Different governments, officials, environmental agencies exhort us to conserve the energy we use in order to save the environment and sustain our continued existence on the planet.
On a personal level I think that we also need to know how to conserve, focus and maximise our own personal supply of energy. We unconsciously dissipate and waste our energy on people, situations, thoughts, attitudes and events which do not serve us well. This leaves less space and energy for creating and attracting the kind of abundance that we want in our lives.
Interestingly enough I've also found that as I conserve, focus and thereby maximise my energy, I tend to use less energy on craving and acquiring "stuff", but more energy focusing on what is truly important to me, thereby helping the environment.
So here are 5 Ways to Maximise Your Personal Energy Supply.
1. Release Resistance
Releasing resistance will affect a profound change in your level of energy and how you view the world. Resistance often feels as though we are going against ourselves in order to satisfy some internal authority or a myriad of "shoulds" "oughts" and "have tos". It takes a tremendous amount of energy to be resistant.
Related feelings and behaviour include: procrastination, using willpower and discipline to effect change (otherwise known as "I Have To Struggle To Achieve What I Want"!), stubborness, inflexibility, wanting to be right rather than happy (a very popular one:), holding onto self limiting beliefs way past their sell by date.
Releasing resistance can be as easy as just making a decision to let go of whatever you are holding onto. Energy therapy also helps release resistance at a very deep level.
2. Reduce time watching TV
Watching TV unconsciously is very exhausting. Haven't you noticed that when you watch TV continuously and do little else, you become extremely tired? That's because you are merely a passive recipient of information that you're not fully engaged with. On an energetic level, taking in all of those rays from the TV (similar to a computer) is overstimulating on a physiological level. Of course while you are watch TV, it means that you're not doing something more productive.
Am I saying that you stop watching TV altogether? No, but to be more selective and watch only those programs that you are engaged with. I'd also say that stop watching the TV news - all of that manufactured fear really affects you on a cellular level. I find that my mindset, moods and overall energy improve significantly when I watch less TV.
3. Consciously create vacuums
Ever heard of the saying: "Nature abhors a vacuum". If you clean out an area of your life, you are giving the Universe a message to bring in something to replace it. This is otherwise known as energetic and/or physical clutter clearing. Start with either. Most people find it easier to start with clearing out the physical which has an effect on their energies. You are consciously creating the space for change to occur and inviting what you want into your life. This is much much easier than efforting to make things happen.
4. Avoid/deal with Energy Vampires
One of the quickest ways to get an energy boost is to disassociate yourself from those with those whose energy drains you. It is very effective. Unfortunately, it also becomes a little more difficult if they are your partner, member of your family, work colleagues or boss. It helps to develop a stronger set of boundaries and energetic protection, so that they are less likely to affect you in this way.
5. Create quiet time for yourself every day.
Not to do anything (unless it relaxes you), but just to clear and refresh your mind. We are human beings, not doings. There are times when our crowded schedule and minds don't allow space and time for the creative to be welcomed in. Einstein liked to go sailing in the afternoons after working in the morning. Okay, most of us don't have this opportunity, but you get the point.
If you only do one of the above, then your life will undergo a profound change.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Divorcing God
Divorcing God isn't easy-especially after a lifetime thinking you had a monopoly on truth. Truth you embraced as absolute simply because someone told you it was. It is even more difficult when you've spent the last twenty-eight years up on a pedestal inside a fishbowl.
Sometimes, divorce is the only way out of an unhealthy relationship. A woman has to get out, get her head screwed on straight, and then start over. I didn't divorce God, I divorced my husband, but at the time it felt like the same thing.
In a way, it was.
I've heard that Catholic nuns consider themselves married to God. I wasn't Catholic, I was Southern Baptist, but I'd married God all the same. Looking back on it now, if I'd known God wasn't a man, I wouldn't have felt like I had to. Most divorces don't occur overnight. Instead, a disconnect causes a crack. Over time the crack warps, widens, and finally an inciting incident pushes it over the edge. When, then, did my disconnect begin?
In her book Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun defines the unambiguous woman as one who puts a man at the center of her life, allowing only to occur what honors his paramount position. Her desires, dreams and wishes are forever secondary.
I risked nothing to become such, for I'd spent my first seventeen years learning the "godly role" of a sanitized, unambiguous woman-and it is a short step from that to wife-yea, preacher's wife. For the sleep dust sprinkled in my eyes by my mother, who was herself, a captive of the times, had anesthetized my spirit.
