My Commitment is to say “yes” to love.
Most of my life have I haven’t been committed. Not to anything. I always left an opening, a back door through which I could escape any commitment I made, just in case I wanted to change my mind. And I often used that door, leaving relationships when it suited me, letting loved ones and colleagues down when standing with them was too hard.
So what’s different now?
Dream we worked at the summer retreat in 2007:
I’m on a train. Suddenly the train stops. A uniformed official gets on board and tells me that I can’t go any further because “I haven’t paid the freight.” I attempt to argue with him, saying that I paid before I got on board. I even go with him to an elaborate computer and start punching in data to prove my point. To no avail. The computer malfunctions. And I can’t prove anything. I can’t go further till I’ve paid in full.
He’s asking for more, much more. He’s asking for it all. He wants everything. What does that mean, everything? I have no idea. In my mind I enumerate all I’ve done: how my life has changed, how I’ve focused my life on Him, how much I’ve done for NOE, for my clients, for my wife, for my children. Isn’t that enough? Haven’t I paid the freight?
I’m defensive, arrogant, angry.
He doesn’t care. He stands there, implacable. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough. He wants way much more, He wants it all. He wants all of me.
“You haven’t paid the freight.”
Nothing I say to him matters. I can go no further till I pay. He wants more.
All that matters is to him is that I say “yes.” He demands a “yes.” If right now I’m not going to stop doing this work, or step back or get off the train, then it only matters that I say yes, yes, yes . . .
But I couldn’t do it. I did say “yes” on the last day of the retreat, but there was a “no” in my “yes.” I didn’t mean it. I wanted to reserve part of myself. I couldn’t give it all. I’d be willing give a lot, but not everything. I wasn’t willing to commit everything to that “yes,” even when I was mouthing the word. Hidden deep in my “yes” was a veiled “no.” That “yes” is not the “yes” He wants from me. He wants it all. He wants a true “yes.” 100 percent.
I practiced saying “yes” after the retreat. Still, the “no” came up in me. I raged against the insights Marc gave me, fought him about the way I work with clients, about how I respond to the dreamers who contact us through the Internet. Anger, projection, rage in tandem with my homework of saying the “yes” which isn’t a “yes.” Saying “yes” in a way that meant “no.”
I’ve become a practicing therapist with a group of clients. I’m dedicated to working with clients, it’s my life’s work, the profession that eluded me my whole existence while I dabbled in the pathologies of sex, drugs, power and deceit, chasing money and success, all the while feeling the misery and separation that overwhelmed me, kept me in bondage to nihilism.
Those were bad years. These are the good years.
But pathology dies hard. With each new client I became more and more cocky, believing I was doing good work with them, reveling in each small success, enjoying the affirmation of their positive feedback, reveling in every tiny breakthrough, delighting in my power to alter lives.
Then the blow fell. Marc began to critique my work sharply. He said I wasn’t wielding the sword of truth, that I was coddling and caretaking instead of being a therapist. “What you’re doing may be ok if you want to be a counselor,” he said, “but it’s not this work.”
A huge “no” came up in me. The pathology in me fought Marc, argued with him, told him he was wrong. I was right, he was wrong. I said he was too harsh, not just with me; that his technique was more than my clients would bear. They would leave me. I didn’t want to lose my clients, so I said “no.”
And I dropped into pain. The pain of wanting to say “yes” and yet holding back, not trusting.
Dream:
A beautiful young racehorse has been wounded by the other horses in the herd. My job is to go in and remove the horse so it doesn’t get hurt any worse.
Marc: “How do you know the other horses attacked it? Removing the horse is pathology, caretaking. Let him be.”
My homework from this dream – don’t rescue the horse. Let the horse bleed to death. Feel the pain, but don’t do anything.
But I want to rescue the horse, I don’t want it to suffer, I don’t want it to feel pain. No, it’s not that. I want the horse to love me, to be grateful to me for rescuing it. I want its love. I want love from the horse, just as I looked for love from my clients.
Looking for love in the wrong places. Looking outside for love instead of within. Striving for love in the world instead of with God, looking for some diluted, watered-down caricature of love.
Dream:
I see a huge man. He is four or five times the size of a normal man. His face is all tattooed or painted with brightly colored designs. He smiles and laughs a lot. He tells me that I have been through an ordeal but my disease is cured and now I am well and able to do His work.
The Animus has said it, I’m able to do His work. But I have to say yes. I need to obey. I can’t do it “my way” ever again.
I go back to my notes from therapy sessions. I’m shocked at how superficial I was with the clients . Where is the Animus in my notes? Where are the messages of their dreams? Where is the one true thing that I failed to tell them? Why didn’t I drop to the depths of the deep well in the sessions? What did I do in these sessions? Where is the work?!!
But the pathology argues back. I don’t want to lose clients. Where’s the balance between delivering the message truthfully and being so harsh that they’ll run away?
Marc taught me. Be gentle, but truthful. Hiding the truth is saying “no.” The truth is a huge “yes.” What I was doing is running from the truth, it’s a way of saying “no.”
I’ve begun to understand. What I was fighting was love, a love so fierce that I was cowering in the face of it. I want so much to be loved, and I’m so distrustful, so fearful that it isn’t real, that it will be taken away, and I’ll be left alone, abandoned. I know this distrust, this fear, it’s been with me most of my life.
In the face of this love, the fierceness of His love, I’m terrified. I feel the terror of being loved in this way and I want to be loved in this way and I want to turn away from it.
I commit myself to Him. I commit myself to the truth of myself. I commit myself to say “yes.”
It’s better not to say “yes.”
It’s safer to say “no.”
It’s so unfamiliar, this fierce love.
I’m in such terror of its power.
I say, “no.”
I’m saying “no” when I want to say “yes!”
“Yes, yes, yes. Yes!”
My commitment is . . . to this fierce love.
My commitment is to this “YES!”
My commitment is to the terror of this fierce love, to its potency and power.
My commitment is to myself.
My commitment is to allow myself to be loved to accept and to welcome love into every pore and fiber of my being, and to live in that love.
I tremble.