Help me God.
Help me complete this piece.
Reveal my pathology and drive it from this place.
Show me the truth.
The pathology is fucking with our book and I‘m pissed. I nearly said my book but I had a dream the other night, the Animus sat across from me in a writing seminar and said "We gotta get working on our book." So it’s our book and the pathology is fucking with it and I‘m pissed. Let me tell you as much as I know, which can’t be the entire story but it’s the best I can do right now and anyway I‘m not interested in telling the whole story whatever it may be. What I want to do, what we want to do right now is shine the light on the wily varmint, grab it by its furry neck, throttle it good and proper, rip its head off, shove it through a meat grinder, incinerate it and heave the ashes the hell out of this book, that‘s what we want to do.
Let’s go.
I began work on this book a year ago. In the first two and a half months I wrote most of what is now the first four chapters and a good deal of what has become the sixth chapter and a piece of what will be the seventh chapter. That’s an output of better than two chapters a month. In the following nine months I’ve dropped to an output of about half a chapter per month. I wrote the first four chapters without any regard for the shape of this book. I just wrote about whatever felt hot at the time then went on to the next hot thing. I felt blessed and led by God. I was excited as the act of writing crystallized hard won yet unarticulated insights about myself and this dream work. I felt the presence and support of God as I was writing. I was a soldier in the tent of my beloved general writing dispatches from the front. I felt him peering over my shoulder. He would pat me on the back from time to time, draw on his big sweet cigar and continuing pacing as he considered the next day’s battle. I went on writing and writing. After a considerable while I noticed I hadn’t felt his hand nor his gaze. I’d written a pile but I wasn’t sure if it was any good.
The first four chapters deal primarily with material that I worked through to some significant level of understanding several years ago. That’s not to say that I don’t continue to wrestle with many of those issues. I do. But for the most part I now see those issues quite clearly and their shapes, though still in flux, remain largely stable.
I read much of that early writing to Marc during our sessions. His response was enthusiastic and supportive. He made minor suggestions, a word here, a phrase there but for the most part he was "Go Boy, Go!" Soon I was spending a good deal of my sessions, well over half sometimes, reading from my book. The writing seemed to become as significant a sign post for my process as my dreams.
I meandered around for a while then thought to myself: "Hey, my first four chapters are about the pathology, I need to write about the light, " Now the camel has his nose in my tent. I go back and rework the ending of the fourth chapter to lead into a new chapter that deals with childhood experiences of God. How nifty. Now I’m writing about material (my childhood relation to God) that isn’t rising out of my dreams, material that hasn’t been exposed to the fire of my process. Now the camel’s head is in my tent and he’s making a good case for letting just his front shoulders in. "Write about God" he is saying. The pathology wants me to write about God because it turns the spotlight away from him, the pathology hates being seen.
I spent a long time thrashing about in those early versions of a fifth chapter. I eventually spent an entire session reading one version to Marc, we didn’t even have time to work a dream and most of what I’d written was pathology. I felt terrible when that session ended. Not only had I departed my general’s tent, set up my own and taken up with a stinking camel but because I’d spent the entire session reading I didn‘t get feedback from a current dream or a homework assignment. I felt abandoned.
That infernal chapter began with a dream I had as a child. Referencing dreams that haven’t been worked in a session is a risky business, though we had briefly discussed this one. What is most significant though is the commentary I wrote on the dream, this is where the pathology took up residence. Let’s take a look. First the dream.
I’m standing in the front yard of my childhood home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Jesus comes walking up the side yard path that runs by the crab apple tree. He comes to me. A small crowd of followers accompany him. I’m so happy to see him. I go inside our house, I want to find my mother and show her Jesus so she’ll accept him and be saved. She won’t come out and by the time I return to the front yard Jesus and his followers are gone. I’m very disappointed.
I then went on to write: "The pathology is active and powerful in this dream. When Jesus comes into my front yard I’m thrilled to see him but my first concern is not for my own soul but for my mother’s. At first glance this may seem noble and loving: ‘oh the boy cares so much for his mother that he wants to save her.’ And it’s true I did care and want to save her but if that’s what Jesus had wanted me to do he would have asked. I can’t think of a single time in the Bible when Jesus asked anyone to be more concerned with another person’s soul than with their own. More concerned with another person’s physical well being, yes but he always told us to look after our own souls first and foremost. So I blew it there, I was the son of my lost mother before I was a follower of Christ. And so he left..."
Much of this may well be true but I am in fact becoming derailed. My fall begins with " I can’t think of a single time in the Bible when..." I’m starting to get worked up here, bringing the Bible in to support my position, I’m feeling enthusiastic, independent, proud and superior. I know this feeling. I get this same feeling when I imagine telling someone off. I’m beginning to preach, preaching not from a place of genuine connection to God but from a place of pride, a place of false strength. My pathology loves to express itself through preaching. It’s energetic, righteous, independent, unassailable, and fun.
Continuing my illegitimate sermon I wrote:
"...Jesus loves me but he’s not there to coddle or comfort me, he’s there to transform me. I’ll tell you something, when Jesus comes in a dream or knocks or calls, you don’t worry about someone else’s relationship to him. You gotta be selfish with Jesus. When he comes you can’t pass him on to someone else or ask him to wait for someone else, you just go with him. That’s the way it works..."
As if I knew! It may all be true but it doesn’t matter, what matters is I didn’t know it to be true in my heart. I hadn’t experienced it. I was out there in the cold, unconnected to God’s love preaching a sermon cobbled together from an amalgam of ideas I’d heard from Marc, Marc’s wife (a pastor) and radio Christians, as if the act of preaching would somehow fire me up and fire others up and help us to cross over into something real. I then spun off into stories about my childhood, stories that I thought illustrated my yearning for the light but it was all labyrinthine, convoluted, unexamined, a vomitus of powerful but undigested experiences. I was lost.
