needs/desires as much as you can get away with. For a while, you can pretend that you control the space and you’ll be able to protect yourself from the pain that happened before…

For a while…

...which then becomes an on-ramp to getting curious about what, if anything, might break the cycle, the pattern. I honestly don’t know. Am I right about the abandonment of women by religious traditions over centuries? Pretty hard to argue against the evidence. Is being right the only thing important to me? Of course not. But this Silent Treatment is the holding pattern in which neither party needs to get too close to the rupture, the anger. This ‘buys’ a sense of security or safety that can be necessary, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending upon the boundary transgressed. This strategy also provides a way of being rooted in one aspect of consciousness--being right, at almost all costs--while refusing another level or invitation to consciousness--being curious, being willing to see all things as interconnected, interdependent...which would mean his/her part in the rupture is more significant than “being right.” 

The stalemate holds… Stepping out of the stalemate feels disingenuous, at best. What is 'my part' in the abandonment of women over centuries? could be the question, but it's nonsensical to me. The stalemate holds... What is 'my part' in this rupture?

Younger Me Looked On with a Smile

This younger Lisa learned to navigate complicated family systems of brothers and their wives, cousins, a rigidly religious sister, and the prospects of graduate education--all of which required her to develop a highly cautious genuine voice with the men in her life. Most of the men in my life know me as a woman unafraid to speak her mind, which is visibly defensible to believe. It’s probably even true. Except when it’s not. 

Countless are the times when I decide it’s not worth my energy to confront or contradict the intellectual flow of a man ostensibly in conversation with me, but mostly with himself. My father and my husband, most often here, but I’m a theologian in higher ed environments largely shaped by men, or women behaving like men. I think this discernment and reticence to jump into masculine-intellectual flows was honed by this younger-Lisa, gradschool Lisa. Conversations I loved most, or even gracious dialogues, were less the point than a choreographed skirmish of argument points, wits, or referenced knowledge. Academic discourse, as I learned from sparring with my father and his brothers, is not about relationship as much as knowledge, or being in the Know. Folks will want to relate to you if you are the knowing one. Today, I rarely enter into these kinds of interactions, having learned my relational energies and feelings are best spent elsewhere. 

Except recently, which was a surprise to all involved...a surprise that feels connected and congruent somehow with this welcoming of younger-Lisa back home to my inner table. 

Brian and I were on a walk in the preserve a couple weeks ago, like we’ve been blessed to enjoy for many months of this pandemic pause season. It was late afternoon, the sun was thinking about setting into a luscious, mauve sky. The ground felt good beneath our feet and Nala had already pounced at something at least twice, sadly (for her, not for us) coming up with nothing in her jaws. Then Brian began down a path I’ve come to sense as his own emotional venting or when I’m feeling less charitable, intellectual masturbation. My part is traditionally to nod and cheer him on, both of us hoping for his quick release. But something in me snapped this time. No longer could I let his preference for what he calls ‘European civilization’ and the ‘classical tradition’ stand idly by while the planet and women and children got silenced. 

Credit where credit is due, I didn’t lash out like I’ve done in these recent years past. I began carefully, with a measured rage. “I cannot go here with you anymore, m’dear,” I said quietly. “What I need to say now I simply need to say. It requires nothing of you. But I am continually stunned at how arrogant we are about a so-called ‘civilization’ that excludes at least half of the world’s population, brazenly murders another portion of the population, and then calls itself ‘civilization.’” I paused with the space that was opening up within me, filling with fire but also water too. “Where does this fascination with the classical tradition come from, still, knowing all we know today? Why does it still beckon so very fucking many of us?”  The f-bomb was my gift to him, because he knows I only drop it when I’m stretched taut and about to let go, should he push.

He began to rise to the fire, like he does. He spoke from his own pain of never being able to say the right thing or be the right way in any conversation where social justice arises. I stopped us walking and waited for him to realize it. He stopped, confused but quieting. “There is nothing for you to do with my words, Brian, but hear them,” I said quietly. “I said them for me. I require nothing of you but to simply allow the words to exist here between us, legitimate, acceptable to you, valid as they are. I will not argue with you about this, nor will I participate in this conversation anymore. I need you to hear me and say nothing.” I didn’t even look at his face to see if anything registered, but simply started walking again.

We walked on in silence, Nala pausing every once in a while to look over her shoulder, insuring we were still coming behind her. I noticed the sunset again, a deeper mauve even than it was before. “Cloud color sure is nice,” I whispered aloud. He murmured agreement. We walked home in what was for me a companionable silence. I felt spacious, free, energized, surprised. I don’t know how Brian felt. I didn’t ask, nor did I feel the need to.

