Tags
abuse, catholic, catholic spirituality, Christian, death, don't give up, enemies, forgiveness, God wins, healing, interior life, just keep going, knowledge, love, love remains, love wins, ouch, patience, sacrifice, salvation, spiritual blindness, suffering, Truth, waking up
Some days I still feel gross, flat, blah, out of it, mostly dead, or perhaps numb. I’ve had lots of practice in charging head with life no matter how I feel, but the desire is still there to run away from everything and hide under the covers. But hiding doesn’t help now.
Hiding helped when I was 19, after my dad beat me for the last time, while I saw hate and death in his eyes. When he abruptly stopped hitting me and charged off towards the room where he kept his loaded guns, I skedaddled. I ran outside through the garage door and hid. Stayed out until after dark, after dinner time, after everyone else in the family had eaten and gone off to do bedtime-type things, and he had had a while to cool down. If I hadn’t run off and hid that day, I might not be here to write this now. Who can tell? Sometimes people snap. Even people who firmly believe that they are one of the good guys.
My dad was like that. He still is. He only apologized to me once in my entire life, and it wasn’t for beating me; it was for a surprisingly small technicality of a discussion where I had been correct in some detail and he’d accused me wrongly at the time. It was trivial, but after all those beatings, and the times he watched me bathe, and the times he stole my hard earned money, and the times he crawled into my bed to make me feel disgusting early in the mornings when everyone else was still asleep, he chose to apologize for a triviality. This is because, as far as I can tell, he didn’t and doesn’t think those things he did to me were wrong.
So, yes, hiding has its place, but hiding from the feelings our memories dredge up never helps. It just prolongs the suffering, postpones the learning, and defers the awakening. If we who have broken hearts can embrace the truth, even with the bad feelings and bad memories, and learn from it, and wake up a bit more, then eventually we can circle back around and help others. It’s the cracks in our hearts that let the Love shine out. We can maybe even get to the point where we can ask God, with Jesus, “Father, forgive them, they didn’t know what they were doing,” when we are overwhelmed by memories and feelings from the past. And if enough of us do that, I’m convinced the that blind- “I’m one of the good guys” -people will start to wake up to the Truth… and the Truth will set us all free.