Remembering My 40th Birthday & Insights? Things I'd Say to My 40-Year Self Today?

Indicative of a lot of things, I spent my 40th birthday visiting my spirit-friend, Irwin Kula, in NYC. I called it my “Upper West Side Jewish Immersion Experience,” but it was a book-end visit to his communities of faith, given he had traveled 7 times to Dayton to teach with me in my community of faith, or, the seminary anyway. Something in me needed the space away from Brian’s overwhelming church-life, I knew I needed something that prioritized my wonder and delight. I was on the cusp of some fairly serious differentiation from him, from our marriage of that era, so while I would have called our marriage stable, it was also straining, about to be stretched to breaking point into a new marriage to one another. One that honored the F/feminine a whole lot more than Brian even knew how to do, regardless of his love for me. 2009, it was, then.

Irwin is one of those spirit-friends who flared into my life, requiring me to grow up and wake up, even as I was also hungry to do so myself. He and I are still deeply connected today, particularly this Holy Week period, when I begin to muse on “what I think about resurrection now.” Delightful, one of my annual practices is writing “an Easter Torah” (he would call it) to him on Easter morning. Given he’s an 8th generation rabbinic Jew, Polish descent, most relatives lost in the Shoah/Holocaust, there’s simply something whole in it, for both of us. When I visited him in 2009, I knew there was a charged energy between us–I remember wondering whether I was some version of a red sports car for a mid-life crisis–but I’ve always kept the boundaries really high with him about all that. The spirit-energies move in subterranean fashion, a sublimated holiness-fire that weaves serendipitous connection between us all the time. Most recently, I was so very sad at a United retreat (February…a strategic-planning one), watching this community become more and more insular, Pentecostal/Conservative literal, realizing how few of my own spirit-friends would be welcomed, feel seen or heard in such a space. I wrote him an email and he responded within an hour with a journal reflection he’d written the day before, sharing almost the exact same thing, from within his own Jewish circles. We set up a time to Zoom and explore all we’ve been experiencing, receiving. I love him fiercely, and he and I have been through some fires of spirit-devotion and betrayal, then recovery, forgiveness. He’s the real thing. [You might also know him as the rabbi from public television who turned the cell-phone messages from folks dying in the Twin Towers into a sung-lament…(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb42zY8QAFM). He was on PBS for that].

Anyway…for a variety of reasons, I made my 40th birthday one I would cherish, always remember. Brian and I did celebrate together with a nice meal when I returned home, that Monday night. But it was a time in which I (needed to? decided to?) pursue the intensity of life I desired both within my marriage, and outside of it. Brian was unable or unwilling…or his energies were simply denser and less emotionally-nuanced, connectional. I dunno… The church was such an overwhelming presence in our lives that I rarely felt truly heard or seen by Brian, given my path was diverging from congregational Christianity. So, while remaining committed to him, I also pursued a web of spiritual friendships outside of ‘our shared life together.’ I spent inordinate time and energy cultivating deepening spiritual intimacies with practitioners of all kinds–Jewish, earth-centered spirituality, artists, etc. Folks whose wonder and curiosity about me fed my need to be deeply seen and heard. Men, women, queering…gender didn’t matter. I would call these connections erotic or sensual, but not sexual. There was a huge charge that fired these connections, in other words, but the relationships were all bounded, chaste. When I finally landed into Women Writing for (a) Change–nontraditional writing school in Cincinnati, OH–I landed into a more socially-visible, less charged “container” within which I could be seen and heard in my soul’s searching, growing. It became more and more apparent that my own substantial mother-wound was being excavated, cleaned out, so to heal. If never fully, at least more consciously, with greater awareness of its patterns in my life. Circle-way then became the home and vessel within which I could channel most of my intensity, passions, desires. Which finally, in 2020, with the Covid lockdown, came back together into my home, my life with Brian. Covid saved our marriage, methinks, as I was forced to bring all of my outside-life-connections into the home. I remember panicking that first weekend of lockdown, fearing I would return to being unseen and unheard once again. But I had strengthened, healed, grown…as had Brian. He was more able to receive or to wonder alongside me, by that time.

