Greetings from Inside the Chrysalis

The really remarkable thing about my brother's photography (See my previous post on "You Thought It Was Easy?") is the process he used called "Focus Stacking" which provides an image so rich in detail that it can be blown up a hundred fold and still not pixelate. As the caterpillar turned to just worm-guts and then hardened its outer surface in the creation of the chrysalis, it was clear that there was no element of butterfly inside that package. And yet over the next few day's pictures, as the outer layer of that jade cocoon thinned you could see something happening. New lines and dark shapes could ever-so-faintly be seen through the surface. Change - real transformative change - was happening.

This creature just did what it was programmed in its DNA to do. But we humans, and this one in particular, far too often are wed to the past understanding of who we think we are.  Our memories of past successes and failures are blended and baked into a story that becomes our map for moving forward.  Constructivism (a field of psychology) says that we can only perceive new events within the context and framework for which we have a vocabulary and a basis of antecedent experiences with which to make sense of them. Actual "new: learning or behaviors are difficult to produce because we simply do not have the tools to produce them and we are too attached to the story already and always running in our mind. But what if that story (and that is what it is, the story we made up about what some event meant - not at all the actual event itself) is fictional? Mark Twain once quipped, "the older I get, the more vividly I can remember things that never happened!"

But inside the chrysalis, nothing of caterpillar, except for some of the worm guts, remain. Caterpillar is lost - not just forgotten - but totally gone forever. And that is what is called for in transformation: I must lose the story. All of it. I must lose the one about how I can do it by myself. Lose the story of how I am alone in this quest. Lose the story of "if you want something done right, do it yourself (thanks dad and Abe Lincoln for that one)." Lose the story that I am somehow better or stronger or more creative on my own than with any others as a pair, trio or group (Yes I know how arrogant that sounds - and inside here, that arrogance must die as well).

I am baffled as I peer through the enlarged picture of the cocoon and see what look like lines of a patterned wing are beginning to form. How is that possible? How can a black, yellow and white striped multi-legged worm lose all its defining characteristics and, as we will see in a few days, emerge as a skinny, six-legged insect with vibrantly colored orange and black wings. Transformation makes no logical sense.

Wrestling the Angel

For the past two years I have been researching and writing about the dark night of the soul, that place which on the outside looks like some spiritual desert, but inwardly is where the ego is stripped of its death hold on what it thinks it knows of the spiritual realm. On this journey I have met real life mystics and everyday people having mystical experiences.  I have had the blessing of friendships that are transforming and I have lost a few very dear ones as well. In many of these instances, had I not been studying the dark night, these special moments may have zipped right past me or thrown me into an unexpected downward spiral. But somehow I was graced by each of those occurrences and have come out just a tad more aware as a result.

Over the next few months or so, I will post bits and pieces from my thesis as I rework sections for publication.  I hope that which I have captured in this research can provide guidance or sustenance to fellow travelers who wrestle with their own angels or demons (do we ever know which it is that has grabbed us from behind?)

I think Rev. Renita Weems captured it best in the opening of her book, Listening For God: "No one is ever prepared to endure the long silence that follows intimacy. No one is prepared to face it when it comes after lovemaking. No one is prepared to face it when it comes after a season of intimacy with God. It is the hardest thing to talk about, and it is the hardest thing in the spiritual journey to prepare for. The long silence between intimacies, the interminable pause between words, the immeasurable seconds between pulses, the quiet between epiphanies, the hush after ecstasy, the listening for God – this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next you hear from God.

I would be honored if you'd let me know what you think.

The Dark Night of the Soul

The time for writing my Master's thesis at my seminary is rapidly approaching and the topic I have chosen is the transformative effects of the dark night of the soul. Now there are two problems associated with this:  One is that unless someone has been up against that wall or had their psyche squished through that pinhole, it is an academic discussion that makes little sense on anything other than a hypothetical level. The second is that many of the processes within that transformation are nonlinear and happen to you as opposed to something you do or even participate in.

Dark nights, generically speaking, are those times when the current level of understanding and experience one has no longer work and must die off in order to make way for a new and deeper connectivity.  Most people speak of the dark night as the place where prayer and connection dry up - they lose that feeling that somehow they are connected to god.  But that is just the signpost along the road! It's kind of like that signpost in the Wizard of Oz that says "certain death ahead" and "I wouldn't go further." And then you step forward.

The transformative effects of these dark nights are hard to describe, though I have attempted to find a language for them.  I keep running into the limits of consensual definitions. As I continue to scan through the literature both in print and on line, I find two camps of dark night literature that I recently tried describing to my son as those that get it and those that don't.

It is really amazing to read the words of those who have been through this continual and de-layering process.  They almost look forward to the next wave of nausea - knowing that it is certainly coming. They breathe differently and there is an acceptance in their speaking that is open and relaxed and all-encompassing.  Finding an academic way to present this "process" and producing attributions and descriptions of that difference will be challenging at the very least. But the thing I worry most about is writing in a way that even slightly suggests a smugness of knowing.  If anything, the dark nights have taught me that I do not know a thing.

Net Intimacy

There is - I think - a deep human longing for intimacy. However, given today's fractured society where everyone bustles along with ear buds plugged in or cell phones lodged between ear and shoulder, it seems we are even less connected than ever. I noted the look on a passenger in a car the other day as her driver chatted away to someone else while toodling along the highway - it was sad! Families are scattered from Michigan to Maine and Boston to Boca and often neighbors don't even know each others' names.

So we turn to Facebook! I have noted with growing alarm the number of intimate details that have been revealed on people's FB page - arguments with lovers and spouses, pain and grief over life situations and all nature of political, moral and ethical views. Not that it is inappropriate to express one's views, au contraire! I am happy people can express views and have a language for their feelings. What concerns me is that those same people (or me too) might not have an intimate friend to sit beside, or whose shoulder they might weep upon, or with whom they secretly confide a new, budding love. Have we lost that?

There are times the all three of us will be in the home office all working away on our respective computers - and not saying a word to each other! OOOO! The family that 'nets together, gets together! When I notice it (not always because I am focused on work, or my son on his homework), I try to interrupt the separation and bring us all into conversation. But I worry about others, about the strange mixture of aloneness and the loss of boundaries that exposes one's innermost self to the passing public. I fear that my 11 year-old son might grow up thinking that he is having a relationship with someone because they txt each other and that he is expressing himself because he has an array of emoticons! And I wonder if the Amish might not be so strange afer all! Reports show that suicide rates, though quadrupling in our society are lowest and staying put among the Amish and among cultures with lower technology.

And of course, as I write this, I think I had better call a close friend and talk about it!