Add to that the self-serving 'will of God' preached by a patriarchal religion, and enforced by my husband, a self-proclaimed 'man of God,' and my spirit, the essence of who I am, was sacrificed as surely as though I'd been nailed to a cross.
Even from conception my world was a wild combination of advance and retreat, then advance again. My body knew things long before my mind did. Even my birth was an on-and-off again affair, battered back and forth by the drama unfolding within my parent's relationship.
My mother never questioned nor modified life's answers given to her by others, for she believed in a world of certainties.
Do this, get that.
But when she did this, and that didn't pan out, she never doubted, for it didn't mean the answer wasn't correct. It just meant she had not done enough of that. She would redouble her efforts, believing that even in the failure, the problem wasn't in the answers she'd been given, but the effort she'd put forth. And since her husband, my father, marched to the beat of his own drum, he forever changed the equation.
Put simply, the problem wasn't the answers she'd been given, the problem was in the doing, or the lack thereof, so she tightened her hold on the answers while the questions of the world multiplied and sucked her down into the mire of dysfunction. My first glimpse that something was wrong, terribly wrong, came the morning after my wedding. Other than a severe downpour, my June 1957 church wedding went off without a glitch. Friends and family gathered with congratulations and celebration. The three-tiered wedding cake baked by my aunt tasted delicious. At the appropriate time-God forbid that I'd do anything inappropriate-I escaped to the bedroom, slipped out of the damp, white gown, and into a sky-blue suit and stood before the mirror. The girl staring back questioned whether it was true; had the wallflower really married the town's most eligible bachelor-the handsome twenty-three-year old preacher-boy? What a coup!
I was a kid playing grown up.
Barely seventeen, with another year of high school ahead of me, I had successfully fulfilled the expectations of my parents, of my peers, and of my church leaders. All was right with my world.
Until the next morning.
As we dressed, my husband sat tying his shoes. "There's one thing I need to tell you," he declared, glancing up at me, authority in his eyes. "God will always come first in my life. You'll be second-but God will be first." Then he stood, pulled his Bible out of the suitcase and opened it. "And we will read the Bible and pray together every day."
His well-intentioned words shattered something inside me, and the pieces tumbled to my feet, pieces of something undefined, yea unborn. I felt slapped, shoved aside. My role in the marriage would never be as an adult, but as a child with a male parent telling me what I would do-yea believe. The pious statement clearly defined the submissive wife. I was secondary. Further, when I needed an opinion, he'd give it to me. Our life together would be his life-not mine.
The disconnect had begun.
Before marriage, I had believed I was important to God and to him, but not now. Now, he and God came first, or his view of God, which, unquestionably, was the patriarchal Him. I came in a distant third.
What then was our marriage? Sacred? How could it be sacred, I wondered, when it is on the bottom of some pecking order.
A seed, a husk of that precious young woman burrowed deep into my soul, shut away from the sun, awaiting the call of the now.
Twenty-three years later, my preacher-foreign missionary-husband and I lived in El Paso, Texas, the cross-cultural city where drug pushers and gang members create their own 'axis of evil.' Where creators of graffiti compete with the majestic Franklin Mountains for attention, for immortality. Where, on the continuum of light and shadow; black and white; right and wrong, there is truth, not only on the ends, but at each point in between.
The day started no different than any other Monday for stay-at-home moms. My two oldest sons were at high school, my daughter at the junior high just blocks away, my husband at his office, and my toddler at home with me. Piles of laundry awaited their turn in the washer. Dirty dishes lay piled in the sink.
After forty years of self-doubt I had garnered courage and enrolled in community college the semester before. Now, at the end of my second semester, an upcoming final exam nagged me to study while I sat in a rocking chair cradling my limp two-year-old son, sick with bronchitis and asthma, his breath raspy, coughing.
From my vantage point I looked up to see my distressed-looking husband open the screen door and head back to the den. He didn't speak until he reached my side, but I knew bad news headed my way.
"My brother just called-your dad-just-just dropped dead of a heart attack," he finally choked out.
I pulled my sick baby to my heart and held him tight, numbness obliterating reality. "Why didn't he call me?" I finally asked, feeling slighted-wounded-that I hadn't received the call.
"He knew you and the baby were here by yourself," my husband explained.
"But it's my dad! He should have called me!"
Someone will call-Mother, my sister, brother, someone. I ached for the phone to ring, for my family to bring me into the loss. No one did. I strangely felt abandoned, cut out of the family. Everyone else was there in my hometown, but no one thought of me, 900 miles away. Neither my mother, nor my sister, nor my brother brought me into the family circle of grief by calling me and telling me my dad was dead-come home.