While we never know when something starts, let alone when it truly ends, I suspect my Big Splash 40th in NYC was a visible and concrete commitment to my own self-awakening(s), such that the next decade unfolded with all its sacred tumult into the blessed life I am so grateful to know today.

What would I say to my 40-year-old self today? Buckle in, baby. Learn to ask more questions before you say you are willing. And yet, had I truly known all the sacred turmoil that was about to unfold, I doubt I could have said yes to it all. I think it’s better not to know or imagine. How do I live with integrity today, in this moment? I was doing that when I turned 40. I hope to be doing it still when I turn 60, or 70, or 80, if I’m blessed with such longevity. What does it mean for me today to live into deeper and deeper wholeness, never questioning I am completely whole right now? Hmmmm….

My path has always been a return to the body. Each book I’ve written in some ‘new’ version of that same path. I joke that I’ve written the same book four times, but only my editor, Charlie, or my friend Irwin could probably sense or see that clearly. Return to the body, and return to the Land, I’d say today. I can honestly say, now that the last book is done (basically), I have no clue what my Work wants to be, needs to be, is being Called to be… My institution of United Seminary is going through its next turmoil-drama-life/death pangs. I feel little to no commitment to its assured survival or its probable decline. I’ve come to think of seminary education as shaping spiritual adolescents to curate dying institutions. Do I really want to be a part of that for the next ten years? Is that my calling? To stay steady amongst the ruins…or to make a last Harvest Woman push (55-65 years of age) for some ‘next contribution’?

Part of the reason I’ve signed onto a Women’ Fast scheduled for the end of Sept/early October, in Oregon, led by a coach I’m working with, Kinde Nebeker, of New Moon Rites of Passage. Part of the reason I’m obsessively watching/re-watching Outlander, whose more-enchanted universe touches something deep within me, feeds something I need beyond Brian’s and my “being wise for retirement” choices. Part of the reason the Wilde Grove series of novels is feeding my soul so deeply. Living with integrity in the moment, for the day. Grounding. Resting. Resisting (energetically, mostly). Grounding some more. CrossFit. Peloton. Yoga. Loving my body. Loving its movement. Honoring its need for rest. Receiving the sunshine and reveling in the rain.

I have no little curiosity whether Living on the Other Side will change my current life in unseen ways. I have a Substack newsletter I will begin, most likely, once the book is out. Exploring themes unanswered in the book, because the book is not a practical-how-to kind of book. It’s more a storytelling, “this is what I need to say on behalf of women facing wisdom traditions today.” I know I am to dive more fully into the forgiveness work, whatever that may come to mean. I know I’m resisting sacrificing myself for things I no longer value. I also know I’m so weary as to not be driving toward the Next with any urgency. Receive the Day, mostly.

Which is something you seem to be good at, dear Friend, articulated so beautifully in your own writing. You remind me, often, and inspire me to deepen in this Receiving.

 

And So It Begins...Listening on the Cusp of Change at United

I received an inordinately heart-felt, gracious, seemingly uninstigated note of gratitude from the President of my seminary yesterday. It’s almost always a blessing to receive affirmation for what one offers in a community of service, education. I am thankful when I am seen and heard in what I hope to offer. Part of the anticipation for my next book coming out--as I know so many women and church-wounded folks who will appreciate my truth-telling. Even so, I also expect it to become summarily trounced by folks for whom it was not written–academics, scholars, etc. I wrote the manuscript for myself first, to finally come clean and speak truthfully about these last ten years or more, beckoned by the F/feminine within and beyond me. Today I smile because the book may just protect me from the grasping and fear of my current community on the cusp of some substantial leadership changes.

