In life, I have constantly found myself thinking: “We are using the same words, but do we mean the same thing?” In the field of informal logic, “slippery terms” are words that mean one thing to one person and something different to another. They produce a consensus that is often an illusion, and therefore likely to fall apart.
For example, “The struggle has made me who I am today.” Sounds biblical, doesn’t it? Au contraire—the struggle has isolated me from others, and formed within me a convoluted life of contradictions. Because in America, a struggle that results in a self-made man is praised, but a struggle brought on by deviate, er, or should I say, deviant choices disqualifies others of responsibility. And in modern Christianity, shaking the dust off one’s feet in judgement is much quicker and easier than the messy and time consuming job of forgiveness and reconciliation. Hell, er, I mean, Heaven, I’ve been so regaled with shame, I’ve shaken the dust off my own feet.
At age 47, I finally became desperate and tired enough to do what I felt was best for me. After four decades of selfless giving and ministry to family, friends, and parishioners, I realized a life of contradictions and struggle had withered my soul. I had cared for everyone else—and failed to nourish the inner life of my own being—and was therefore incapable of caring for anyone, including myself.
These ten little contradictory words encapsulate the struggle I call life, so I suppose you could say they’ve made me the man I am today. For better or for worse. For good times and bad. For richer and for poorer. The agony and the ecstasy. You get the picture.
These ten words are certainly why I coined the term “happy sadness” for a sunset. Ten slippery and utterly incompatible words.
Yes/No—I penned in my memoir these words, “Religion, as I know it and as my parents know it, is a way of life where no is said with such constancy that on some days, one might forget that the affirmative is even a possibility.” And for someone who is a hopeless optimist, addicted to approval, and an artist that must break the rules in order to create—ah, what a dilemma. The phrase, “’tis better to ask forgiveness, than to ask permission” became my mantra.
Many of us grew up in this black and white YES and NO world. But for some reason deep down shades of grey seemed so much more life giving.
I feel we need much more YES in our lives. Perhaps the word YES is the most powerful affirmation one can make. Did you know that the word AMEN actually means YES?
NO is the word I was taught to use for myself, and YES was the word for all others. Isn’t that an ironic contradiction? A slippery slope?
Amen or oh me. Yes or no.
Love/Hate—There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. So said, the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Wait, is that a contradiction? I was told Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself. I’m so confused, about the same time, the Beatles were singing all you need is love, but I was forbidden by my religion to listen (er, I mean, love) them.
At church, ironically, all my neighbors looked and acted exactly the same, but what about all those other people in the world? What about me? Oh, God, I’m so…different.
I just read a quote by Justin Cronin that rocked my world, “Behind every great hatred is a love story.”
And another quote by Blakney Francis, “If you can just stop loving someone then you never really loved them at all. Love doesn’t work that way. If you ever truly love someone, then it never goes away. It can become something else. There are all different sorts of love. It can even become hate—a thin line and all that—and, really, hate is just another kind of caring.”
Really now? Really, hate is just another kind of caring?
Be/Do—Why is it so much easier to tell people about what I do than about who I am? Is the goal of life doing what I love, or being who I am? What if doing my job and being who I am is a contradiction? Is the goal of life to accomplish great things or be the best I can be?
At age forty, I first had the chilling realization that what I was doing was contradictory to who I was. It scared the hell/heaven out of me. I had let the noise of other opinions drown out my own inner voice.
And even scarier was the question: “Did I have the courage to follow my heart?” Wait a minute, doesn’t the Bible say somewhere not to trust my heart? Will being who I am and trusting my heart lead to a slippery slope?
Peace/Fear—I get it, Fox News makes billions scaring the hell out of people, but now its the local news, and for God’s sakes, even the Weather Channel is trying to make us afraid of the heavens. Fear is everywhere. We are afraid of anyone that is different than us.
There are millions of people afraid to go anywhere other than the radius of their hometown. Two out of three Americans do not even have a passport. Wasn’t it St. Augustine who said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page?”
Muslims are afraid of Christians, blacks afraid of whites, liberals afraid of conservatives, Americans are afraid of foreigners, and if we are honest, we probably all are secretly afraid of what Trump might do. We are a people—a world—of fear.
But wait a minute, isn’t there something about perfect love casts out fear? Ah, it’s beginning to make some sense. We hate therefore we fear. We love therefore we have peace. Could it be that simple?
Didn’t someone say, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind?” Was that “eye for an eye” thing Old Testament or New Testament? Does the Bible want to make us blind? Wait, or does it want us to be colorblind?
Empathy/Shame—Interestingly, in our dictionarys, the opposite of shame is pride. Isn’t that a contradiction? If so, is pride bad? Doesn’t it go before a fall or something like that? What is the opposite of shame? Does anyone know? I tried “Googling” it. Good luck with that. Do we even know?
Brene Brown is trying to help us, she says, “Shame is the belief that we’re unworthy of love and belonging. The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. Shame can’t survive empathy.” So, the opposite of shame is empathy? Hmmm, that seems to be contradiction.
Well, then no wonder I’m screwed. When I take empathy assessments, I am off the charts. Highly empathic. It’s how I’m made. No wonder shame crushes me so. I feel it so empathically.
Consider the words of author Sue Monk Kidd, “Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it’s accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another’s eyes or heart.”
Conclusion: Was it Nietzsche that said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Is that really true?
The first half of my life was all about these five murderous words. No. Hate. Do. Fear. Shame. They made me the man I was at age forty.
The powerful institutions in my childhood stand at the root of these words that in turn formed the dogma of the first half of my life. Not least important was an anxiety that never ceased to trouble me concerning the search for truth. The coldness, egotism, and selfishness of religion severely limited an attachment to my soul, and was also the key source, I believe, of many of the contradictions I speak of here.
I have decided in the second and final portion of my life to seek after the five words that are total opposites. Words that speak deeply to my soul.
Yes. Love. Be. Peace. Empathy.
In so many ways, these words hearken back to my childhood in the seventies.
I dare hope one day these five words will come to define my life, my goals, and yes, even my demons.
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