Be still…It’s really such a simple request and such an impossibly difficult task for so many of us as we get older and more acculturated.  It certainly has been for me. I can barely talk on the phone for 15 minutes without washing the dishes or multi-tasking in some other way. America is a culture of action.  We do. We don’t sit.

The problem is that with constant busy-ness comes chronic spiritual insensibility. We can build things, accumulate things, and get from one point on a line to another faster than any other group of people on Earth. We are the cleverest, quickest, and most acquisitive culture in our planet’s history. But we see, feel, and understand less. We have collected data and sacrificed wisdom. We have built colossal glass cities and relinquished our sight.

By the time we are in high school, probably earlier, most of us are set into a rhythm of living. Our eyes are focused ahead and our peripheral vision shrinks with each passing year until we can barely see the tips on our own noses. And unless we can see not only ourselves but ourselves in context, the truth is that we can know very little. It becomes more and more difficult to see any evidence of God, no less know Him. Unless, of course, we’re in deep trouble and a sense of urgency is dramatically renewed.  As one Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has said, “Unless there is thunder, people don’t make the sign of the cross.” The American equivalent: “Everyone believes in God in the trenches.”

Yet, we are continually surrounded by the evidence. We are in a world filled with miracles. Clues are in every corner of our lives. Amma, the Hugging Saint of India, exclaimed that God is everywhere: “If you ask me who is God, I tell you, you are my god. The lion is god. The flowers are god.” Yet most of us don’t see it. Or don’t recognize these clues as such if we do see them. Some of us just forget to look.  But miracles are not empirical. They do not present themselves in the linear, organized manner of double-blind studies. We try but we cannot collect miracle data to analyze. Most people think they will believe it when they see it, but the truth is that we see it when we believe it or are at least willing to entertain the possibility. This is what is meant in Mathew and why we must be as little children to see the truth in the evidence that is all around us.

Two experiences have illustrated to me the urgency of keeping my eyes and mind open.

The first experience occurred when I was 12 years old and I was allowed to take an after-school art class. It was a small, unpretentious event held in the backroom of an old woman’s apartment in the Bronx but it changed the way I saw everything. Instead of looking at a thing and seeing its function first (how it pertained to me, how I could use it, eat it, play with it), it now had a life and a charge all its own. I saw light, form, color, shade, placement in its surroundings. If I tilted my head this way or that, the thing—and all those aspects of it—also tilted. I was suddenly in relationship with the world in a new way.

The second was studying for nearly five years to become a homeopath after already being a psychotherapist for about ten years. Classes would not start until we had all closed our eyes and sat still for a period of time, sometimes for as much as a half-hour. Even as I write this some years later, it hardly sounds like much—what’s a half-hour? But for me sitting still and letting myself be quiet so that I could receive impressions from my patients without actually collecting them, without any judgment or interference on my part was initially as easy as teaching a puppy not to run after a rabbit.  But by my last year (and it was a struggle every time) I began to notice something odd—I started to see more. Information was not just more available, it was clearer and more understandable. This, I began to understand, was where the miracles were to be found.

But understanding was far from enough for me. Humans are a complex and mixed bag of needs, desires and defects. Poised precariously between good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death, dangling between light and dark, the human heart is by nature a busy place, a shifting ground where there is both endless dance and relentless battle.

Stillness does not come easy for me.

I do not sit with much grace.

I have had to find a way to be still of heart and let my body move as it will. So, I do yoga. I walk in meditation and I pray as I hike. Sometimes on those hikes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I’m hurt and fearful. Sometimes I’m grateful and delighted. All I can do is bring myself—all of me—to Him, assuming that He can handle it, the awe, the anger, the confusion, the good, the indifferent, all of it, all of me, from the loftiest impulses to the darkest corners of my soul. And what I found was unexpectedly simple: Finding God was like being married. You have to show up for the relationship. All of you. Build it and they will come. The same is true of God.

Be there and He will come.

No one over ten years of age would be terribly surprised by that sort of turn on a dramatic television show.

But Sweets, a psychiatrist whose job it is to support the people who face the most gruesome deaths on a regular basis, is utterly shocked and rattled.

And that interested me even though it was a droll stretch in the script. Because the truth is we are utterly unnerved by the Irony of the Universe. We come unhinged when someone we know has died. “He’s dead? What do you mean?!” we want to know.

