Cross Purposes

I have not been posting here over the last few months as daily life has distracted me from the process of intentional reflection. Now as things settle down, in spite of it being the height of holiday rush, I hope to return to my discipline.

It is not that I haven’t been writing. Pieces were begun but got stuck or lost their focus or became too personal for public reading. So, reaching back to a piece I started about a year ago, here is something for Advent.

In “Joseph’s Dream,” an essay posted on Episcopal Café, the Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo reviews Joseph’s perspective on the birth of Jesus. Ferlo reminds us how much inner conflict Joseph must have felt when he discovered his wife-to-be was pregnant. How it was during a dream that Joseph learned who this child would be. What caught me was Ferlo’s reflection on how that inner chaos of Joseph matches ours:

“. . . our deepest desires at cross-purposes with each other. We feel it when we want at the same time to embrace our families and to escape them; when we harbor private grief or grievances in the midst of public joy; when in spite of the holiday, or because of it, we seek to escape to a darkened room, to banish all semblance of dreams, to sleep in blankness.”

I have been experiencing that kind of internal chaos. The sharp contrast between simultaneous feelings has been startling and confusing. My desire is to banish the negative and only feel the positive, which is impossible. They both demand attention, and are part of the same experience, engaged in the chaos.

I can only blame myself. I have been working for years to notice my feelings, and to notice when I have moved into denial. In my experience, denial shoves the negativity being avoided into a secret bank account, where it accumulates compound interest at high rates. When the denial fails, the bank account automatically opens to show all of fear and pain that has collected in the darkness, battering my soul.

So, I try to deal with things as they come, not bury them inside. However, that requires being open to my emotions, which do have a life of their own. Last year during a baptism at church, I found myself brimming with hope for the little girl who I don’t even know. I felt proud yet humbled in making the promise aloud that I would support her in her life in Christ. Tears came to my eyes as we sang a hymn while she was processed around the congregation. It was embarrassing, wiping my tears and blowing my nose during the last verse.

My tears came partly from my knowledge that I would not be remaining in that congregation, that my time within that community was temporary. Even as I made the promise, I knew I would not be available to care for her. My path would take me away to a different parish. While I try to justify it by saying I would fulfill my promise with some other child where ever I might be, I had a deeply felt desire to care for that particular infant.

So often, we are all like Joseph, with our “deepest desires at cross purposes.” As we enter Advent this year, “as with Joseph, the dream will come however much we try to block it, making of our mixed desires and the world’s distress the stuff of revelation.”

May God grant all of us the courage to be open to God’s revelation this Advent.