I recalled when I'd sat with the woman next door after her husband had dropped dead from a heart attack. How the neighbor had insisted on calling their only son, telling him, herself, of his dad's death. "No, no, that's my job," she'd said when the police offered to call. "He needs to hear this from his mom." How comforting, how loving that must have felt for the son.
I waited, not even understanding why the call was so important to me, but eventually I gave in, picked up the phone and called Mom. "Yeah, he's gone," she mumbled. "Are you coming?"
We loaded ourselves, four kids, suitcases and funeral clothes, into a small Chevy Citation and headed across desert at five o'clock that evening.
Earlier that day my father had gone home for lunch, quickly 'inhaled' his food, as always, and left again. It was May, in southeast Texas. Hot. Humid.
He always wore long sleeve khaki shirts and pants, and even died dressed in a pair while sitting in a boat in front of a bait shop.
I wanted to bury him in a suit of khakis, but Mom chose a blue suit, her one chance, she said, to dress him her way. Handsome, he was too, with his red hair and ruddy complexion. But rock hard and cold when I placed my hand on his cheek.
I didn't recognize the event for what it was-the beginning-the first day of my estrangement from God. The day my soul wrinkled when I overheard my mom talking to friends and family who called their regrets.
"I just really feel Jesus helping me get through this; if it wasn't for Jesus, I don't know what I'd do," Mother would say.
I didn't "just really feel Jesus helping me." Instead, I felt sucked into black, soul-crushing nothingness.
Jesus helped her-why not me? Perhaps this compassionate God I'd declared existed-didn't. Or maybe I wasn't worthy enough.
All I felt was pain, abandoned by my father, the one man in my life that I desperately wanted to love and accept me. And now my chances were gone.
Forever.
I'd done all the right things. I'd married a preacher-a good man-making the family proud, receiving my father's blessing, a blessing based not on me, but the marriage. A marriage that raised the family's worth in the community and church. A marriage that ended up making my father feel guilty, for years later I learned that when we came to visit, he hid his beer under the bed so he didn't offend my husband.
So, at 41, I took the first halting steps down off the pedestal of preacher's wife, yea-foreign missionary-and into wilderness, into the dead end of me.
It seemed the sun came up each day in a different corner of the sky. The pieces of bread I'd dropped along the way now became boulders blocking my path. I grieved alone. Family and friends offered comfort, but it didn't bring my father back, nor did it bring back this god-person who seemed to be there for everyone except me.
For the last 41 years, I had sacrificed me to become another person's definition of who I should be. I had gained a halo when I'd married the preacher-boy, and then later the halo had grown bigger and brighter when we became foreign missionaries. But now, after assisting hundreds of people in their spiritual journey, or telling myself I had, when I needed God the most, He wasn't there. I felt deserted and disillusioned. God didn't exist. I felt no Presence or love. No comfort, nor compassion. I felt no empathy, no heavenly understanding.
Smack in the middle of wilderness I began questioning what I'd been taught by the church, by my husband, by Christian scripture, by well-intentioned church members, other missionaries. At first I questioned in secret, still convinced there was something wrong with me, not God.
I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Texas at El Paso and a whole world opened up, a world I'd never known existed. I learned to think autonomously, analytically. I began raising questions about "truth." Questions that threatened my husband and his authority over me.
I began to see how I had bought the patriarchal myth and allowed my husband to be my authority figure-my parent-yea, my God-and, if not God, then definitely God's spokesman with a straight line to truth and divine will.
So I tried telling my story, but what I said threatened folks in my world, no one wanted to listen. I grew so exhausted from trying to be heard that finally I walked out past everyone, unnoticed. My body didn't leave, so they thought I was still there, but my heart was long gone.
Over time I learned to stand up for myself, claim what I believed, what I stood for, what I didn't stand for, and what I absolutely would not stand for and, as you might expect, this took a severe toll on my marriage.
One day my husband confronted me, asking, "Can't you go back and be like you used to be?"
I could try, I thought, but if I did, I'd die. Oh, my body may last a little longer, but my soul, already in a death-throe, would wither and blow away.
"I can't!" I cried, "I like me so much better now-for the first time in my life I like me!" "But I like you less!" he said, pain crawling down his face in deep deadening lines, overflowing, spilling onto the floor, creeping towards me. "I always felt superior to you," he continued, "but I don't anymore! Now I feel inferior!"
I knew his words to be true, always had, even felt it myself, but I didn't realize he did-or would admit it to himself, much less to me.