Something in my gut nudged me today, curious about such a lengthy thank you note, seemingly out of the blue. So I reached out via text to a spirit-friend who has been in some life-transition discernment. He has played a fundamental leadership role in my current community of service, even as the divisions widened in the UMC and now UMC/GMC denominations, even as his leadership in the new Global Methodist Church created dissonance and division with the current Board (if no longer the faculty, given we’ve learned how to depend upon one another). In something of a Hail Mary, I crafted a proposal for a collaborative executive leadership model to maximize the use of gifts of both President and current Dean to become Co-Presidents, to minimize the denominational division creeping into the community by means of a Board unwilling to take the risks necessary for such a proposal. Eighty-something year old white men are not adept at imagining things they’ve not thought of first, particularly if offered by a woman (no matter how charming I might have been, at first). Has it just dawned on the President that he will have few allies on the faculty for whatever will come next…? Is that the instigation of such a note, out of the blue?

Part of me feels ungrateful for even naming such suspicion. The larger other part of me, however, recognizes the patterns in higher education systems, led largely by disempowering masculinized persons driven by fear upon the cusp of change. The first ones such “leaders” come to are often the strongest women in the system, hoping for her/them to take on the train-wrecks their pride has created.

Everything in my body tells me this is what’s coming, this is how the system will approach me, asking for my gifts to lead in a higher education system that refused my vision and my soul-driven work.

I will pray about it, of course. I will hold my suspicions in the “aversion” basket, listening for deeply grounding “attachment” observations, listening for the movement of Spirit. Perhaps this work will even push me to dive further into the forgiveness work I am about, leading me to name and release the visceral anger at the summary refusal of what I offered in September. There is no small urge of 'I told you so,' which is satisfying if not sanctifying.

I cannot imagine a world in which NO is not the answer to any questions of executive leadership asked me in this system. I can no longer value its constitution, even as I have been able to be me in contributing within it.

I consider higher education to be declining for good reason, with almost the sooner the better behind it. It requires dualistic thinking and linear rationalization. It prioritizes masculinized thinking over collaborative listening. It is not a good business model. I yearn to be as useless to capitalism as I can, even as I recognize I am of its ilk, its divisive "successes" for some of us. I’ve long left this educational-community's theological presumptions behind, particularly the authority of Scripture and the focus upon historic tradition toward understandings of fidelity to Godde. To be clear, I honor the historic tradition(s) because that is where I come from and Truth is Truth. I honor my elders and proclaim the Oneness of Godde in a renewed and renewing Trinitarianism. But I don’t let this historic grasping/fear decide or provide the categories nor answers to the questions of faith presenting themselves to us today. I serve in this community as I attempt to love unconditionally, with forgiveness learning at its heart, but the "community" is not a community. Higher education never is. That we continue to look to it to shape leaders for building religious community is habit, not sacred Word. Those in higher education today have little emotional intelligence within which to deepen relational learning anyway.

An elder in my life has observed (which I find compellingly accurate): We live in an adolescent culture, with few initiated adults, able/willing to take responsibility for living new gifts into old models declining, even dead. My own language, in my own context? Seminary education today is creating spiritual adolescents to curate declining institutions. This is what our current modeling does, which won't change in my lifetime. I am okay with that, have surrendered into the Great Turning, the sacred bewilderment of unknowing in such systems. I am not one who can or will change such systems.

So...How long must I--will I be welcome to--serve in such vineyards? I dunno. I can be myself in this system because I am tenured and can speak relatively freely (if not impolitically). Old wineskins. My Work is modelling new collaborative, forgiveness, unknowing wine, as long the old wineskins can bear the dissonance of my presence.

I wonder how long that will be...?

So THAT happened...

Brian and I had a cocktail hour that went awry, unexpectedly off the rails into The Great Matter once again. There had been a brief flare-up when She Who Will Not Be Named tried to get Lisa Heckaman to become her spiritual director (again). Lisa checked it out with me, to confirm or deny her own gut-sense that such a re-arrangement would be a bad idea. “I know the whole story, after all,” she reasoned, “so could I help her? Yet it seems unwise too.” I confirmed it would be a bad idea, simply continuing the destructive pattern this woman has shown again and again: getting her emotional needs met in the covenantal intimacies of others. This time, she was hankering for Lisa’s and mine, not Brian’s and mine. 

