Truth

To Forgive or To Forgive…

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

“I will always be guilty,” he said matter of factly. “Nothing changes that.”

I have forgotten the exact question I had asked him. Maybe I had asked if he felt God had forgiven him or if he could accept that he had been forgiven, or something that, even then, felt silly the moment I heard the sound of my voice. Alistair Little was not a man who couched or minced his words, nor did he let euphemisms do the heavy lifting when talking about his past. Little’s story can be read in online articles, his book, “Give a Boy a Gun,” and seen in a film starring Liam Neeson (as Little) and James Nesbit, called Five Minutes of Heaven. When he was a 17 year old UVF member, the man having lunch next to me at this peace center in Northern Ireland had shot a catholic man dead in his home. The victim’s younger brother, who had been playing in the street, saw it all through the window. It was a terrible trauma and eventually dissolved that whole family. Little served twelve years of a life sentence as a political prisoner, and since his release, has been doing the work of reconciliation among victims, survivors, and perpetrators of political conflict in Ireland and abroad. Our paths converged when I had the privilege to take his and Wilhelm Verwoerd’s workshop as part of my M.Phil. in Conflict Resolution & Reconciliation.

This memory resurfaced as I have recently had reasons to have a good hard think on the word forgiveness and how often it is used in a number of different ways that, in my view, undermine its real meaning. More often than not, it is this misunderstanding of what forgiveness is and isn’t that actually gets in the way of healthy boundary setting and real, wholehearted reconciliation. Living amongst a flawed human race myself, I cannot escape the need to forgive and, truth be told, be forgiven. So, it serves me well to take stock if I am dealing in the genuine article, or if I have been duped by one of these counterfit versions of forgiveness. Little’s transformative journey from committing a heinous crime to being a force of nature for reconciliation could not have happened without forgiveness, even if he may not even use that word, and the memory of my encounter with him comes up just in time for his story to serve as a good ‘authentication tool’ against which to compare these pseudo versions of forgiveness.

Pseudo Forgiveness

These substitute usages of forgiveness apply to both the forgiveness we are offering as well as the forgiveness we ask/demand of others. Here is a short list: Forgiveness as a…

Get Out of Jail Free Card: Of course this is probably the most common and the most obvious miss-use of the concept. Probably since Constantine, humans small and tall, from our very own children all the way up to mega-church pastors, have effectively been pulling out the forgiveness card when caught in both minor and severe transgressions. The person who is quick to invoke this core Christian duty usually has had too little time to actually have even begun a truly transformative paradigm shift. Being more concerned with the likely consequences of their actions, a plea for forgiveness can be a pragmatic tool to bargain a person’s way out of any social, financial, or physical pain which may be coming their way. Forgiveness becomes a magic eraser which disappears any logical, natural, and causal lines connecting behavior with negative outcomes. Besides doing absolutely less than nothing to move the relationship needle toward genuine reconciliation, this Get-out-of-jail-free-forgiveness, if granted, robs the user of one of life’s most valuable learning and character development tools: the pain of consequences. Any wisdom any of us have has not come purely from theory and book learning. We have gained it the hard way, through trial and error, through experience, through the hard knocks of bad choices. Taking those knocks away from someone obstructs the growth of wisdom, character, and maturity and is likely to breed entitlement instead.

A Muzzle:. “Why can’t you just forgive and forget. Why can’t you just let it go?!” When we say this to someone who is calling us out and asking us to do better, we are leveraging forgiveness as a mouth gag to anyone who would want to hold us accountable for our actions. It implies that bringing it up at all is already a failure to forgive. When we say this to someone, what we are really saying is that we want them to privately do all the work to reconcile our differences. We don’t want to know anything about it. Behind this is the need to remain flawless in our own eyes, so if someone has a beef with us, it can only mean that they are unforgiving (if you are a christian) or intolerant (if you are a liberal). But beyond that, both the core teaching of forgiveness in the Christian tradition and the core value of tolerance in Liberal Humanism are often wielded as extremely effective tools to squelch dissonance and maintain dominance and control in social/political groups.