Older me offered younger me something unexpected here, something new. Not only did I refuse to participate in the pretense of a conversation, which was really my beloved working out his own feelings of inadequacy and guilt, projected outward. One could argue I mirrored to him what he was doing with me. Granted, it was a conscious move on my part, to respond consciously instead of shut down or react defensively. I informed him the words he would hear were for me, that I was going to speak and that he had no responsibility for them, nor was it a debate or ‘conversation.’ He simply had opportunity to hear, to receive. I needed nothing from him, even then. If he chose not to hear, it didn’t matter for my immediate needs of speaking for me. So the second gift of learning here was that I spoke for me. I spoke what I needed to say aloud. What I needed to refuse in him or his choices. Lastly, I tended to what I needed in an intellectual-flow with a man in my life, irregardless of how he might feel about it. This is much harder for me to do than most folks in my life imagine it is, for whatever reasons.

Younger me had opportunity to get a little freer from the overwhelming presence of Authority in her worlds of intellect and ‘conversation.’ I was grounded in what we knew--she and I--and didn’t care to be beholden to the classical presuppositions any longer.

I have to imagine she smiled inside me. I certainly did.

January 20, 1999 -- Then and Now

I don’t know how to write three pages of this “stuff.” ... I feel scared. Stupid, guilty, ashamed. And angry, but what else is new? I never seem to be able to get past emotional baggage… I’m embarrassed by who I’ve been and what I’ve done to people close to me. ... I feel like I have no right to feel as I do or to feel with the intensity that I do. What’s wrong with me?

So begins my Artist’s Way journey, January 20, 1999. I recently unearthed these journals from my basement storage shelf, following a hunch that I might learn something from my younger, pre-scholar self. Or that she might want to say something to who I am today, a fiercely feminine circle-way kind of gal.

The first thing that pleases me about this new beginning, way back when, is that I began with I don’t know how to write… There’s honesty in that, even as I was clearly writing those pages I supposedly didn’t know how to write. I was already willing to trust that I knew more than I thought I knew, just beginning. 

I’m also drawn in by the intensity of emotions. Most of them negative or difficult, admittedly. Something in me persisted long enough to find a container for what I needed to get outside of me somehow. I’d tried journaling over the years, but my inner critic would always throw sand into the gears, eventually stopping me cold about three days into the ‘new journal project.’ These pages were not supposed to be anything but drivel. How freeing that was for me! How salvific even. I was finally going to get underneath some voice or presence in me that had kept me bound for two decades. I didn’t know it yet, that day, but I celebrate that now.

Then, of course, there is the shake-my-head disbelief and bemusement. I’ve been on the healing journey for well over three decades now. Picking up Volume I of these morning pages, I was expecting to do an archaeological dig into what I was feeling back then, thinking about back then. It was over 20 years ago, after all. I’ve come so far. As I read these words, I was stunned...

I could have written much of what I wrote that day in 1999...yesterday. These voices are still in my head today. I don’t know how to write… I feel scared, stupid, guilty, ashamed, angry, so what else is new? I feel like I have no right to feel as I do… You have to laugh, really. I did, out loud. Brian wondered what was so funny. Humility, I said. The gift that just keeps giving. I still live in this fantasy that as I heal and mature, I will leave who I was behind as I transform, getting free of all that has bound me over the years. I will be smiling into a new, whole ME. Yet never a day passes that I don’t catch myself in self-denigration, that I don’t repurpose the shaming voices, that I don’t see me taking on guilt that is not mine...blah blah blah… A good friend confirmed it, as I shared a little bit with her. “Yep. That sounds like the you I know when you’ve had a bad day.” Sigh. Disbelief, but bemusement. 

Because why would I want to leave any of my selves behind? Each has done the hard and joyous work-play-rest of becoming who I am today. I have been transfigured. I have gotten underneath the voices so many times now that I do know the way out from underneath them. A circle of women, for one. Deep belly laughter with friends. CrossFit in a community fierce about wellness. Staying at the page and staying curious. Always curious. It’s not a very nice myth anyway--to leave behind a self who has served me so well over the years, right? She’s weathered the non-circle years, the years of no feminine companionship and no prospects of it anytime soon. She learned to stay with her passion and to be fierce for herself when no one else really would.

So I’m settling into the journey this semester of finding out more about who she is and what was rising for her in this pre-scholarship time. Writing a dissertation. Reorienting to a creative life first and foremost. Learning the politics necessary to navigate a conflicted department. Looking for love in more of the right places this time. Finding it...or it finding me...much more quickly than I could ever have known. Yes...she’s someone I’d like to invite back to the table, give some space to hear what she has to say.