Why are we so shocked by death? Why are we so stunned by suffering when it comes, finally knocking on our door? Why does the death of a young man unhinge us when we have lived in the world (in Sweet’s case for a few decades) and seen what the world is made of? Why—when we know there are NO exceptions to the bruising life gives us—do we still think happiness, good endings, and success is some sort of birthright?

I pondered this for a few hours and then it dawned on me: We forget the world is fallen. And it is fallen, all of it…all the time. I don't much like it and apparently I'd rather forget, too, but I keep getting reminders.

Once I had the misfortune of seeing a large hawk pick at a dying, but still-breathing rabbit underneath a juniper to the side of my garage. It was horrifying, but the deed was done and there was nothing I could do except weep as I walked away.

Sometimes, even years later, that image–that most intimate suffering–will pop up unbidden and unwanted while I’m driving or walking or resting. Every time, even now as I write this, I wince in pain.

As a psychotherapist and homeopath, I work with people whose lives are filled with undeserved misery, whose suffering sometimes boggles the mind and keeps me up at night. I have seen enough to know and it should be enough for me to remember what life is really like.

Yet, I’m no different than Dr. Sweets. I forget because I live in America where I can enjoy long periods of relative ease and comfort. I forget that things are fallen when all seems to be going well, the dogs are healthy, my husband is happy, and my family is at peace. I forget because I've been damned lucky.

Up until not too long ago (it embarrasses me to think just how not so long ago that was), I operated under the delusion that somehow everyone else would die, but I would just keep going. And that if I “just did this” or “just avoided that” or “just avoided flying” that somehow my ticket would never get punched. One can get very wrapped up (knotted, really) by this sort of thinking.

I know I’m not the only one, though. I think most of America operates under this delusion and because of it many, many people spend a great deal of their lives anxious—fearful, to be more accurate—and trying desperately yet vainly to control as much of their environment as they can.

Acknowledging the fallen nature of the universe does not mean we stop lamenting suffering, or stop praying for the recovery of a loved one, or ignore injustice or walk away from a wounded animal.

To the contrary.

At least for me, finally coming to terms with the nature of existence and my own mortality has set me free. I no longer have to struggle against the way it is. I no longer worry about “what ifs.” I no longer try to control the things that are uncontrollable. I know that there is little I can do about suffering (though I will never learn to shrug it off) and I accept its inevitability.

What I can do, though, is be truly present to those who are in its grip and I can give more of myself to the things I really can do something about. For instance, the other day my husband and I stopped by a wild bird supply store to pick up some seed. We got to talking with the shopkeeper and we asked her about the sudden disappearance of all the smaller song birds in the area. Where we used to get flocks of robins, finches, titmice, bluebirds and juncos, now we saw absolutely nothing. Not a one in the birdbath. No one on the feeder.

She said, “That’s odd. Maybe you have a predator?” I hadn’t seen anything, but I yielded the possibility. We are, after all, in the foothills of a large mountain and federal land.

The next day while driving home I saw something bizarre: a young hawk standing in front of our house by the edge of the road. I thought it was a hawk, anyway. I stopped the car and the bird looked at me with utter indignation and tried to fly away.

Instead he flopped. His wing was broken. I ran into the house, yelled for my husband to come out with a towel and leather gloves. I said, “Don’t ask, just hurry.”

It was getting dark and I knew if we let him stay there, by morning the coyotes would have found him. Or he would soon die of the pain, an infection or starvation.

We ran after him a little while and finally managed to throw the towel over him. My husband picked him up and we held him in one of the dog crates, covered, until we got in touch with a friend who’s not only a medic but a top-notch expert on raising birds of prey. When we brought the bird to him, he looked at it and exclaimed, “It’s not a hawk. It’s a kestrel. He’s a full grown falcon!”

It was a joyous relief to learn the next day that he’d been handed over to a rehab, Talking Talons, for surgery and hopefully release back into the wild. So, the birds have started returning.

But it is all such a frail thing; it all hangs in so precarious a balance. For them to come back, one kestrel had to be severely wounded.

I am no great mystic. I understand relatively little about how things are the way they are. But I have learned a few things that help me to observe truly and keep my center. The most important one is the simple knowing that if the world is indeed fallen, there was a fall. And if there was a fall, there was a place, a higher place from which it fell. That means that it was created to be quite different than the way it actually is and that it can—and will—be restored to its proper condition, as God intended.

This I do believe—we all, the falcon, the small birds, the Boy on the Train, and all that suffer will one day be redeemed and made new. There will be no balance beam to totter along, no “ironies” of natural law, no struggle to make palatable that which is intrinsically intolerable, no need for philosophical pockets big enough to hold the suffering of the innocent.