A distinctive reaction in me was my own utter visceral wallop: feeling a loss of oxygen, slight panic, wave of sensation then tears. I tended myself well, honoring the visceral wisdom, letting it be held in witnessing with a friend, moving my body through it. And the next morning, still aware of it, I did the online instruction research to invite Brian to block his email addresses from her, finally. He’d nodded he was willing when we were away in Minnesota, but such things are rarely of his own agency or energy. He won’t pursue things of potential conflict, even when–or especially when–they are in his best interest. It’s like he doesn’t value himself enough to protect himself. For others he’ll fall on a sword to protect. Himself? Rarely if ever. Maybe he thinks that’s manly. Myself, I see only a soul-wound or deficiency. An inability to believe he matters for who he is, as he is, not for what he does. A refusal of an abandoned little boy unable or unwilling to grow-up into a deeply grounded, loving man, Image-Bearer, knowing his own needs matter to Godde, not just for him.

And my part in the debacle? Let’s see what an autopsy might reveal…

Whatever was triggered within me started slowly, gained force, then ultimately refused to withhold itself, to the point that Brian nearly walked away from the walk we were on with Nala. Part of me regrets that. I never want to see him in pain. Part of me is proud of it, as I rarely speak openly in tender spaces with him. I do my best to be as gentle and as translated as possible, attuned to his insecurities, his griefs, his desires. Then every once in a while, I disregard all that and simply say what I feel I need to say. It’s his and my version of both of our parents’ disagreement styles. True to expectation, he and I live utterly parallel “stories” of wounding, each projecting onto the other, both available to grow us up, if/when we're willing. This whole 9-year narrative is the shark that’s taken bites out of me for years.

When he’s had more than he can withstand, he stops listening and begins counting: his experience of “bites” I’m taking out of him. “You’re like a shark,” he finally said. “Taking bite after bite.” I wish this were not so, of course. How painful. Yet his incapacity to continue to listen, to really hear and understand amidst this Matter continues to surprise me, wound me, anger me. He continues to have the assumption of relationship renewed, regardless of what he and I seem to have agreed. All while she has done more and more to demonstrate any relationship would be unhealthy, inadvisable, dangerous to him. He cannot root out the presumption of relationship, hoped-for connection, which will only continue to wound him and me.

He named “the hypothetical” of the one conversation he would have with her, if/when she finally does reach out to him. “I would answer one direct question from her, which would be why I blocked her from my personal and formal email contacts.” He gave his threefold answer of what he would say. He outlined that any return to relationship would go through me and only through me. This is when my trigger popped, I think, if slowly at first. It was only a hypothetical, after all.

I tried to name my once-again frustration/anger at “having to revise what we had agreed upon” understanding of no-contact. How even imagining this one-question-response was a betrayal of our agreed-upon no-contact, which I then try to reconfigure in my own gut-sense as not a betrayal. The word betrayal is a charged word, particularly for him, so I have learned it’s not very useful for us together even if it is what I experience. I stayed with my own experience, even if I tried to soften it. Projecting his need for relationship with her onto me, onto "my choice" or "through me" was the other "pop" I now see in my trigger. This is the responsibility for his relational life that I am attempting to release. It is not my responsibility, ever. "I will never open that door," I told him. "Ever."