A Witness Relocation program: For those who procure this kind of forgiveness, it means not only do they get a whole new identity (“You are a new creation in Christ”), but also they receive a whole new back story! Not only are we no longer one who cheats on their wife, commits murder, or skims from the top, but we never were that person! In this way of understanding forgiveness, being forgiven means we get to tear out all of those unflattering pages and snap-shots of our story, put them through the shredder, and just leave the wholesome, flattering, respectable bits in. They are never to be spoken of again. They are the “sins” that shall not be named! In groups practicing this understanding of forgiveness, everyone is a generic sinner, “the worst of sinners” actually, but no one has ever even made a single, concrete, nameable mistake, let alone done anything that would put a speck on their wholesome, respectable, good christian/good liberal image. They all just slipped in through the side door and took a seat in the back pew as if they had been among the saints this whole time.

In the new gender-cult, there is a similar dogma called “dead-naming.” Here it is not only the person transitioning to a new identity who hustles to keep their past identity on the down-low, but the entire community and world around them that must be forgiven for having gotten it wrong to begin with! It is everyone else who must delete every possible trace of a person’s pre-transition selves from our memories, perceptions, and experiences, if we want any crumb of relationship with them going forward. In both cases, the past identity is whitewashed of everything a person finds intolerable about themselves and is unwilling to integrate into a new, shiny, and allegedly more worthy identity.

A Jack-in-the-Box: Being in a relationship with a person practicing this kind of forgiveness seems too good to be true…because it is too good to be true. This person appears to have the capacity to overlook (forgive) (tolerate) all of our shortcomings, annoying habits, Faux pas’, and even more serious transgressions. This person can seem to be the model of tolerance right up until you have to draw a boundary or ask them to do better in some area. Immediately the music stops and, BOING!, out springs this very ugly, unflattering version of you marked and blemished with every-single-thing-you-ever-did-or-didn’t-do that hurt, disappointed, or irritated this person at some point in your relationship with them. My brother calls them, “Whatabouters,” because if you ever bring up something that bothers you about their behavior, they counter with, “Well, what about when you…” (full discloser: my brother and I did this with each other for years while we were growing up together, and I can neither confirm nor deny that my husband and I have done this!). As it turns out, they were not even in a relationship with you this whole time, but with this simulated-monster of you they kept to themselves – and everyone else they would show it to except you. In this way, they would never dare risk loosing your favor by speaking up for themselves, but all the while in their own mind, they maintain a steady sense of patronizing superiority and hold you in private contempt and maybe resentment. … that is, until you break the “contract” and BOING!

The “Free Zone”: In the game Capture the Flag, each team has a designated side where they hang their flag. The goal of the game is to be the first team to capture the opposing team’s flag (which is supposed to be visible and accessible). Only to do so, a player must venture onto the opposing side of the field/landscape where they run the risk of being captured and “imprisoned.” To get free again, another teammate must tag them, thus risking their own freedom. Team members are only safe on their team’s section of the field or in the designated “Free Zone” in-between the two sides. There are always players who hang out in the free zone because they are either afraid of getting caught, if they move into the ‘home territory of the other team, or they are afraid someone might steal their own team flag, if they do not patrol their home border.

Of course the game is only fun if all the players are willing to take risks, and it is not really worth playing at all, if all the players just hang out in the free zone. But this is how many people live relationships. In these groups, Forgiveness or Tolerance is this “free zone.” Here, only safe topics are allowed, the kind that do not cause any tension at all. This, by necessity, excludes most of what truly matters to people: religion, politics, values, struggles, our vision for how things could be. The “flag” of their true identity is safely hidden away on their home turf. If someone behaves in a way that is or seems unacceptable to someone, it is not discussed in the free zone. It is brought behind the line to our home-side of the field and tallied there against the other team without the offenders knowledge. The game is just one very long stalemate, with at least some players hoping that the tally will fall in their favor when the game is “officially” scored at the very end.

This is the cowards version of forgiveness (or the liberal’s Tolerance). It is not based on generosity, but on mitigating loss, competing morality, and image-protection. It is peace without justice, which is no peace at all. In this Free-Zone there is a lack of wholehearted integrity, a lack of growth, and little if any movement toward mutuality, true collaboration, and intimacy. Instead, there is just light entertainment and a polite, superficial, and often unspoken agreement to stay clear of any topic that creates tension or calls into question our own or someone else’s flawless Avatar.