One day, the debate will be over. The train will be made to set right on the tracks again. In my mind I hear some of the last words of the last book of the Narnia series when the battles are all over and Lucy, Edmund and Peter stand at the end of all they have known, before all they have ever hoped to know: “Welcome, in the Lion’s name. Come further up and further in!”

It happens with Hummers, with houses, with degrees of “handsome” and with holiness. People will even huddle around their own humility, if you can wrap your mind around that one. I know at least one person who not only announces how humble she is, but attests to the humility of all those she associates with.

When we “huddle” like that or use a quality or item as a source of pride and superiority, we are simultaneously shaming others, whether we intend to or not, whether we are even conscious of it or not. When I googled "snob" I was rather surprised to see how many websites (millions) were snob sites. There were cigar snobs, brew snobs, bag snobs, pot snobs, coffee snobs, and beauty snobs. There were snob snobs, which I took to mean people who were snobs about being snobs. There were so many levels of elitism, I lost count.

But the essence of it goes like this:

I have a Hummer. Hummers mean success. Success means I’m favored. Being favored means I’m better. Better than who? Better than you. Why? Because you don’t have a Hummer. (And if you do, I’ll find a way to make my Hummer bigger, better, and badder.) This can be done alone or in a group. Just take out the “I” and substitute a “We.” It’s the way most problems are started in the world as much as in the playground.

So…speaking of playgrounds…

My colleague came in to the office the other day shocked and dismayed by what he heard transpire between his young granddaughter and an older, obviously way more sophisticated nine-year-old girl.

“Look at what my grandpa got me,” the little one said, happy to be in her soft, fuzz-lined boots.

The nine-year old looked her up and down. (Can nine-year-olds watch Desperate Housewives?)

“My grandpa got it for me for Christmas!!!” Her joy was palpable. There was no pride, just a fuzzy delight. “They’re UGGS!”

The nine-year-old pursed her lips in disapproval and said, “Those aren’t real UGGS. I’ve got real UGGS. Yours are fakes.”

Then she pivoted and walked away, leaving a little girl confused and deflated.

Why did the nine-year-old do that? Because someone had shown her how important it was to have the “right” label. Someone had instructed her already—by the ripe old age of nine—how to have pride in a thing that meant literally nothing. Someone had given her the ability to attach her sense of self to an article of clothing, a pair of boots, to make her image more important than her integrity, rightness of being, her compassion, or her relationships.

My husband is a musician and he sees a fair cross-section of people when he plays in clubs and public forums. Recently, after a gig in another state, he told me about a group of 20-something men and women who had paid fairly good money to be seated at a table near the stage. Every single one of them had their face lit up green by their palm pilots (or whatever they’re calling them this week). Not one of them was listening to the music. Not one of them was in actual communion with anyone else.

I have been a psychotherapist treating trauma and anxiety for more than 25 years. I have been teaching Verbal First Aid and therapeutic communication for almost 20. I have seen many forms of emotional fragmentation. I have seen pained children and lost parents, angry spouses and lonely ones. The world is no stranger to suffering.

But something that is happening now has not happened before. While we are physically closer in proximity than ever before, we are less—far less—connected to one another. The trend is a disturbing one: It is as if our own manifest destiny were a version of a microcosmic “big bang.” Post-boom, western culture is moving out like a speeding centrifuge, pushing itself further out to the edges, farther away from each part of itself, leaving its center empty.

If, as it’s said, nature abhors a vacuum, that emptiness has to be filled by something. If we are wise, that emptiness gets filled by God and we are released back into communion, re-centered, and freed. If we are unwise, we buy more and more Uggs so we can lord it over little girls who wear other-than-Uggs and buy into the delusion that it somehow makes us better. We are then pulled by those forces farther and farther away from the only things that really will make us better. Each other and God.

Psychology and fundamentalism at best have been polite opponents. In recent history, say the last 50 years, this opposition has become vigorous and often less than polite. Many churches, such as Calvary, completely eschew all mental health practitioners (whether social workers, psychiatrists or counselors) and staunchly maintain that all healing comes directly from God or prayer and that all you need in order to develop and maintain a robust mental health may be found in Scripture or a prayer session.

This rejection of psychotherapy may have been a reaction to the “I’m okay, you’re okay” generation of therapists who did very little for most people except to allay the anxieties of narcissists and sociopaths by telling them “if it feels good, it is good.”  In the eyes of both Orthodox Jews and Christians, the field of humanistic psychology took the whole program of self-improvement one giant step too far, putting man in the center of the universe, particularly his own.