I got in my car and drove to White Sands National Park, climbed atop a dune of sparkling sand and watched the wind whip the 270 square acres of sand-piled desert. Watched the grains blow into the air, scatter, and then sift down in new locations. They ever advanced, ever changed, yet remained within the confines of their primordial plot. I squinted off into the distance, still hoping for God to top the dunes on a big white stallion and carry me off to glory.
No one came.
I shut my eyes, gritty against dashed hope, knowing what I had to do. Knowing if I didn't, I would surely die.
Years of guilt, passivity, submissiveness and domination had taken its toll. After a lifetime spent in the midst of a high-demand theology that proved unhealthy for me, my spirit felt chewed up and spit out, mangled, desiccated. Theology that taught me I was only complete when I served my husband, and yes obeyed; that I must submit to his control as if I too, were a child needing a watchful parent. A lifetime filled with holy-sounding platitudes and meaningless clichés.
It is unauthentic to pass off as Truth, experiences not yours, simply because other people tell you it is. I had spent a lifetime doing so. Actually, I didn't know I had a choice, and to stay in my marriage-I didn't.
But when you learn you've glibly handed out pat answers to life's most complicated questions; when you learn, despite sincere effort, you're the phony; that the answers, yea, the 'truths' you'd given weren't yours at all, but those given to you within a patriarchal world view, you must go back to the beginning.
And go back, I did. My wilderness wandering would last several more years, years spent reading, creating questions, discovering my own connection with God-as-I- Know-God. Not the patriarchal God of my past, but as a woman also created in the image of God. Through it all, I've learned that wilderness is a sacred place, and that while divorce is an end-it is also a beginning.
Sometimes, divorce is the only way out of an unhealthy relationship. A woman has to get out, get her head screwed on straight, and then start over. I didn't divorce God, I divorced my husband, but at the time it felt like the same thing.
In a way, it was.
I've heard that Catholic nuns consider themselves married to God. I wasn't Catholic, I was Southern Baptist, but I'd married God all the same. Looking back on it now, if I'd known God wasn't a man, I wouldn't have felt like I had to. Most divorces don't occur overnight. Instead, a disconnect causes a crack. Over time the crack warps, widens, and finally an inciting incident pushes it over the edge. When, then, did my disconnect begin?
In her book Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun defines the unambiguous woman as one who puts a man at the center of her life, allowing only to occur what honors his paramount position. Her desires, dreams and wishes are forever secondary.
I risked nothing to become such, for I'd spent my first seventeen years learning the "godly role" of a sanitized, unambiguous woman-and it is a short step from that to wife-yea, preacher's wife. For the sleep dust sprinkled in my eyes by my mother, who was herself, a captive of the times, had anesthetized my spirit.
Add to that the self-serving 'will of God' preached by a patriarchal religion, and enforced by my husband, a self-proclaimed 'man of God,' and my spirit, the essence of who I am, was sacrificed as surely as though I'd been nailed to a cross.
Even from conception my world was a wild combination of advance and retreat, then advance again. My body knew things long before my mind did. Even my birth was an on-and-off again affair, battered back and forth by the drama unfolding within my parent's relationship.
My mother never questioned nor modified life's answers given to her by others, for she believed in a world of certainties.
Do this, get that.
But when she did this, and that didn't pan out, she never doubted, for it didn't mean the answer wasn't correct. It just meant she had not done enough of that. She would redouble her efforts, believing that even in the failure, the problem wasn't in the answers she'd been given, but the effort she'd put forth. And since her husband, my father, marched to the beat of his own drum, he forever changed the equation.
Put simply, the problem wasn't the answers she'd been given, the problem was in the doing, or the lack thereof, so she tightened her hold on the answers while the questions of the world multiplied and sucked her down into the mire of dysfunction. My first glimpse that something was wrong, terribly wrong, came the morning after my wedding. Other than a severe downpour, my June 1957 church wedding went off without a glitch. Friends and family gathered with congratulations and celebration. The three-tiered wedding cake baked by my aunt tasted delicious. At the appropriate time-God forbid that I'd do anything inappropriate-I escaped to the bedroom, slipped out of the damp, white gown, and into a sky-blue suit and stood before the mirror. The girl staring back questioned whether it was true; had the wallflower really married the town's most eligible bachelor-the handsome twenty-three-year old preacher-boy? What a coup!
I was a kid playing grown up.
Barely seventeen, with another year of high school ahead of me, I had successfully fulfilled the expectations of my parents, of my peers, and of my church leaders. All was right with my world.