Then I realized it was this matter of “presumption of relationship” driving the ship once again. He cannot adjust to the reality that she broke their relationship. Continues to threaten him in ways he refuses to see. On our walk, then, I tried to name the issue as this presumption that was driving the hypothetical.  We weren't arguing over a hypothetical, in other words. It's always the presumption of relationship. The hypothetical only arose because the presumption pushed it. “What do you get out of having this one-question conversation that not having it does not provide?” I tried to invite us to see together that his need to be loved by her, understood by her was his proverbial Achilles Heel. He refused to see it. Or simply couldn’t, in his own grief and sadness. Instead, he did what is the next best thing for him: project it onto me, my desires. He knows how to do things he doesn’t want to do if someone else is responsible for “making him do it.” I forbear this most times, but this time, with less patience. Yes, I am holding a fierce line because in some increasing areas of tensions between us–The Matter, his own body-activity-care, for instance–I recognize I will be hurt when he refuses to care for himself. In this narrative, I am my father, trying to get my mother to believe she matters. Fool’s errand, and I know it. I wish I could just stop it. I honestly don’t know how and tend my own fear. Yet.

He remained out in the living room for the majority of the evening, as I moved into bedtime and reading in bed. “I just needed some space,” he said, as he finally came in. Yeah, me too, if not in the same way.

Francis Weller speaks of what I see in Brian (and in myself) as developmental trauma, or slow trauma, which “occurs from an experience of absence rather than from something dramatic that happened to us. … In those moments when we needed to be soothed or held, the touch often didn’t come, or what was offered was a partial and distracted attention. What we were granted was too thin and didn’t provide us with enough substance to calm the effect of the experience we were having. … It shows itself in the inability to regulate internal states of distress as they arise and in feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness.”[1] Brian and I both share these behaviors, demonstrated responses when the experience we’re having touches this longstanding experience of absence, “the touch that didn’t come,” or what was offered was simply insufficient to hold what we were/are feeling. Brian's grown-man-self, his outer-shell, knows his worth and fears becoming arrogant. His little-boy self sabotages him all the time with self-doubt and fears of worthlessness. And so they dance, pushing away the self-doubt and fears, never facing them, never knowing how to face them.

This morning, I awoke to a bit of convergence or an ‘a-ha’ feeling about it all. This young woman has such drive to have children, to fill the emptiness within herself through another she can control. Though she has never had any deepening intimate relationship with anyone, she will pour that voracious need into some biological form from her own womb. I lament that so fully…I pity the child. While Brian loves his mother, she was also overwhelmed with depression and migraines in his earliest years. He never got the message that his own needs matter. No one’s needs in his family of origin can be claimed to matter: selfish, self-centered, etc. Swedish-Norwegian culture, we say, pushing it outwardly. He honestly has no spiritual-muscular-capacity to know what his own needs are, let alone advocate for them himself. To do so in his own family would further isolate him from his family. So he refuses. In The Great Matter, I now see: this no-longer-young woman attached her neurotic need to mother to this abandoned little boy inside of him, whom he regularly refuses.  (As most men "to be manly" are taught to do too, btw).

He won’t ever get himself free until he learns to feel, discern, and protect his own needs in healthy ways, which as a pastor he faces obstacles against, which as an abandoned little boy inside, he simply doesn’t know how, nor even have any motive to get curious about. She’ll always have this hold over him until he grows up inside, recognizing his own needs matter. I need to remember that he has to be the one to name, claim, and pursue them. Well-bounded. Clear. In conversation with me, yes, but not always met by me. His work, not mine. 

My work is how to hold my own fear as we age, even if it means he self-destructs. I need to practice remaining vulnerable with him in the times to come when this aspect of him means that I will get hurt. I need to practice releasing him to Spirit’s care for all these things, for him to do what he’s chosen to do, ready to do, willing to become. To love him, in other words, without unhealthy attachment or presumption. My challenge here is protecting myself while he refuses to claim his own agency in protecting himself, protecting both of us. All he knows right now is his sensation of "Lisa is controlling what I do." Which I am apparently willing to do for now, to tend my own fear.

So how do I tend my own fear in the midst of a trigger-fest? Well…that’s why it’s called practice. I need to learn to welcome fear as wisdom, alongside a deepening trust that I am learning to name my needs, knowing that they matter. I could imagine that as I get better at that, specifically with him, he'll get more and more pissed off. In the past, that has led to us finding our ways to grow in this invitation together. Will he get curious about strengthening his own ability to name, claim, his needs? I wonder... He doesn't need to, ironically, for me to love him, as clearly I do.