Their objections were not wrong. And I say this as a holistic psychotherapist with almost 25 years of experience in the field.

I have seen far too many well-meaning therapists do little more for their patients than make them feel better about being sick. They are loath to challenge or confront negative behavior or unhealthy thinking because they fear being seen as judgmental. As a result of their tentative relationships with the truth, they fail in their relationships with their patients. They do not see what needs to be healed so the patient is left unhealed. This is truly a disservice to the patient because what it ultimately does is feed the pathology and starve the essence of the person.

I think all good and true healing flows from the same Source which means that there can be an alliance—and an important one—between the Biblical and Mental Health communities.

But only if we have an understanding of our terms and are actually seeking the same results.

(More on this topic to come.)

Good People

They understand the battle against evil but never take pleasure in its defeat, rather sadness in its necessity.

They have consistent integrity.

They are appropriately (not helplessly or cunningly) selfless.

They are the last ones to see themselves as good and definitely the last ones to tell anyone they are.

Super Nice People

They interact with a pseudo-intimacy, behaving as if they’d known you personally for years.

They relate to you on the surface and let you in only so far.

They do not respond to your needs but gloss over them in a way that makes you wonder whatever you needed that for.

They need to maintain a persona or a position in a social circle at all costs because how they are seen is more important than who they are.

They have no compunction about lying to get what they want so long as they are nice about it.

Niceness is conscious and deliberate. It is a social skill that is turned on and off, a vehicle for self-enhancement.

Coexistence

Perhaps it should not go without saying that a nice man may in fact be a very good man. Not all charm is a cover for sadism or cruelty, although very often it is. Good and nice can coexist. A good man may be quite charming and engaging. But not always. Only in the right circumstances and for the right reasons. In the choice between what is right and what is “nice”, a good man will choose what is right. He knows that true goodness is a Grace bestowed in brief moments. Sometimes a good man will say and do things that may offend, hurt someone’s feelings, or even lead to battle.

I imagine Chamberlain thought he was being quite nice with Hitler. I don’t believe anyone in Czechoslovakia would have thought it was very good.

Sounding the Cultural Alarm: Discernment

In 1940 C.S. Lewis was already sounding the alarm about this radical change in modern society. He stated emphatically that kindness (or niceness) was not the measure of goodness, just as apparent cruelty was not the measure of evil. For as Russ Murray points out in his blogspot column on good vs. evil, (www.thekingpin68.blogspot.com), someone can be quite nice and have the most horrible of intentions, citing as an example how Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Doctors do the opposite all the time: they reset dislocated shoulders, suture lacerated skin, and remove decayed teeth sometimes causing awful (albeit temporary) pain in order to facilitate proper healing. Is it nice? Hell, no. Is it good? Until we have better means, yes, it is very good.

Because our culture puts such a premium on niceness, charm, and pleasure, ordinary, good people are put at a disadvantage when it comes to discernment. A narcissist can appear quite innocent because she has so mastered the technique of ingratiation. So much so, that she can make you feel that you have somehow committed a terrible injustice by denying her X or Y or Z as she positions herself as the victim.

As Gavin De Becker points out, this failure to see behind the mask of niceness can make the difference between life and death. World-wide, the crime records attest to the danger. A woman who can’t say “no” to a nice stranger’s unsolicited offer to escort her to her car at night, even though she doesn’t like him, may wind up filing reports of assault, rape, and attempted murder. This is not to blame the victim, rather to point out how charming that charm can be and how carefully we need to pay attention to the differences.

So, what does a person do? How do you tell the difference?

When I teach Verbal First Aid to emergency workers, a communication protocol used to facilitate healing in traumatic situations, I ask them what they think their most important tool is. Inevitably the hands go up: the defibrillator, the oxygen tank, the Jaws of Life. I tell them: No. Your most important and most healing instrument is you.

What makes them—or any of us—healing is at least in part what makes us good: the ability to develop rapport, our integrity and compassion, our benevolent presence and support. To be healing (or good) one must respect the patient (or person) before him and do what is necessary even if it is not “nice” to deal with the disease or the injury. Part of what is necessary in Verbal First Aid, of course, is dealing with the patient honestly and with a gentle, but firm authority. Manipulating and healing are mutually exclusive.

