TAKING THE BEAM FROM OUR EYE FOR THE HOLIDAYS

The other day a friend sent me a clip from 77-year-old musician, avant-garde artist and filmmaker Laurie Anderson (formerly married to Lou Reed).

She offered three rules for a simple life:

“The first one is don’t be afraid of anyone. Now can you imagine living your life so that you are afraid of no one? And second is get a really good bullshit detector and learn how to use it. And third is be really, really tender.”

I don’t know Anderson or her work well and don’t have much feeling one way or another toward her as an artist. But over the last week, I’ve thought a lot about these three ideas and how they apply this time of year.

The unhealthy closed-circle family system, for example, consisting of codependence, dishonesty, enmeshment,and distorted versions of love is all too familiar to many of us—especially with the holidays approaching!  

We get enmeshed with friends or family members, for example, who we’re convinced are direly mentally ill and start trying to force them, one way or another, to admit to their sickness with zero cognizance of our own! We become engaged in a pitched battle to “win” while CONSTANTLY maneuvering behind the scenes, creating fresh crises and drama, sucking in the rest of our circle or whoever will listen into the drama, and casting ourselves as rueful martyr/saviors while in fact we have often been the prime motivators in generating and sustaining the system we purport to abhor.

In a supposed sign of love and support, the circle (also codependent, often because we’ve trained it to be), rallies around, listens, agrees, shores up, is drawn into the drama, shows love and concern by demonizing the supposedly ill person who gets talked about (nothing delights us more than when the circle joins us in spying upon and reporting the wrongdoing of the other), dissected, lied to and manipulated to within an inch of his or her life, while all the while we, the supposedly well, loving, recovered people, profess to hunger for Truth and Love.

Our version of Love of course goes BEYOND the normal run of the mill love and WAY beyond any distasteful, unfeeling kind of “tough” love. Our kind of love requires constant surveillance, hovering, unsolicited advice, and intrusion, often trying to do for others what they should—and would if we’d get out of the way—do for themselves.

While meanwhile our own lives, passions, desires, and growth get neglected.

These kinds of generational prison systems can keep us forever in their grip—I speak from experience! Because to surrender them strips us so thoroughly of our false scaffolding that without fellowship and a real God we simply couldn’t handle the nakedness, the reality (this, to my mind, is the beauty of 12-step groups and principles).

Our whole idea that we are special and different and follow a different, higher star than everyone else has to be shattered!: the hypocrisies attendant upon our (self-styled) “creed,” the hubris that prevents us from seeking or being open to outside help or ideas. (I do think those of us who are Catholic may be especially prey to such thinking).

Not because we need to suffer more, or feel worse about ourselves than we perhaps already do—but so that we can see how thoroughly fear has us in its grip. We’re afraid others in our circle might not think we’re “nice,” that we might not get straight As on the martyr report card, that someone might be freaked out by new behavior (they probably will be; Jesus is with us) and get mad at us or explode.

Fear has such a stranglehold on our psyches that everything must remain within the closed system because no-one else would “understand.” An outsider might reveal an uncomfortable truth.

No-one was more aware of the nearly satanic strength and power of these family-and-friend systems than Christ. Of course we love and support our circle, but if the system is our god we’re in trouble. Christ himself—while his beloved Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary!—was waiting outside, said “Who is my mother and my brothers? Those who do the will of God.” The neighbors thought he was crazy. He was tortured to death because people couldn’t bear such integrity, such fearlessness, such single-minded devotion to the will of the Father.

The truth is that in our conflict with a difficult person, we tend to become absolutely convinced that we are the “well,” forbearing, generous, sane, one and that the other, in his or her “sickness,” has wronged us at every turn. But in my own (admittedly limited experience in having my “sight” restored) the very fact that we think we are “better” than the other turns out to be the whole problem!

As is our blindness to our own neediness, our own lack of wholeness, our own desperate desire to see ourselves as useful, as people to be depended upon, loved. That doesn’t mean the other’s behavior is “perfect”—it may be objectively insufferable and/or beyond annoying–far from it. Still, the whole relationship is built upon a falsehood, a delusion on our parts.

So they’re insufferable. That’s settled. But the solution isn’t to keep going over and over their insufferability, waiting for the OTHER person to see the light. We don’t have such power. It’s for us to let go of our pride, to beg like the blind man for Christ to take pity on us and restore OUR sight. 

When that happens, and with a ton of unmerited mercy and grace, the questions and obsessive concerns either drop away or realign. We’re simply no longer in battle and thus are free. We’ve released the other person from the leash we had wrapped around their neck and were either jerking or allowing ourselves to be jerked by (by their slightest word, comment etc) every second. We realize that, LIKE US, the other is somewhat spiritually sick. How can we help?

In freedom, we can cultivate a general tenderness of heart toward the person while also making healthy boundaries (say, 20 minutes on the phone once a week). When they start in on their own litany of unresolvable complaints we can say, “That must be really hard. I know you’ll find your way,” and change the subject to flowers, or the weather, or what we had for breakfast.

We can quit being afraid of people, keep fresh batteries in our BS detector (for others AND for ourselves!) and we can above all–again again and always–pray for tenderness.

“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).