In our “Creating a Life that Matters” class that Scott and I are taking through our church, we have weekly homework. This class is conducted in three “courses” (“Rediscovering Relationship With the Sacred”, “Rediscovering Relationship With Myself”, and “Rediscovering Relationship With my Passion”) of 6 sessions each. We completed the first course a few weeks ago. Tonight we completed session 1 of the second course, “Rediscovering Relationship With Myself”. The homework varies from week to week. The first session had one assignment that involved journaling. I wrote about that first assignment here.
This week’s assignment also asks us to journal. We’ve read a piece from Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. The following three questions are what we are to write about.
- Where do I come from?
- Who am I and who am I not?
- What might I do to strengthen the connections among the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of myself?
I fear that the reading does not provide much guidance for answering most of these questions. So, I’m on my own!
Where do I come from?
I think there are several answers to this question; they are not mutually exclusive. First of all, I come from God. I believe all of us are, whether or not we choose to acknowledge or believe this.
And I know it sounds strange, but I come from stardust. I think we all do. The stuff of which we are comprised, the basic atoms and molecules have been here since before here was, and will continue after we are no longer here.
I come from Iowa/Nebraska. I come from Bonnie Yates Strom and Louis Strom. I am from Swedish, German, English, and a host of other nationalities.
And finally, for this journal anyhow, I come from 50 years of experiences that have created in me pain and ecstasy; happiness and sorrow; hope and at the same time a sense of hopelessness. “I can do all things in God…” and nothing I ever do will change anything.
Who am I and who am I not?
The questions get harder! Once upon a time in a land not so far distant from here/now I could have taken a stab at answering that more fully than I can today. So much water under the bridge of life over the years though has taken it’s toll on my self knowledge. I wonder these days, just who am I? And because I do not know who I am, I have even more problems answering who I am not.
I suspect that to some extent my confusion on this matter stems from loss. Things I’ve lost in life have robbed me of self-identity or more to the point, self-knowledge.
I am no longer employed. I no longer serve in a leadership role at church, having chosen to rip those roles from myself. I am no longer involved in the “international” retreat organization which I lead for some years… mainly because I lost to some degree my belief in that. And the greatest lost, which contributed to much of those things I “am no longer”, is the loss of identity in relationship to God.
When I could put a label on my spirituality, on the way in which I believe in God, I could identify TO God. In a very real sense, I lost God.
I need to label the compartments of my life. I just realized that as I was writing the above. Without labels, I am nothing! At least can identify with nothing. And if I can not identify with anything, then I can not know who I am – or who I am not.
I doubt much that anyone ever had any illusions that I “had it all together”, least of all myself. But now, what togetherness I had is ripped from me.
Yeah, I’m skirting the issue of what it is that I am thinking. Because, having made the decision to post this in my blog, and knowing who reads my blog, all of a sudden I’m fearful! There are people who read this blog that matter much to me, and I want to keep the curtain between who I think they perceive me to be and who it is, or what it is, that I’m skirting. Ahem, you know know who you are.
See, it’s like this. I have lost my experience of my faith in God. I don’t know how else to say that. Once I could label my experience of that faith as Catholic. I can do so no longer. Once I could label myself as a “sort of rebellious evangelical type”, but I can do so no longer. Once I could say comfortably to myself “I know who God is”. I can do so no longer. I honestly don’t know who/what God is. I could blame the author of a book I once read; I could blame a spiritual director at a monastery I visited a few years ago; I could probably blame a bunch of others; but it’s on me.
See, God once upon a time made the Divine Presence known to me. God made Himself known to me. In many ways, small and large, I knew God’s Presence. In the way a breeze caressed me. In the way the atmosphere changed. In the way God spoke to me. But it’s been a very long time since I’ve experienced that. I’ve tried so many things to recover that sense of God. I have to content myself in struggling to be faithful and to acquiesce that, with or without experience, God exists.
You see, my life has been so wrapped up in God, and in my faith, and in the experience of that faith, that with it all gone, I don’t know who I am, any longer. And worse, I don’t know who I’m not.
What might I do to strengthen the connections among the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of myself?
Like the question of who I am and who I am not, this question asks of me something I can not provide. The soul is utterly unique to each of us. It arises from, and informs who we are. It is that point within us at which our unique “usness” meets the Divine. To paraphrase Thomas Moore’s reading for today, if I don’t know who I am not, I risk filling my soul with that which is bogus. And when that occurs, my soul has no way to present what is ultimately real of me.
So, what CAN I do to strengthen these connections? I can but continue to strive to sustain the faith I do have; to continue to seek the label-less me, though of course, when I do ultimately find that, it will no longer be label-less. Muscles unused wither, atrophy. Faith not exercised also will atrophy. Muscles are supported by our skeletal structure and our tendons. The experience of my faith that is now lost was the skeletal structure and the tendons which sustained and supported my faith. Without it, I don’t know how to sustain this faith. But, of course, as all analogies must, the whole thing falls apart here for me, because a body without skeleton or tendons becomes a puddle of goo, whereas my faith, without the experience of that faith, can and will remain strong. Perhaps it is the power of mind which sustains that faith that becomes surrogate skeleton and tendon.
In which case, I’m in deep doo doo!
On The Road II 