The Bible defines Good for us as “an inherent rightness of being.” It never ever mentions niceness. It never equates it with beauty or talent. It never, ever mistakes it for showmanship. (Moses himself had a lisp and timidly refused his mandate by God to lead the Jews out of Egypt.)  If anything it warns us from the very beginning to beware of pretense.

We can start to tell the difference by remembering that there is a difference.

For full-length article, please see: http://ezinearticles.com/?Nice,-But-Not-Good—Discernment-Skills-For-Modern-Americans&id=3610725

Traditional or fundamental Christians have had issues with hypnosis before. Verbal First Aid is a form of hypnotic communication. Can they be true to their faith and use Verbal First Aid?

I believe Christians can use Verbal First Aid to benefit their own health and the health of their loved ones and stay faithful to scripture and spirit.

One of Christianity’s great fears about hypnosis as they've understood it through television and mass media is that it is used by malevolent people to induce a moral laxity and make the prohibited permissible.

The truth, however, is that clinical hypnosis cannot make anyone do anything that would undermine their moral or ethical resolve.

There's a simple and true story to demonstrate this:

One day Dr. Erickson, the greatest psychiatrist and hypnotherapist of the last century,  went to his secretary and told her he was tired and wanted to rest. If anyone called, he told her, she was to say that he was out of the office. She agreed to do this for him. A few days later he put her in a hypnotic trance and then asked her the same thing: to tell people he was out of the office when he was in fact taking a break. While still in a formally induced trance, she refused outright. “Why?” he wanted to know.

"Because,” she said, “it would be a lie.”

Ironically, in hypnosis she had a stronger moral resolve than in her normal waking state.

Hypnosis is not “brainwashing" even though it's been portrayed that way. Verbal First Aid–as a form of hypnotic communication in acute situations–is similarly not a form of "mind control."

Here is the critical difference between the way Christians have been taught to see hypnotherapy and its clinical reality in the hands of ethical practitioners:
Hypnosis only utilizes a state of consciousness that is already natural and normal. Trance is not something that is artificially induced in a person. It is simply a state of awareness in which we are more focused on an internal process (breathing, thoughts) and most importantly it is something all of us move in and out of all day.

This normal shift of awareness is even more common when we are frightened, hurt, or ill, which is why Verbal First Aid works so well to help stop bleeding, reduce an inflammatory response, and lower blood pressure. We can see it even more dramatically when it is used with children who enter fairly easily and frequently into “trance."

How Verbal First Aid Works in Alliance with Faith and the Faithful

If the definitions of trance as clinicians use it are accurate (and I believe they are) and the dangers are real as Christians see them (and I believe they certainly can be), how can the healing use of imagery work together with the faithful so that as Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

In the beginning was the word.

That words are powerful is a familiar concept to those who read the Bible.

Words have a prominent position in the Bible from the third sentence: And GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. He did not create with His “hands”. He spoke—“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (Ps. 33).” To speak is to WILL into existence. What we say and how we say it is a co-creative act. What we say hangs somewhere between heaven and earth.

Words matter. The mystics have always known this. Only now is science catching up.

Why? Because they create images in the mind of the person to whom we are speaking. Those images and the thoughts that flow with them generate cascades of chemistry that dictate not only how we feel emotionally, but how fast or slow our hearts beat, how high our blood pressure goes, how profoundly we feel the pain of an injury, even the way our livers function.

We all use words all the time. And they have the power to help or to harm. Isn’t it our obligation to make what we say as healing as possible?

The therapeutic use of words (psychotherapy/hypnosis) is no different than a good conversation, a sermon, a lecture, a television show or a good book. It is the use of words to move us to see things in a different way, to uplift and help us. When used in the right way with a proper intention, those words can help us heal.

I asked her, “How do you know that?”

”It’s the Mayan calendar,” she answered as if that were proof enough.

After listening to her talk about bomb shelters and potassium iodide (for protection of the thyroid against radiation poisoning) I began to consider how filled our culture is with these dire predictions.

There are all the evangelical shows on the Apocalypse, the disaster shows (climate change, super-volcanoes, tsunamis that will wipe out the Eastern seaboard of the U.S.), FEMA alerts, and commercials by the insurance industry. And just in case that doesn’t make you afraid enough, there’s always the pharmaceutical industry to warn us about the next pandemic.

For a long time I had been afraid. Before I came to know that salvation and grace were not only possible but available in the present moment, I was an afraid person almost at a constitutional level. The ads and the preachers and the shows resonated with the fear of death that was already there.