Until the next morning.
As we dressed, my husband sat tying his shoes. "There's one thing I need to tell you," he declared, glancing up at me, authority in his eyes. "God will always come first in my life. You'll be second-but God will be first." Then he stood, pulled his Bible out of the suitcase and opened it. "And we will read the Bible and pray together every day."
His well-intentioned words shattered something inside me, and the pieces tumbled to my feet, pieces of something undefined, yea unborn. I felt slapped, shoved aside. My role in the marriage would never be as an adult, but as a child with a male parent telling me what I would do-yea believe. The pious statement clearly defined the submissive wife. I was secondary. Further, when I needed an opinion, he'd give it to me. Our life together would be his life-not mine.
The disconnect had begun.
Before marriage, I had believed I was important to God and to him, but not now. Now, he and God came first, or his view of God, which, unquestionably, was the patriarchal Him. I came in a distant third.
What then was our marriage? Sacred? How could it be sacred, I wondered, when it is on the bottom of some pecking order.
A seed, a husk of that precious young woman burrowed deep into my soul, shut away from the sun, awaiting the call of the now.
Twenty-three years later, my preacher-foreign missionary-husband and I lived in El Paso, Texas, the cross-cultural city where drug pushers and gang members create their own 'axis of evil.' Where creators of graffiti compete with the majestic Franklin Mountains for attention, for immortality. Where, on the continuum of light and shadow; black and white; right and wrong, there is truth, not only on the ends, but at each point in between.
The day started no different than any other Monday for stay-at-home moms. My two oldest sons were at high school, my daughter at the junior high just blocks away, my husband at his office, and my toddler at home with me. Piles of laundry awaited their turn in the washer. Dirty dishes lay piled in the sink.
After forty years of self-doubt I had garnered courage and enrolled in community college the semester before. Now, at the end of my second semester, an upcoming final exam nagged me to study while I sat in a rocking chair cradling my limp two-year-old son, sick with bronchitis and asthma, his breath raspy, coughing.
From my vantage point I looked up to see my distressed-looking husband open the screen door and head back to the den. He didn't speak until he reached my side, but I knew bad news headed my way.
"My brother just called-your dad-just-just dropped dead of a heart attack," he finally choked out.
I pulled my sick baby to my heart and held him tight, numbness obliterating reality. "Why didn't he call me?" I finally asked, feeling slighted-wounded-that I hadn't received the call.
"He knew you and the baby were here by yourself," my husband explained.
"But it's my dad! He should have called me!"
Someone will call-Mother, my sister, brother, someone. I ached for the phone to ring, for my family to bring me into the loss. No one did. I strangely felt abandoned, cut out of the family. Everyone else was there in my hometown, but no one thought of me, 900 miles away. Neither my mother, nor my sister, nor my brother brought me into the family circle of grief by calling me and telling me my dad was dead-come home.
I recalled when I'd sat with the woman next door after her husband had dropped dead from a heart attack. How the neighbor had insisted on calling their only son, telling him, herself, of his dad's death. "No, no, that's my job," she'd said when the police offered to call. "He needs to hear this from his mom." How comforting, how loving that must have felt for the son.
I waited, not even understanding why the call was so important to me, but eventually I gave in, picked up the phone and called Mom. "Yeah, he's gone," she mumbled. "Are you coming?"
We loaded ourselves, four kids, suitcases and funeral clothes, into a small Chevy Citation and headed across desert at five o'clock that evening.
Earlier that day my father had gone home for lunch, quickly 'inhaled' his food, as always, and left again. It was May, in southeast Texas. Hot. Humid.
He always wore long sleeve khaki shirts and pants, and even died dressed in a pair while sitting in a boat in front of a bait shop.
I wanted to bury him in a suit of khakis, but Mom chose a blue suit, her one chance, she said, to dress him her way. Handsome, he was too, with his red hair and ruddy complexion. But rock hard and cold when I placed my hand on his cheek.
I didn't recognize the event for what it was-the beginning-the first day of my estrangement from God. The day my soul wrinkled when I overheard my mom talking to friends and family who called their regrets.
"I just really feel Jesus helping me get through this; if it wasn't for Jesus, I don't know what I'd do," Mother would say.
I didn't "just really feel Jesus helping me." Instead, I felt sucked into black, soul-crushing nothingness.
Jesus helped her-why not me? Perhaps this compassionate God I'd declared existed-didn't. Or maybe I wasn't worthy enough.