It takes courage to wade deeper onto the other’s ‘home field’ in generous candor to say what we really think and feel about the impact they are having on us and to get to the “flag” of real, authentic relationship with the actual person behind their projected, idealized image. And it takes courage to let others onto our home field, to let them see our scratch-pad where we are still working things out before we deliver a more palatable version of ourselves to the free zone, and to also hear what impact we are having on our community and world.

None of the above scenarios are what I would call true forgiveness or tolerance, and whether we find ourselves on the receiving end or the granting end, they do not do the job that real forgiveness is needed to do. In actuality, all these tactics are just your standard ole Conflict Avoidance masquerading as forgiveness/tolerance. In one way or the other, they are simply another means that we try to avoid one or more of the Big Three nuisances of being human: Responsibility, Limitations, and Discomfort (pain, loss, effort) and the inner conflicts that they create for us while living in a world where everything is so unlike us in all too many ways that matter. For conflict avoiders, it is more often than not the fear of losing favor with others (to not be good in their eyes) which is in the driver’s seat, and so they fall into a pattern of ignoring or masking their own limitations (boundaries, insufficiencies, wants, needs, values, purpose), while also shouldering responsibilities that belong to others and/or dodging taking 100% responsibility for themselves and the impact they have on their community and the world (blaming, excusing). But none of that sounds very nice, so it gets dressed up as forgiveness/tolerance.

I don’t mind telling you that I have lived for far too long in relationships on both sides of this kind of conflict-avoidance-forgiveness-tolerance, and I can report back that it is a cheap knock-off of the original! But buying into these street-vender versions of forgiveness is much worse than buying a fake Birkin bag. When we forgo engaging in the conflict necessary to practice real forgiveness, we miss out on the three most valuable things there are: Our Integrity, our growth, and movement toward mutuality and intimacy with others. So, for me, in any and all of my relationships, doing conflict has become a non-negotiable.

The Real Thing

Alistair Little is, of everyone I have ever met, a No Bullshit guy. I experienced more candor in that one week workshop than I had ever experienced in most of the long relationships I have had, some of them for almost my entire life. And how could he not be? When working with tough-as-nails, Irish ex-combatants who had suffered tremendous loss at each other’s hands, one cannot tip-toe around the bloodshed. Polite & Superficial aren’t going to deliver reconciliation. Alistair may or may not have used the word forgiven to describe himself, but his answer to me that day clearly indicated that he had not been duped by the knock-off version of it. “I will always be guilty.” “Nothing will change that.”

Guilt is just a shorter word for responsibility. It is the responsibility for the past, what we have done and left undone. In other words, he was saying that forgiveness does not absolve him of the responsibility for what he had done. “I will always be guilty.” It is a simple statement of fact without any emotions necessarily tied to it. He murdered a man. That will always be part of his story. An act that has far reaching ramifications into the future.

To acknowledge my guilt means I continue to take responsibility for my past and present self, no matter how unflattering or truly awful it may be, by owning it and transforming it into something meaningful and beautiful for community. That is a job that never ends. And I would say Alistair Little’s life is as good of an example of this as I have ever come across. His acceptance and integration of his past, his ongoing transformational growth, and his offering this wisdom and insight in generous candor for the service of healing the environment that had seeded his own violence are all the evidence I need to know that he is dealing in the genuine article of forgiveness.

How it Works

I think mostly forgiveness is thought of as letting go of negative feelings toward someone (and this someone can also be ourselves) who has harmed or disappointed us in some way – feelings of grief, resentment, irritation, animosity, anger, vengeance, contempt, or dread, for example. But I have wrestled with some of those feelings in some relationships for many years and have thrown everything at them, including the pseudo-forgiveness’s I’ve listed above, only to have these feelings compounded rather than diminish. I have come to suspect that it is a fool’s errand to keep trying to dissipate emotions while ignoring what it is exactly that is causing them. Like trying to relieve the pain of a blister while still wearing the shoes you love but that are simply too small. Those feelings tell us that something is amiss in a relationship, that there is a disconnect that is compromising either our integrity, our flourishing, or our need for meaningful connection – or all of the above. This disconnect will have to be addressed if we ever hope to have those negative feelings dry up or, better still, transformed into empathy and compassion.