---

[1] Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, 38.

Noticing & Cherishing

Today is a day of noticing, one which I intend for cherishing too. When something in our life ends, we get grand opportunity to notice many of the pieces it had touched. Even if it hadn’t been active or lively for a good long while. I’ve written about this a couple times now, on my CrossFit-focused blog (www.crossfitatmidlife.com), but my home-gym, CrossFit Dedication, closed its doors for good yesterday. It was sweet to do one more AMRAP–which I dubbed “That’s a Wrap” in my writer-way–with Open Gym friends (Melissa, Matt, Beth, and Amber).

It was poignant to receive the snap-video and then final picture of the box completely cleaned of equipment, mats, etc. Truly “end of an era” as this CF affiliate that had held space there for eleven years became its emptied-out space of ending.

And new beginnings…for them, for me, for us.

Me being me, I notice the “us” things first. While I didn’t consciously choose this transition for me, it was the change in the “us” that really pushed me out into the larger CF world. The relational web of the class I had enjoyed for years shifted, with some members leaving to other classes, new members coming in that were difficult for me. I did my best to innoculate myself from the relational tensions, but to no avail. What had been an anchor became just a weight. I shifted my attentions to some Work that was calling–a book manuscript–and realized my best writing time was during the previously-CF-focused hour. So I shifted my CFD times to more open, more collaborative-communal offerings on the weekend. And I explored other CF boxes closer to home. In a weird way, I’m now thankful for that dissonance that invited me to grow up, move out. Sometimes unwanted things are good things for our own maturation.

Because my own CF practice had needed it, I now see. Not aware of it at the time, I was hungry for new perspectives, a variety of coaching styles, more-specific technique-coaching each class. It wasn’t that the CFD coaches weren’t providing. I simply knew them well. So I landed at Bombers’ CrossFit, much closer to my home, with course offerings that fit my writing-work schedule (10:30 a.m. esp, but afternoon WODs too). And I have grown intentional again about my own training, technique, in a way I hadn’t been, too-focused on the people-bits.

There’s a lot to notice just in my sense of the day today, this first day “after.” Folks who hold space for others’ learning-journeys–whether it’s in a writing circle, or in a CrossFit gym, or in a nutrition-education program, etc.--carry an energetic weight that is underneath and above the explicit curriculum or practice-tasks.

I noticed an absence as I food-prepped yesterday and now as I make choices about how to fuel my body, for instance. The Dedication Health program utterly changed my life in my relationship with food, a healthy sense of how to fuel my body for all the activity I now love. Though it’s not been active for well over two years for me, the presence of CFD had held an echo-web of community, holding this healthier way of being in the world. I wasn’t alone in it, which helped me balance the really unhealthy eating dynamics in my own home. Its historic-structures strengthened me in living a healthy-choice, body-fueling life. So this morning, I notice the energetics of that is now solely within me, my own body this morning. The “Melissa is Always Right” energetics we always joked about can now return solely to her, with no more responsibility to hold, even unconsciously. I find myself curious whether she will notice any of that abundance returning to her in her own awareness. How to relinquish responsibilities when you’ve carried them for years…takes practice! And I will observe my own habits and explorations…I know online-resourcing to pursue, if I need that communal web of healthy-living-eating support. (Bombers doesn’t really carry the focus on nutrition in the same way.)