All I felt was pain, abandoned by my father, the one man in my life that I desperately wanted to love and accept me. And now my chances were gone.
Forever.
I'd done all the right things. I'd married a preacher-a good man-making the family proud, receiving my father's blessing, a blessing based not on me, but the marriage. A marriage that raised the family's worth in the community and church. A marriage that ended up making my father feel guilty, for years later I learned that when we came to visit, he hid his beer under the bed so he didn't offend my husband.
So, at 41, I took the first halting steps down off the pedestal of preacher's wife, yea-foreign missionary-and into wilderness, into the dead end of me.
It seemed the sun came up each day in a different corner of the sky. The pieces of bread I'd dropped along the way now became boulders blocking my path. I grieved alone. Family and friends offered comfort, but it didn't bring my father back, nor did it bring back this god-person who seemed to be there for everyone except me.
For the last 41 years, I had sacrificed me to become another person's definition of who I should be. I had gained a halo when I'd married the preacher-boy, and then later the halo had grown bigger and brighter when we became foreign missionaries. But now, after assisting hundreds of people in their spiritual journey, or telling myself I had, when I needed God the most, He wasn't there. I felt deserted and disillusioned. God didn't exist. I felt no Presence or love. No comfort, nor compassion. I felt no empathy, no heavenly understanding.
Smack in the middle of wilderness I began questioning what I'd been taught by the church, by my husband, by Christian scripture, by well-intentioned church members, other missionaries. At first I questioned in secret, still convinced there was something wrong with me, not God.
I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Texas at El Paso and a whole world opened up, a world I'd never known existed. I learned to think autonomously, analytically. I began raising questions about "truth." Questions that threatened my husband and his authority over me.
I began to see how I had bought the patriarchal myth and allowed my husband to be my authority figure-my parent-yea, my God-and, if not God, then definitely God's spokesman with a straight line to truth and divine will.
So I tried telling my story, but what I said threatened folks in my world, no one wanted to listen. I grew so exhausted from trying to be heard that finally I walked out past everyone, unnoticed. My body didn't leave, so they thought I was still there, but my heart was long gone.
Over time I learned to stand up for myself, claim what I believed, what I stood for, what I didn't stand for, and what I absolutely would not stand for and, as you might expect, this took a severe toll on my marriage.
One day my husband confronted me, asking, "Can't you go back and be like you used to be?"
I could try, I thought, but if I did, I'd die. Oh, my body may last a little longer, but my soul, already in a death-throe, would wither and blow away.
"I can't!" I cried, "I like me so much better now-for the first time in my life I like me!" "But I like you less!" he said, pain crawling down his face in deep deadening lines, overflowing, spilling onto the floor, creeping towards me. "I always felt superior to you," he continued, "but I don't anymore! Now I feel inferior!"
I knew his words to be true, always had, even felt it myself, but I didn't realize he did-or would admit it to himself, much less to me.
I got in my car and drove to White Sands National Park, climbed atop a dune of sparkling sand and watched the wind whip the 270 square acres of sand-piled desert. Watched the grains blow into the air, scatter, and then sift down in new locations. They ever advanced, ever changed, yet remained within the confines of their primordial plot. I squinted off into the distance, still hoping for God to top the dunes on a big white stallion and carry me off to glory.
No one came.
I shut my eyes, gritty against dashed hope, knowing what I had to do. Knowing if I didn't, I would surely die.
Years of guilt, passivity, submissiveness and domination had taken its toll. After a lifetime spent in the midst of a high-demand theology that proved unhealthy for me, my spirit felt chewed up and spit out, mangled, desiccated. Theology that taught me I was only complete when I served my husband, and yes obeyed; that I must submit to his control as if I too, were a child needing a watchful parent. A lifetime filled with holy-sounding platitudes and meaningless clichés.
It is unauthentic to pass off as Truth, experiences not yours, simply because other people tell you it is. I had spent a lifetime doing so. Actually, I didn't know I had a choice, and to stay in my marriage-I didn't.
But when you learn you've glibly handed out pat answers to life's most complicated questions; when you learn, despite sincere effort, you're the phony; that the answers, yea, the 'truths' you'd given weren't yours at all, but those given to you within a patriarchal world view, you must go back to the beginning.
And go back, I did. My wilderness wandering would last several more years, years spent reading, creating questions, discovering my own connection with God-as-I- Know-God. Not the patriarchal God of my past, but as a woman also created in the image of God. Through it all, I've learned that wilderness is a sacred place, and that while divorce is an end-it is also a beginning.
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