For a long time—especially after 9/11 (I had volunteered with NYPD down there days after the attack)—I admit I seriously considered building a bomb shelter or running into the mountains. And in considering all the possibilities in reality (where to build it, what to take with me, how to find food) I realized after much unnecessary heartache that there was no place to run because the “end” they were predicting was meaningless. I had been afraid of death and had let their fear mongering move me because I identified myself with my body and my possessions.

It was truly a moment of grace that brought me out of that trance.

Once I had accepted that there was no way out but out, my prayers changed. And as I said, this was pure grace. It was certainly no doing of my own because I can still get scared and I am still a creature of wants and I know I'm as fallen as everything else in this universe. I am still attached to my husband and my dogs and the mountains I wake up to every morning. I love my life. But I know it’s a terminal case.

So, instead of asking God to save me from this and give me that or keep me healthy, it became simpler: "Take us home. Save our souls. Save all your creatures. Have mercy." Period. There's really nothing else to ask for because eventually–whether it's Mayan mayhem or Swine Flu–something will end the tyranny of flesh for us.

And so it is. And so it shall be.

After the class I kept thinking of the last book of C.S. Lewis’s series on Narnia when Edmund, Peter and Lucy believe that all the old worlds have ended and they are in a new place. They look around, trying to get their bearings and when they are too confused to make any sense of it all, Farsight the Eagle spreads his wings, soars high into the air and says, “Kings and Queens, we have all been blind. We are only beginning to see where we are. From up there I have seen it all…Narnia is not dead. This is Narnia.”

And none of them understand the Eagle because they just saw the end of the Narnia they knew. It had been destroyed, mountain by mountain, tree by tree right before their very eyes. Lord Digory finally has to explain it to them:

“When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here…And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.”

So, in some ways, prediction doesn't matter. It's not like I walk around always peaceful. I want to live and I still sometimes want to know what's down around the next curve in the road. I move with all the waves of the ocean we're in. But when I remember that I live in the Shadow-lands and walk in dreams, it's easier to stay right where I am and wait for the moment when I hear the trumpets and some great voice telling me, “The dream has ended: this is the morning.”

"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle;              you can live as if everything is a miracle."

Albert Einstein

For the vast majority of our time on Earth we have known very little about the nature of our universe–neither its dimensional extent nor its essential “nature” so to speak; whether it is causative or caused or neither. We’re here, but we don’t know why or exactly how or even where “here” is.

So for thousands or millions of years (depending upon whom we ask) we saw the universe as a spectacle of miracles, where everything to us was in itself supernatural. Because it was all incomprehensible everything was not just imbued with mystery, it was Mystery itself. Without a philosophical or scientific prism with which to look at the world, it was not an accident of random majesty but Majesty itself. Given the information and understanding we had, it was certainly understandable that early Man and Woman worshipped the sun, the moon, and the seas or prayed to the stars as much as the clouds for guidance, protection, and strength.

As we grew and became more “scientific” we narrowed this deified Nature down to its details and discerned regular patterns: Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, along with thousands of others, helped to describe nature as a very distinct and determined package of laws. Because of these laws we were able to develop, in turn, very clear and firm expectations of the world in which we lived. Things operated in an orderly and expectable fashion. And if one just understood the mechanism of the laws of thermodynamics then most of the natural phenomena in which we found ourselves surrounded was about as mysterious as, well, the sun. It burned because of the release of energy due to certain basic chemical and nuclear processes. It rose, it sank, it rose, it sank.  One could even set a clock by it. And the clock, well, it too, had laws. If X, then Y. A is always A, not AB. Etc… As C.S. Lewis put it, we had become “Naturalists” in which “Nature” had just become a word for ‘everything.’

THEN, we grew yet again and discovered the world of quantum mechanics where all the laws we had discovered previously broke down. SO…. Once again the world became a place where nature could be seen as highly unnatural. And ‘everything’ was no longer operating according to an order that was as expectable as we had imagined. The scientific model had been undone by science. Yet it was all science. What was a believer to do?

Especially now that nature itself was not entirely natural (or was it?) we were left with a theological conundrum of a fairly significant magnitude. How are we now to define a miracle? It used to be that a miracle was defined as anything that broke the rules of nature and in so doing showed the hand of the Creator, Who stood eternally above and beyond the laws of nature.

But with modern nature standing in contradiction to itself, with surprises from other dimensions, multi-verses, black holes and time dilation or space folding, is there even room for a miracle? And if so, does it mean that the Creator, if in fact there is One, is both within and without, immanent and transcendent.

