Living With Trauma 15

I have been frequently mentioning love in this series as being our only real way forward when it comes to healing and living with trauma. I will explain shortly. Today, I stopped by the Quaker Meeting House and during the silence a woman spoke up about her struggle with achieving complete silence since, for her, silence and stillness are the way to the Divine. She said that she often finds herself restless and distracted and inwardly struggling against the kind of stillness that would bring her close to God as she perceives him. I appreciate this individual's candour and honesty. I also found myself thinking at the time, as I am thinking now, that there was something missing in her statement. One word. Love. If we love God then we are going to be naturally drawn to him and the silence in his presence will turn into an already given. There will still be a struggle of course, because good things are not cheaply won. There is also something in our fallen human natures that resists God, and by extension, resists love, that wants nothing to do with him, or love. This also has to be reckoned with, through contrition, repentance and inward regeneration. It also struck me how important that love be consistently interpreted in our everyday dealings with one another. Simply put, where there is no love there is not God and all our efforts at calming and stilling ourselves in his presence are simply going to be wasted time and effort, unless there is that essence of love enlivening and guiding and controlling us. I think that love needs to be appropriately employed and expressed in all our levels of human interaction. It is an already-given that we are going to love our families and those to whom we are romantically connected, if we happen to be so connected with someone else. There is also a level of love or liking for our friends, and a liking and respect for coworkers and clients. But this needs to be taken even further. We don't have to feel intimately or passionately connected to every single person we see on the street or on the bus or in the store in order to love them in the way I am proposing. That would be impossible, far too intense and confusing to sustain, and probably at times rather creepy. What I'm going to suggest instead is envisioning each person we encounter as being like a small hand-held, or even a full-length mirror through which we can view ourselves. I am not advocating narcissism or self-love here, but to see each person in our daily journey as a teacher, as a vector of the divine. We are going to see different sides of ourselves in others throughout the day, and we are not always going to like what we see. We are, for the most part, going to remain obtuse and oblivious to this reality of others being mirrors for us. But this is how we impact one another. This will also challenge us to accept the reality of interconnectedness. We are all part of this and we are all part of one another. Most of us either don't know this, or don't want to know it, because we really at the core of our beings resist love every bit as much as we need and yearn for love. By the same token, others are going to see themselves reflected in us. For the most part they are not going to know this, neither are they going to want to know it, and this tends to impact tremendously on the way we interact. I wonder if this fear of self-recognition in the other keeps so many of us glued to our hand-held devices when we are out in public. Not only are we pleasantly distracted: we don't have to see our ugly selves being reflected back to us. And when it does happen not many of us are going to take the time nor have sufficient introspection and self-reflection in order to recognize the resemblance. Instead we will grumble silently, or aloud, that that person is a jerk, or worse, and how dare they, and what a shame that people like this are allowed to be out in public. When what we're really saying or thinking is, I really do hate myself, I cannot stand those horrible traits that I carry everywhere like a dark ugly shadow, and I am not going to even think any deeper about this because I don't want to know where it is all going to lead. Here is another idea. We are all flawed, yes, but there is going to be beauty there. Don't ignore the flaws, but look for the beauty. If you want to see the beauty in yourself then look for it in the other, even while you really want to smack them upside the head. If that person's words and behaviour are so overwhelmingly offensive or obnoxious then simply make it into a beautiful fiction, because the beauty is there. You might have to distance yourself in order to regain a sense of proportion and this is one of many very good reasons for knowing when to be alone. But not to remain alone, because there is always going to be that missing part of you that can only be found in loving and caring for the other. This is an inescapable truth of being human. It has nothing to do with being codependent, but everything to do with recognizing that none of us really is alone in the world, no matter how badly we might fear it to be otherwise, or want it to be.