Love and Discipline

Structure and growth in the most basic life

It seems that, despite my best efforts, I will not be getting to sleep tonight. It's probably my own fault for allowing myself such a lethargic day, but I'll try and get out all this nervous energy this evening... or morning, rather.

I've been doing a good deal of thinking this evening on the interrelation between Love and discipline. It's not something we hear too much about, and I know that it's not something I've really incorporated into my life. I mean, I've been trying to work out the philosophical nature of love since the 9th grade, and I've had my share of both guided and misguided attempts to love other people, but to be honest it feels like I hit a plateau... or rather, a dead end that required me to turn around and glance at the map again. As I've vaguely referenced in past articles, about a year ago I reached a pretty low point. Although many elements played into the difficulties, I'm pretty sure what tipped the scale was a very long, very one-sided relationship that I had to finally admit couldn't be sustained simply by 'loving.' So then, I had to go back to the drawing table - what does it mean to love another person? How are we able to sustain such a love, especially in the presence of pain, without becoming selfish and taking care of ourselves?

What seems to have been missing, essentially, was a definitive sense of discipline and self-control - of thoughts, desires, emotions, and even day-to-day actions. And of course, it's the unprotected mind that is the most vulnerable to corruption, and in an honest evaluation of that particular situation I could say that I was corrupted, even torn apart, by letting unguarded and undisciplined emotions define my entire life.

Several months later, I met and started dating someone I am perfectly convinced was placed in my life on special commission from God - someone who embodied kindness, purity, forgiveness, and self-control in such volumes that I was utterly astonished. The dignity he afforded to others and to himself as complete human beings flew in the face of every cynical thought that had formed in my mind in the past years. We've recently mutually agreed to continue our discernment independent of each other, and honestly I think it's only the combination of love and self-discipline in our relationship that allowed us to part and remain on such good terms as friends. The year of knowing him set me on a crash course to learn the relation between love and discipline, the fruits of which I hope will come to pass in this upcoming year.

Love without discipline is like trying to grow snap peas without a lattice. Anyone who's ever gardened knows that when you plant peas, you should plant them near a fence or wire to give them a direction to grow. If you do it right, you should have neat rows of pea plants twisting upwards with delicious little pea pods dangling from their vines. (It might be time for a 4am snack). And, in the picture above, if they grow upwards, they also gradually grow closer to one another. But if you don't plant them near a fence or wire, the vines grow everywhere, and wrap around the first thing they come in contact with - the ground, or another pea plant, or itself - and basically becomes a tangled mess. If you don't fix it, the plant dies. It's the same with the heart; without the structure of discipline, it grows in every which way, clinging to anything it happens to come in contact with, and oftentimes tangling up and making a mess. If it's not fixed, the heart clings too tightly to itself and those around it until it loses its life and fades away. In discipline, the heart grows further and further upwards, closer to the sun and to other hearts, more and more capable of truly loving.

I've found myself struggling with old habitual sins. And the longer I wrestle with them, the more I know that I really hate doing them. Why I fall for the temptation over half the time it presents itself, I have no idea - I pulled out a piece of paper earlier and scribbled down every single effect the action has on my mood, thoughts, and demeanor over the short and long term, and I honestly could not list a single pure enjoyment that came from it. It seemed like I was describing the most empty, unattractive, desperate version of myself. And yet I continue. Why? Because of the simple fact that I am enslaved to it, and have not yet developed my love for God, others, and self that is required to live a virtuous life. My lack of discipline has led to the development of a fickle love, and the lack of a true love has made discipline especially challenging - it's all one big cycle! I could try to start with trying to make myself feel as though I love God, to spark the cycle in the right direction, but in the long term that isn't enough. Some essential changes must happen in my daily habits, schedules, and demeanor in order to sustain any further growth in love. Something as mundane as bedtimes and waking times could have an impact on your spiritual life - most of life is made up of the mundane, and to assume that the everyday doesn't have an impact on our essential nature would be, I think, a naive and serious oversight.