In this light, forgiveness is not an act of letting go of our negative feelings toward the other (the painful blister), which I believe is not possible anyway, but an act of letting go of our fantasy about the other as well as the fantasy about ourselves. To let go of the fantasy about the other is to let go of the idealized image that we have of who they should/could be to us or how they should have behaved (a shoe that looks good and fits comfortably!) but fail to live up to. This image can be what they project and want us to believe about themselves (The Wizard of Oz), or what we project onto them (Nate’s Ted Lasso). To let go of the fantasy about ourselves is to let go of the idealized image of ourselves as being more magnanimous than we are (Grandiosity). It means letting go of the idea that by performing forgiveness and tolerance and inclusion for people whose behavior toward us consistently demonstrates their lack of interest in who we actually are, their need to outdo us (in status, achievement, or even morality), and how little we matter to them and factor into their priorities, we can somehow manage to win them into a relationship where we finally feel seen, supported, and included. Ironically, the more magnanimous and inclusive we strive to appear, the smaller our actual selves become, since it is only through self-betrayal (denying our limitations), self-diminishment (staying small), and self-exclusion (staying silent), that we are able to maintain the farce of community.

So, in forgiving someone, and even ourselves, we are letting go of the fantasy of who they (we) ought to be and acknowledging the reality of who they are and what they are actually capable or willing to offer us. We accept not only the limitations, inability, and/or unwillingness of the other to meet our needs, wants, expectations, and boundaries, but also the space (gap) which that inevitably creates between us! It does not fill that space with more effort, skilling up to better defend ourselves or disarm the other, coddling, badgering, pretending, exceeding/ignoring our own limitations (boundaries), a continuous shouldering of the other’s responsibility, or resentment, hellfire, and fury. In other words, forgiveness relinquishes the insistence that the other be something they are not yet, and may never become, while also maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space created between those two realities. It is only once we have done this, that we are able to appropriately redefine the relationship in a way that no longer compromises our integrity, limits our growth, nor cheats us out of meaningful connection.

This space which gives us all room to both acknowledge and transform who we really are, some might call the Growth Mindset. I call it a guilt/grace paradigm, and it is the practice of forgiveness which unlocks that space for us and for others. This practice of forgiveness, which acknowledges and allows for the gap between where we actually end and where they actually begin, recognizes and honors both our and the other’s worthiness and dignity to exist as imperfect, not fully matured human beings, it holds each of us responsible for our own limitations as well as our transformational growth, and it invites the other into an authentic, better quality, and mutually satisfying relationship. Forgiveness stands with arms open wide as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy with us.

But this is not yet reconciliation.

Forgiveness is only the invitation.

Reconciliation can only happen when that invitation is accepted.

Below I’ve tried to illustrate what this looks like to me:

Forgiveness :

When we are forgiven it…

  • Changes the future not the past
  • Releases us from retributive punishment & condemnation (contempt) for our choices, not from the consequences of our choices
  • Frees us from being limited to our past not from the responsibility for that past

When we forgive we…

  • …Open the possibility to create/restore authentic relationship (each as they actually are), not idealized images & shared fantasy
  • …Cancel an unpayable debt from the past as an investment in a generative future (either together or apart!!), we do not keep upping the anti on a losing hand!
  • …Relinquish the insistence that the other be something they are not yet and may never become, while maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space/difference created between those two realities.
  • …Keep the path clear and open for the other to grow into a person of wholehearted integrity who respects our boundaries, shares our values & purpose, and wants meaningful connection, instead of canceling for good those who have failed us. (Murdering someone in your heart = dead to me)
  • …Have an inner attitude of Standing with arms open wide in generous candor as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, to share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy.

Wrap up…

Forgiveness does not erase what we or others have done or left undone (if it did, we wouldn’t have a Bible at all!). It does not pretend that wrong doing never happened or that it does not elicit a strong emotional response in us. And it is not a vow of silence that must be kept to protect someone else’s image and reputation. It is not a Witness-Relocation Program nor a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card. Rather, forgiveness is the open window which lets the fresh air and sunlight in, giving us the space and visibility to begin exactly where we are to name the mess for what it is without fear of condemnation and retribution. In this Guilt/Grace paradigm (Growth mindset), I do not have to be forever stuck being the worst version of myself, living under the fear of exposure, shame and pay-back, nor do I need to spend valuable resources keeping my flaws hidden behind a perfect image. Rather, I know my limitations, mistakes, and ugly moments (and those of other’s) can be transformed into something that is generative and connective, when I acknowledge them and integrate them into the story of who I am, do what I can to regain trust wherever it has been broken, and invest my energies into creating a more just and beautiful world.