So for now, I’d like to take a risk and define a miracle as an occurrence or event or object in which one can see, feel, or experience the presence of a creator, of an existence with purpose and intelligence and meaning, of a numinous divinity. A miracle can only occur when one sees the universe as both the seen and the unseen, when nature itself is a “creature,” one of the created things, not a thing either random or fixed. As C. S. Lewis said, “It is not in her, but in Something far beyond her, that all lines meet and all contrasts are explained.”

In a sense, miraculous events are not “miracles” in that they somehow stand outside of or above nature—because we now know that nothing in the universe does. In the world of super-positioning and quarks and faster-than-light transmission, what is weird is expectable. Instead, we can take “miracles” to mean wondrous. They are arrows pointing to the Thing Behind All Things, to the true unknown, to the end of all scientific enquiry and the beginning of real answers. They are and must never be seen as the answers themselves, of course. That would be the mistake of the sun-worshippers and idolaters. But like a note on a treasure hunt or a colored tag on a tree in a thick woods, they lead us ever up and in.

More than a few times this past week, friends and clients have called complaining that there is a pale of sadness and hopeless around them. One said he felt like he was walking through an emotional bayou. Another observed that everyone she knew was fighting, engaged in endless round-robins of discontent and finger-pointing. Yet another found himself in the middle of chaos at a job that usually was calm and orderly. One woman moaned, “I feel so helpless.”  People seemed so hopeless. Were they as helpless as they thought they were?

Not too long ago, in a published commiseration for the tragic death of Michael Jackson in The Hartford Courant, (7/15/09)  Peter Tork (the former bass player for the Monkees) summed up the King of Pop’s emotional essence in this statement: “I think just about everybody grows up believing two things, at least for some part of their lives. One is that you can’t do this life thing alone, and, two, that there is no help. Entertainers…are particularly susceptible.”

Why do Americans feel this way? Why is it such a prevalent emotion now? We have more capacities to alter our environment than ever before. More hands to move mountains. More minds to create whatever is needed from healing hearts to hardening of the arteries.

So as I read that, my hand went up as if I were still in the third grade, my mind filled with an odd admixture of confusion, eagerness, and sorrow: “Uh, I have a question…”  Is either of those things true? Are they both true? Can they both be true simultaneously? If so, how far out into our culture does that self-conflicted idea ripple? And what in God’s name does that mean for us?

“There is no help…” Those words rang in my head for hours after I read his article. What would make a person believe that? How would it manifest? What hopelessness would overtake him? What would he have to do to compensate for it? Particularly if the first thought were also true: “You can’t do this life thing alone.”

It’s a nightmarish paradox: To urgently need help and believe that ultimately there is none. To me, the despair is unthinkable.

No wonder Michael Jackson nearly cut himself into pieces. No wonder there’s more Viagra, Prozac, and pain pills in Hollywood than anywhere outside of a pharmaceutical plant. No wonder people are running back and forth to doctors to have their breasts augmented and their sexes changed.

If what he is saying is true, it does not bode well for our relationships, whether they are intimate or business-based. It is the sort of paradox that corrupts core programming, distorts perception, and generates behavior that is supremely syphilitic and self-destructive. If we are in the sort of conflict that Peter Tork contends we are in, we are stuck in a hamster wheel of discontent, distrust and disappointment. We long for connection, we know we “can’t do it alone” but we can never surrender to love. We are left forever searching, forever lost.

But, he did allude to an answer, even if it was only parenthetical. He wrote: “(I have more recently found the help it takes to get me through life, but that’s for another time.)”  It was curiously and (obviously) deliberately vague but the implication was clear to me: He had found a way to re-connect with God.

The other day a client who finally came to an acknowledgment of her powerlessness (appropriately so) asked me if I really believed in God and an immortal soul. I told her I did. She asked me if it helped.

I asked her, “What do you mean? Helped in what way?”

“Just helped, you know, be happy?”

I told her it had less to do with happiness than with contentment and joy. But, yes, it had helped me enormously.

She asked, “But what if it’s a lie?”

And I answered, “What if it’s not?”  I had presented her with a post-modern, colloquial form of Pascal’s Wager.

All I heard for a moment was her breath as she considered the possibilities that there was help—not just an empty coterie of aphorisms or a new self-esteem building technique but a Love that actually promised everything we ever longed for, a connection, a restoration, a redemption that was limitless.