I’m not yet ready to turn toward that light and write steadily, convincingly and honestly toward it. I’m not yet living consistently in the love of my father God. I’m still alone and independent in many subtle and not so subtle ways, still an unwitting rebel not yet come in from the cold. But the problem runs even deeper. If I talk for a sustained period about God I start to get excited, and in that enthusiasm I’m very vulnerable to Satan’s attacks. I say this not as a point of theology but as a description of my weakness. If I turn my back on my pathology and sing God’s praises I will be attacked from behind and I will begin to preach and in my preaching I will lose whatever meager genuine connection I have with God. Then I’m just talking shit. I can wield the vocabulary of enlightenment but I don’t yet truly and deeply feel that connection to God. I don’t feel his love and support as the dominant experience in my life. I’m not there yet. When I begin talking about God an unconscious part of me is aware of this disconnect and I become even more enthusiastic to convince you and in turn to convince that unconscious doubting part of myself that I really do know and love God and bask in His love and isn’t this wonderful and aren’t we just a terrific couple God and I and don’t you wish you could be like us? When I’m at my worst I preach.
Last spring after abandoning this chapter I continued adrift and alone. I wasn’t concerned with the overall shape of this book until I decided that a chapter on cults needed to be pushed back toward what would become the middle of the book. Since that decision, and since I was no longer the General’s scribe I have felt like an architect who is designing his house as he is building it. Of course mistakes are made, large portions of the second story must be ripped off so changes can be made to the redesigned first floor. The whole thing has to be jacked up so the now inadequate foundation can be redone. What an unhappy builder I am, what a stupid architect. If I were only a smarter architect I’d map out the damn book and then write it. I tried to be smarter and got into more trouble eventually finding it difficult to write at all. Can you see my problem? Can you see the pathology? Here it is; I am not the architect of this book though the pathology would have me believe I am. I am the builder. My job is to listen for directions then build, my job is not to design, that’s my partner’s job. He is of course the General now the Architect. He’s much better at it than I could ever be.
My work is to keep my eyes on the enemy. My work is to see the particular life of the pathology in me. This work around the pathology is quite different from, though related to my work on my relationship with God. To fight the pathology I must remain alert, "frosty" as Marc says borrowing a term from the Marines apparently. The pathology maneuvers and attacks in darkness, it reaches me through the cracks in my consciousness. Since I am asleep a good deal of the day, by that I mean unaware of the always lurking, sometimes attacking pathology, the cracks are often large and I’m swamped in my shit before I know it. Sometimes I can see that I’m hooked by the pathology but I just don’t give a shit and I feel a perverse ecstasy, a strange psychic orgasm when I give in to its desire and say something hurtful to Ellen, or pig out on junk food, or blow off a responsibility, or jerk off.
But if I’m engaged in the battle I have two weapons at my disposal. Two weapons which I have been given by the dream work. Two weapons which I must continually keep clean and in good working order. The first is the ability to recognize the patterns the pathology traces in me. I know that if I’m looking at a woman who is not my wife or a picture of a woman and my desire is aroused then the pathology is there. I don’t know this from a moral teaching, I know it from experience. I don’t know if this is true for other men, but I know it is true for me. I don’t blame myself and if I’m "frosty" I don’t feel guilty about it, and most times I don’t even have to do anything about it but I know that if I’m feeling attracted to a woman who is not my wife then the pathology is there, breathing down my neck. This is a pattern, an easy one to recognize. Another pattern is this: if I lose or misplace something I assume the worst. I assume someone has stolen it or I dropped it out in the world someplace where it will never be recovered. This too is a simple pattern, increasingly easy for me to spot and recognize. The second weapon is more difficult to use though much more powerful. It is the keystone of this work, really. The second weapon in my fight against the pathology is the ability to discern my feelings. For example anger can be good, that is process anger or it can be bad that is pathological anger. There is process joy and pathological joy. In this work we call the process responses feelings and the pathological responses emotions. It’s not easy to tell feelings from emotions. Let me give an example.
In my session a few months ago I shared a dream about going through my father’s things as he was dying , (my father in fact just died and I will speak of his death in a future chapter). My father was a pack rat and my brothers and I had in fact been going through his stuff as he was dying. In the dream I found five million dollars, far, far more than the few thousand he actually left behind. In the dream I’m ecstatic. Upon awaking I thought this was probably a good thing, a feeling not an emotion. I compared the feeling in the dream to a feeling I had at my fathers graveside. I had felt alienated by the chitty chat around that hole in the ground. I wanted to feel and express something deep and meaningful but felt like a stranger in a strange land, lacking courage. I turned from my family and stood looking across the cemetery at the low gray clouds over the autumn trees and felt God’s presence and realized I could share this pain and yearning with Him and in that moment I felt the love, support and understanding I’d been looking for from my family. I felt enriched.
Later, while working the five million dollar dream with Marc I thought the feeling in the dream was similar to the feeling at the graveside but I was wrong. What I felt at the graveside was God’s love, the real gold. What I felt in the dream was excitement and the promise that my worldly needs would finally be taken care of, fool’s gold, emotion not feeling.
Feelings seem to bubble up from the interface between my connection with God and my life in this world. Feelings can lead me to a new death and a deeper life with God. Emotions rise from the place in my life where God is not known. Emotions seek not death but resolution and justice in this world, they keep me from God. Learning to tell the difference between feelings and emotions is essential and difficult. Like learning to tell the difference between writing out this poor heart’s truth and preaching.