My Striving and Me (part II)

/ It Takes One To Know One / 3 Comments

(This is the second part of To Strive or Not to Strive)

When I listen to Bilyeu and hear this oh so familiar clarion call to chase your goals with “these ten rules and this secret sauce,” I can’t help but wonder how my life has stacked up to my own dreams. I am no stranger to having caught a ‘vision’ for/of my future: the resonance I felt around teachers, speakers, and preachers even from as young as four or five; the inspiration and sense of kinship I feel when reading certain authors; the pure delight that these wordsmiths seem to forge in me; and the confirmation I received of my own abilities for writing/teaching/preaching during my time at college. But in the years since, I have had to contend with an undercurrent of panic fueled by the thought that I have somehow missed my calling, have squandered my gifts and training, and have receded into obscurity, having not filled in my spot of the grand puzzle.

I have so often flagellated my conscience for not hustling harder to make this future happen… that I have not already written my book, not already become a public speaker, not already unleashed a movement. I berate myself for getting distracted by the circumstances and the needs that those circumstances presented. Never-mind that these ‘distractions’ were that I fell in love, threw all my energies into raising a family, tried to form deep community, lived in several foreign countries and learned a few languages, followed my curiosity and my interests for designing spaces and events, worked for years for free to fulfill other people’s goals- I let them shift my focus away from pursuing this one vision of myself and my gifts!

Over the decades, I have felt the excruciating pressure of multiple longings and interests competing for my limited time and attention, and no matter which thing I focus on, feeling a sense of guilt and restlessness for neglecting the others. I have so often anxiously suffered under that sense of urgency to reach all of those goals before crossing that final finish line, before my time is up. Sometimes it seems to me that all these other needs and longings have led me down a different path entirely, have somehow stolen something from me… my future perhaps?

Compounding this dilemma, is the sad fact that I am the slowest human being alive. Implementing any one of the million ideas, the possible worlds that exist in my head, is an excruciatingly slow process. The ideas are backed up for miles and miles, each waiting impatiently for their day to be born into this time-space-matter matrix we call life. And just as waiting on too many tables always put me in the weeds and would find me in the walk-in fridge cussing and crying before the night was over, my inability to keep up with the onslaught of things going on both in my head and around me often overwhelms me. Because of this, I experience this creative process as a kind of hustle, an anxious striving, and always a race, not always against others, but always against the clock.

So the discussion that Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu have had is deeply relevant to me and touches on this irksome question about pursuing any goals of any kind, having any images at all to aim for, even as trail markers along the way, as we are guided by a worthy, universal, and truly infinite North Star. Does every image trap us in a dopamine-induced hustle for a finite identity based on a comparative/competitive measure/orientation? Is every creative idea an image casting on the pavement ahead of us, like hopscotch, that pulls us to scuttle and scurry after it? Every new thought and idea of what could be taunting the shortcomings of our current reality?

This is what I have struggled against for what seems like my whole life. The image of the idea in my head drawing the yardstick, the finish line, plum line for the reality that I struggle to make it become. The longing for a beautiful home, a worthy goal or a hustle for the hit of dopamine that status and comfort can give? The dream of a lovely garden, an expression of creativity, or a refusal to be content with things as they are? The vision for a certain kind of loving, intimate community, a new reality worth the effort and conflict, or proof of my intolerance for human fallibility? The log-jam of things to write about, raw ideas needing only the logic and language I can give them, or simply a restless spirit and an over active imagination? The impulse to preach/teach, a promise of certain contribution, or a pipe-dream that taunts me with FOMO? Change the world, or be content with the way it is? Lord knows the people telling me to leave well enough alone are stacked a mile high and more than fifty years deep.