For these years/months that I’ve time-shared between CrossFit boxes, I’ve been able to play the boxes’ strengths off of one another, choosing to receive what I needed, when. It was a little complicated, of course, requiring me to manage and scale if/when two arms’ days or two legs’ days collided in a week. But I notice an ease with some simplification now. I’m less relationally-focused at Bombers, so more energy can be spent simply on my own training. What are my own training goals? What do I want to lean into next, discomfort-zone-wise? A 10K race? Some mobility-learning around shoulder or thoracic-tight movements? I wonder… I found myself missing my “push-ups per day” practice, so maybe I begin that today. I’ll miss the Murph event this year, being on an Alaskan cruise, but I can still do a version of it on my own…

It’s weird having the apps on my iPhone change. The scheduling app was no longer necessary, so got rid of that. The SugarWod is my 5-year history-app, but color changed. Not sure what that says about the relationship I have with my phone, that I notice such things. 🙂

So…this morning, Brian and I begin our day slowly, unplanned but gently organized now into a high protein breakfast, a walk in the woods somewhere with Nala, then I suspect I will find myself at a coffee-shop for some downtime, a bit of work, then a Fran-focused WOD afternoon class. Or a longish run, perhaps. I’m needing to slow my own pace down, allow my own energies to be replenished amidst things I love to do, to receive.

A good new-beginnings day, then…

What I'm Learning...in "Operation Differentiation"

 Rarely do I sit down to chronicle the overwhelm of my life anymore in this private blog-space…but today seems to be the day (to wear my favorite underwear! ~ Olivia the Pig). I am amidst the uncertainties and invitations to deeper trust in what I will impishly call Operation Differentiation, or Operation Grow the F**k Up, Rachel.

I have been living in the overwhelming emotional-spiritual flows of Brian’s ministry life for the last several weeks, months even…the staged-crafted departure of one young woman staff person (Loralei), the ordination of a previous staff person become Word&Sacrament minister (Rachel). Brian came home “in the weeds” a week ago about something Kelley had shared with him: Rachel’s intentions for the Associate at Fairmont’s job, upon Kelley’s retirement. Rightly, he knew this could break us, him and me. So, we set the intention to “have a conversation,” agreeing it made most sense to do so well-held by a therapist or a church consultant or both. 

Which never works with Brian’s anxiety, nor my own, for that matter. Once “the conversation” is named as intention, it begins. We live it, almost non-stop, until he and I can live into a better emotional space of understanding or connection or both. Sometimes it’s not both. It’s only intertwined connection, with neither of us understanding. But sometimes it IS both. For him, that’s when “the conversation” can rest. I tend to do better with ambiguity or “letting it breathe” even if I am not pleased with where we are. He wakes up with nightmares that then need airing, assurance. Which I’m glad to hold, offer. My nightmares tend to come when I am moving, walking, active; when my body can speak to me in its own voice, not my mind’s chatter. 

This morning, I’m appreciative of how deeply we are connected, regardless of whether I can feel him, whether it feels good. Wow do we live our emotional life bouncing back and forth from one another, most often in church-dynamics these days. (I’ve, of course, instigated this dynamic in my own awakening, in some of my own journey points. But recently, it’s been all church, all the time for us).

[Context notes, for future recall. Sunday was the Celebration of Ordination of Rachel Christina Boden to the Word and Sacrament Ministry by our Presbytery of the Miami Valley, Dayton Ohio. A culmination of nearly ten years of collegiality, then mentoring, tending, heartbreak and challenges still remaining. A week ago, I realized it may be necessary for my 8-10 years of “quiet collaborations” in “tending the gifts/challenges of Rachel Boden” to become potentially available to the whole community, for the sake of informed discernment when Rachel decides to press for a “working relationship with Brian” again. 

Brian and I have stewarded together a most demanding question, with various phases of response: "How to nourish a daughter of the church who has fallen in love with a married man who happens to be the supervising pastor with whom she works daily?" This question began in 2016 and has unfolded in quite difficult ways ever since. I invited her into my writing circles, in hopes of her facing her irresponsible choices and increasing threat to Brian’s public ministry. Her decision to leave for Princeton Seminary seemed a reprieve, but it only intensified her dangerous emotional pattern of pursuing her own emotional needs through the covenantal commitments of others. She intruded into another marriage, this time enmeshing with an older woman, in disregard of that woman’s husband as well. We now have a datapoint set of two, and gender doesn’t matter. 