In my work and in my life there is help. But it does not come from fuller lips or ever-lasting sexual attractiveness. It does not come from money or being invited to the “right” parties or awards that attest to our greatness in this world. It will never come from the things Michael Jackson sought or the insanity the sycophants around him perpetuated. It will not come from ourselves or the people we pay to compliment us. It will not come from bigger homes, bigger cars, or bigger erections. All of those things are booby prizes. They are the crooked fingers in the creaking hallways we all know how to avoid and fear in the movies but follow foolishly in our lives.

I mourn for Michael Jackson. I mourn for all those who walk through life believing that love is a by-product of bling. I mourn for all those who live under the delusion that there is no help when it’s right there, waiting. And I’m relieved for people like Peter Tork who have found it.

And that is true on the most concrete level. But there are other levels, ones which we have been debating for a couple of weeks, now. What is forgiveness? What does it depend on? What impact does it have on Justice and vice versa? And what about Truth?  How does that affect both the nature of forgiveness and our ability to extend or receive it?

She has said that forgiveness is a phenomenon that by definition must be relegated to the personal. I have implied that it may be offered on a larger scale, e.g., nation to nation. Thus far, we have agreed to disagree.

Recently she sent me this excerpt from an article by Father Schall:

"But it all depends on the willingness of the one who caused the injustices to repent and ask forgiveness. This is the divine limit. God cannot create man free and then take it away and leave the same being in existence. If this forgiveness is not in some way asked, even God can do nothing but pursue justice…"

So, I wrote back explaining my sense that there is a difference between forgiveness and reconciliation although the latter cannot happen without the former. In order to reconcile with another person, or nation-to-nation, there must be a formal humbling, a repentance, a request for forgiveness. This is basic common sense. You can't reconcile with someone who's still intent upon harming you. And you can't "make nice" (diplomatic reconciliation) with a nation-state whose mission it is to annhilate your nation-state.

However…forgiveness is another matter. It does not need the reconciliation to take place. Forgiveness, as I have come to define it (mostly by virtue of my work with victims of trauma) is a letting go, a release of hatred, resentment, hurt, and rage. And it can occur without any hope of reconciliation with the perpetrator. Indeed, where there is recovery (of any kind–abuse, alcoholism, abandonment, etc…), there is forgiveness. I told her that we can exact justice (as opposed to revenge) or set limits or hold people accountable for their behavior and still forgive them.

In fact, if we are to remain sane and attempt to grow in some relationship with God, it is absolutely necessary.

She is absolutely right when she says that someone who is to be forgiven must ask for forgiveness and mean it sincerely. Recently Michael Vick, the sociopath who beat and brutalized and killed puppies for entertainment and money, had  a press conference and publicly "apologized." He smiled and glittered throughout the entire scandalous waste of our time. He adored the attention, delighted in every camera turned his way. The reporter interviewing him at some time during the mini-documentary nodded his head with a solemnity that was either pure show or pure stupidity. I've been a psychotherapist for more than twenty years and I've learned to read faces fairly well. There was no doubt that the man neither wanted forgiveness nor felt in any way repentant. There was no doubt that he merited serious consequences for his behavior. (Far more, in my opinion, than he got.) And there was no doubt that justic was poorly served. Can we be reconciled with a man like that? No. Is he trustworthy? No. Would I leave a full-grown dog in his presence, no less a puppy? Never. Ultimately, should I forgive him even if he never asks for it and never deserves it?

I think so.

Why?

Because it heals us. Because it keeps us  just and prevents us from taking out our rage on someone like him and calling it "justice" instead of the vengeance that it really is. Because it brings us just one step closer to what God has called us to do, to love more like Him.

I have a hard time with it, especially with sociopaths like Vick. I'd like to see people like that shipped off to the farthest asteroid and left there. But I also know that wishing him ejected into the vacuum of space is a dark part of me speaking, clammoring for some way to let off steam and pain. It never helps. It doesn't bring back anything or anyone that was lost and chips away at our own souls in a way so subtle we don't recognize the damage until it is too late.

I want to state clearly that I am not a pascifist. I wish I were that evolved, but truly I love being alive and I would be willing to fight to stay that way. And God help the brute who tried to hurt my dogs. I know I would be hard to restrain. I believe strongly, though, that forgiveness does not necessitate the laying down of arms or the passive submission to a bully.

What it might mean, what I hope it means, is that we can be pure of heart even when we do what is necessary in this world. And if that means removing an imminent threat so lives are saved, so be it.