A New Perspective

But while contemplating this conversation with Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu, I had a new thought, and for the first time I can remember, I can begin to feel the pressure lifting. This new thought rises up from a deep well I dug a long time ago and which has quietly sustained me all these years. This well is filled with the imperfect, but invaluable narrative and propositional wisdom which has been passed along through millennia like a precious family heirloom. Filtered? Worn? Problematic? Contextualized? Misappropriated? Shocking? Yes, I think so. And yet, I have always been able to trace within it, as if my finger were tracing a red thread, the very questions I ask of myself and the world today: Am I enough? Why am I here? And Where do I belong? And like a weary and bedraggled currier, it offers me a gulp of water it has smuggled through 3000 years of rough terrain, and instantly and instinctively I know that it is curative.

I am talking about the account of a shepherd boy’s rise to the throne in the Judeo/Christian traditional literature. In this narrative, when David is anointed in secret by Samuel to be king of Israel, he is still a boy tending his father’s sheep, and it isn’t until many years and many trials later that it actually came about. Joseph’s dream of ruling over his brothers is another such narrative. There are many other times the Universe seems to give people a peek into their future, though they still have a long way to go to get there, and if you are caught up on your quantum theory, it is no longer far fetched to believe this is possible. But even if the narrative is a fiction, a myth to transport a deeper truth, what is the wisdom it wants to convey? What is the medicine it offers me?

What is the message of such a future glimpse? “Here, you should strive to be king! And all of your priorities and everything you do should be oriented toward achieving this goal!”? Get yourself an MBA at King School, do these ten things and add this special sauce so you can claim your crown? I don’t think so. There is no indication in the narrative that David is being told what he should do or what should happen, but instead it relays what will happen. It is a promise. It is drawing back the curtains and saying, “look, this is in your future, for certain, so whatever else comes your way, whatever obstacles or apparent detours you may face, whatever menial chores, whatever or whoever conspires against you, whatever obligations or needs you will be asked to fulfill, don’t worry, it is not a fools errand! Because the outcome is already secured, you are free to give your full attention, commitment, and engagement to the moment by moment, the step by step of your life as it unfolds before you. You do not have to hustle for this future you have glimpsed. It already exists.”

The promise, the sneak peak, was not a finish line to ‘cross or be doomed’ with which God goaded him. It was not a Vision-carrot to increase motivation and participation in company goals. It was not a fix point of orientation around which to plot and scheme and prioritize the people, places and things of his life, so as to orchestrate that end. It was an “It is done” declaration that would be a go-to well of comfort and hope in the midst of the extraordinary hardships, challenges, and drudgery that David would face in the years that preceded his wearing the crown. Ascending the throne was not something David achieved. He became King. He grew into a sovereign able to exorcise authority on this level through a curriculum David would not have chosen nor have known to create for himself. In so far as David rose to face each of the challenges that confronted him, doing what seemed to be the right thing to do to the best of his knowledge and abilities for himself and his people (or sheep as it were) at that time, he collaborated in that process…leaving the outcomes to God, or fate, as you will.

So what if I have gotten it backwards all these years? What if this thread of longing and intuition I have had my whole life about the kind of work I should be doing, which has goaded me for as many years, was actually just a promise of what the fact of what some part of my future would look like? What if it was meant as an assurance to help me relax into my life, with all the unexpected bends and twists that it would have, and not panic about meeting the myriad of markers that are held out to us to gain “worthiness” points in this world? What if it was never meant to drive me to scurry along this yellow brick road toward some ambitious goal in the future so I will win the prize? What if instead, God was saying, this whole area is filled out already! This is who you are, past, present, and future, and it is enough! You are free to take it one step at a time, one challenge at a time, at your own pace. You are free to live in the moment of it, even while you and the universe move toward the future together in a collaborative dance. There is no hurry. There is no scarcity of time, because you will get there exactly when you need to.

Just because David was anointed King long before he would be King, God never said that is all that he will be. It is like David only got a glimpse behind the last window of the advent calendar, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other windows, or that the same kind of chocolate would be behind every other door. Or in other words, we want to make a B-line from where we are now to some marker of success or fruitfulness on a distant horizon. We want to cut across the grass, so to speak. If we take that route, all we have from our lives is that one, well worn path and perhaps a significant amount of time being “ahead” of others and smugly waiting for them to catch up – or hoping they never do. This kind of hustle may get some somewhere faster, but almost always by externalizing the cost of their lives or denying and excluding other pressing needs. But just as disturbing, by having such a laser focus on some marker of success, we could be denying the fullness, depth, and dimension our life could have had, had we been fully present for all of it.