I therefore spent a couple days writing and refining my own documentation of “the quiet understory,” in (only) my own perspective. An eleven-page document to be sent to all relevant ecclesial bodies should informed discernment be necessary for any future Associate-hiring alongside Brian at Fairmont. For the first time in nearly ten years, I realized I could no longer “hold protective space” or “provide context” for what is an unhealthy attachment pattern in her, and an unhealthy attachment with her in my own life-soul-partner, Brian. I lived into the framework of “we disagree about this, but it is his emotional life to discern” up until now. Now, I am unwilling to see this disagreement as something I can hold. I release him to his own devices, and stand with the resources that are at my disposal, which are public-attestation and potential greater-ecclesial/presbytery involvement.]

Not surprisingly, especially for an Enneagram Six personality style, it is this threat to his institutional security that has actually begun to bring about resolution and awakening, which will hopefully be better for us both, us all.

This learning both makes me sad, and brings a weary smile too. I have deeply embedded habits of “family accommodation,” “indirect use of power/anger,” “refusal to name my own needs for fear of being abandoned or emotionally shunned.” These played out for years. On this side of naming my experience, naming what I need to do for me, breaking the habit of accommodation and indirect power while moving into my own agency, my own gentle use of power, the dynamics are changing. 

Be the change you want in the world, right? Be willing to name what you need, without attachment to outcome? Whew...so very hard for me in the intimacies of my life.

Now, on this side of all this, I wonder now how I could have accommodated for as long as I did!! Hence, sadness. Owning I allowed so much that I could not articulate nor name I needed.

But the weary smile? I’ve learned more deeply how my partner thinks/feels, in a fashion so foreign to me but so clearly communicative beyond anything I’ve tried before. I’ve learned what the levers are that I may need to be savvy to in the years to come. I hate to say it honestly, but when I need him to hear me, to respond to me about matter of his church? The use of public perception and ecclesial politics appears to be the only thing he can hear and respond to. I wish it were not so. I wish he thought-felt “primarily relationally” as I do (as an Enneagram Two). But he does not. And he never will. He thinks/feels as Godde made him, which is within a love-devotion-duty to the Church. Part of me really does love this about him, as it has also kept me stretched open in significant ways. Part of me wishes this was not so.

This learning is not for abusive use or potential manipulation in the times to come. There will always be things in his life, which is his work, that I simply disagree with but can hold, stomach, imagine Spirit’s work within. The threat that Rachel Boden has always been to us, which he and I navigated together in my/our unhealthy but faithful attempts, is simply no longer a disagreement or divergence. It is an unpalatable dynamic that could break us, if we’re not both attentive to it, if he’s unwilling to differentiate and let her go.

The weird thing is that I haven’t felt as light or as hopeful in a very long while. I realize that I have choice in every situation and that my boundaries deserve care by me if not by him. If he is unable or unwilling to deal with this in a responsible way, then it could be the thing that forces him, us, to leave Fairmont entirely. He does not want that, so again…Spirit seems to be putting new strictures in place that are requiring him to deal with all of this in new, healthier ways. Ways he and I seem to be better at determining together, attentive to what I need not just because I challenge the church and can be disregarded in his love for institutions. Sometimes my own emotional wisdom (need?) actually protects the church.

I will always hold him in love for that journey. I hope to hold it alongside him for the rest of our lives. I anticipate that we will work through this as we have done for 23 years. I feel closer to him than I have in a very long time. 

Still I recognize that I am sad and smiling, both. He and I have learned things about one another this week that have so deeply challenged us both. We live in the world so very differently. Yet it does seem to be Spirit’s intentions for us to be right here.

Trusting in the divine order of things, that Spirit has him in his conversation with Rachel tomorrow. That way will be made clear, in Spirit's timing, for him to face his anxiety and for me to grow stronger in knowing that my needs--even in his church work--can be for the good of the Church.