Breaking Loose

Photo by Ben Padgett

When all hell breaks loose, and you’re there in the middle of it – maybe even doing a lion’s share of the unleashing – it’s mostly signaling the continuation of this thing called life. Chaos and rage are breaking loose because they’ve been inside you, and those around you, for too long. Their most likely source is a lie of some sort that you’ve been doing your dead-level best to transform into truth, as if the falsehood of it could somehow be painted or polished or glued into its mirror image.

If you’re like most of us, a big part of the lie comes from someone else’s expectations, not just for how you should live, but even for who you are. The vitriolic flow is as necessary as the double-boiler’s steam valve, but it’s when and how and where you vent that determines whether the eruption becomes a step toward catharsis or a lather-rinse-repeat of self-and-other-destruction.  A deception that is particularly powerful and destructive is the notion that our own joy and life’s purpose are codependent with others – that we must be and behave in certain ways to make others happy, and we need them to be and behave in specific ways to make us happy.  No one is created for this.

No matter how long and hard you’ve tried, and how many faces and facades behind which you’ve hidden, the lie of who you aren’t will not happen. It wasn’t meant to happen. You received this unreal expectation from someone who came before you, who received it from someone who came before them. If you’re like most of us, you’ll end up passing it on to those who come after you, until you find ways to be healed – holy places to set it down and walk away.

If you’ve ever driven a vehicle too fast down a partially flooded road and hydroplaned, you know that helpless feeling of spinning, sliding, and careening, completely out of control, toward who-knows-what. If you’re like most of us who’ve done this before, you remember the sick feeling that seems to last forever as time warps into slow-mo. Now, every time rain starts pouring as you’re driving, you instinctively slow down, because you don’t want to experience chaotic free-float again. Emotional maturity is about learning how to avoid interpersonal hydroplaning by slowing down our reactions, so that we can differentiate between truth and falsehood.

A critical part of life’s spiritual journey is learning who we are, which often begins by discovering who we aren’t. Once we’ve peeled away enough of the crusty layers of who we’re not, God has a way of revealing who we are; a way of letting us catch glimpses of our created giftedness and enoughness. The difficult, and yet also the potentially beautiful part of life arrives, over and over, when who we aren’t shows up in our children. It’s probably not who they are, either; but they’ll have to find that out for themselves. Beauty’s possibility lies in recognizing the not-ness for ourselves, and relinquishing its – and our – hold on us and our children. Apology is a necessary beginning, but dual release – letting go of our self-blame and other-expectation – is the path toward hope.

Years ago, when a fight was brewing between two young men on the basketball court, one of them refused to escalate the pushing and shoving into punching. He backed away and, with anger seething, said repeatedly, “I’m better than this!” In this kind of situation, which had turned into a brawl on more occasions than I would like to remember, this young man was reminding himself and the rest of us, “This is not who I am!”

Here are two “slow down and breathe” questions:

• Is this an unrealistic expectation for me or someone else – a false-self-image passed down through the generations by rogue emotional/spiritual DNA – from which I can back away, that I can disown, and from which I can terminate negative power and energy?
• In this situation, how can I best express love and make freedom’s room for both myself and those I love?

 Like most roads worth taking, this is a day by day, hour by hour, conversation by conversation journey for which there is very little reliable mapping data. We make this road by walking, by making mistakes, by rerouting, by putting one foot in front of the other, by speaking one word behind another, and by taking one breath after another.

A number of years ago I wrote a funeral prayer for friends who were grieving the loss of a mother and grandmother – both the loss of her life at the end, and the loss of love they had experienced through the years. Here’s how that prayer concluded:

Now you are free to accept

all she gave for what it was intended;

also free to watch everything else drift away;

because in the end – hers and ours –

love is the scale upon which all are measured,

grace, the final measurement itself.

I pray that you’ll find your way to this path more often than not; that you’ll reach the next rest area before exhaustion’s whisper becomes a shout; that you’ll see grace and enough in both yourself and those you love.

© 2015 Todd Jenkins