Life as a Spiral

What if instead of cutting across the grass, we are meant to weave a spiral out of what we’ve been given, the way one would crochet a round area rug from leftover scraps of material? Each crochet loop tightly stitched to the row that came before and the one that comes after, going around and around in a spiral, one stitch at at time. By the end, we will have a multi-colored, rich tapestry, full of unexpected things, hard things, joyful things. At any given point along our journey, we are what we have woven out of the scraps life has given us, and what we have woven forms the basis for what comes next. In this way our identity is our foundation not our orientation.

But if we were shown any one part of it, say a short stretch made from a silk tie, or worse yet, see someone else’s rug made of desirable fabric, we may come to believe that our whole rug should be made from that yellow and blue striped silk, spend our lives looking for this particular fabric, be willing to pay exorbitant prices for it, and waste all the good fabric we already had. That is the hustle. The striving.

So what could be a worthy orientation for our lives? I think to truly be a worthy North Star, it must be values that are infinite, eternal, and universal. It must give us the questions we can ask ourselves in any and every situation to help guide us. It must leave the door open for others, especially the least of these (anyone who is not/will not be instrumental to our ego-goals), to shape the answers to the question what is good at any given time. For me that leaves Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, in that order, as worthy points for a North Star. Not trying to Be Right, Good, or Beautiful (harmony of just relationships), but seeking them like water or oxygen to nourish a thirsty and gasping soul. My curiosity, my creativity, my energies, my attention, my resources, my competencies all attuned to seek and create these realities in my immediate vicinity, in others, in my circumstances, even in my enemies, as one would precious minerals, no telling where it may lead me save for the few reassuring glimpses I have tucked away in my heart. These are the magnets that draw me forward, as I stitch row for row on what came before, who I was every bit a part of who I am as the new creation I am becoming moment by moment. In this way, I weave a life that accepts the givenness of things even while I reach toward connection and grow in ways that are true and good and just for me and my neighbor.

Full Circle

The narrative in no way whitewashes David’s grave moral failings, and yet, in the final equation, it tells us that God chose David to be King because he had a heart after God’s own heart. Maybe another way of saying this is that David navigated his daily life oriented toward the North Star of the infinite, eternal, and universal principles of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, because that is what was most valuable to him. Even when looking into the mirror of truth meant seeing the ugliest things about himself and what he had done, he did not look away, nor did he expunge the public record of it. He was able to do this because he was deeply and securely grounded in the knowledge and acceptance that his past, present, and future self, his Identity, were in the hands of a power greater and more benevolent than himself, and would be enough.

Though Dr. Lembke and Bilyeu’s conversation was about understanding and moderating dopamine, the neurochemical responsible for motivation, at the heart of their exchange, I believe, is the age old duality between what is and what is not yet. The reality we are born into and the world we are creating. The centripetal forces that pull us around and around what is known, and the centrifugal forces that pull us out into that which is not yet known. To err one way is to circle in place like a broken record, to stagnate, to wither, and become irrelevant. To err the other way is to chase a mirage, dissociate, become unmoored, and be lost to chaos. I think what we are avoiding in our endless over-consumption of easy dopamine (and I am thinking of my own eating, binging, and shopping habits!) is the unique pain that each of these two forces brings with them. I wonder if the kind of balance that Dr. Anne Lembke is advocating is to allow both forces to act on our lives in a way that produces a stable but growing spiral. Not just chasing for the sake of chasing. Not just resting on our laurels, or on those that came before us. We form a solid and stable spiral by leaning into the promise and the pain of both of these forces. Facing what has come before and what is with radical honesty, embracing this imperfect reality with grace and compassion, and salvaging and curating whatever good we can with gratitude, while also allowing curiosity, creativity, and empathy to pull us outside ourselves so we may venture into the risk of failure and danger, as well as all the novel truth, goodness, and beauty that still lay waiting to be both discovered in and given to the world.