Yes. Perhaps I will be able to offer a more moving contemplation when it is not 4:30 in the morning... and I swear that this is still linked to the love and isolation topic... but these are my thoughts for now. Maybe one day they will grow into something beautiful.


peace-

friendships

I'm a bit too tired to theologize tonight, but I do want to write - maybe even just so we can get comfortable with each other :) haha

I've been struggling lately with the idea of friendship; what constitutes a true friendship, what was a true friendship but is no longer, what is a casual 'friendship' and remains thus, and who are simply acquaintances with whom you are friendly. I attempted pretty vigorously over the past year to identify my true friendships and invest in them particularly - relationships with people that were truly give-and-take on a real and essential level, that I could expect to last for a long time. Apparently this move - to look for friends who were interested in giving back, rather than unambiguously sharing myself with everyone - was interpreted as selfish by some people I considered to be close friends, and, unexpectedly, led to them terminating the friendship.

I could analyze this further, but I do want to refrain from too many details or allowing this to degenerate into complaining about the situation - although it is a very troubling and difficult one, trying to figure out if it's my fault or theirs. However, I'm too tired to really think of anything else to say and be able to be sure I won't want to delete it later (yay 1:30 am posts). So I'll end with a quote from someone much better at friendships than myself: "I just try to cherish whatever friends I have in whatever situation we're in." Thanks Dec. I should probably just relax and do the same.

love and isolation

dear friends,

i wrote quite a long blog on this, but decided to save it for later - it would be best served to be prefaced by a testimony, because often a story conveys much more than logical words ever could.

i wrote this in the spring of my first year at uva - february 1st, 2007 - following my first trip to honduras with the missioners of christ. i will post it here, and then try to forget that i've done so - it's exceedingly personal, but i put it here for you, because i believe that when i get down to the core of who i am, it's remarkably similar to the core of who you are - and if that's true, then God needs to speak to you just as He spoke to me.

remember that this is over two and a half years ago, and i have changed and grown since then- but in order to understand who i am and thus connect with anything further i can say, i think one must understand where i'm from - and so i post this. it was titled, "there is something beautiful here."

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there is something beautiful here...

i remember that night, and yet i don't… day after day of traveling through the village, experiencing the love and the grace of the people of Honduras… night after night, kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament, becoming increasingly aware of how utterly unworthy i was to be there, to receive such grace, but it came relentlessly, it filled my heart to the point of breaking and it was torment, wonderful, terrible… night after night of empty words flowing from my mind – i thought i was praying, i was praying in the only way i knew how, telling the Lord to please take my life, just take it… i was out of my league, uncomfortable, i didn't know how to deal with… with everything. with church every morning, with prayer every evening, with that chapel in the center of the house with no walls and no roof, all-encompassing and ever-present, a constant reminder of God. i had prayed before, i believed that i had given my life to God, but suddenly God was everywhere, in every minute, every person, every word… i was overwhelmed, and confused, and… distant.

distant.

who was i?

i didn't care.

who are you?

i could laugh with you, sit down and joke around and be crazy and talk your ear off… but when you left, you were gone. i didn't give a damn if you were upset or sad or frustrated. i was too impatient to care. i had found the solution, i had found the escape – my heart betrayed me, it hurt me. so i left it behind. i was "taking myself less seriously." if i don't take myself seriously, then when i start to feel sad, i can discard it. throw it away. it becomes nothing. it has no power over me. i thought this made me free. now i could flirt freely without danger of breaking my heart, i wasn't too shy or scared to meet new people, because people couldn't hurt me anymore. they couldn't touch me. and that made me powerful.

but i was still missing something. there was an emptiness, and i became agitated and irritated that there was something that could still make me feel empty. well then, i probably just need some friends… maybe a guy too. i'm reasonably intelligent; i know what qualities people find attractive in others. so i started to construct myself: funny, outgoing, nice, generous, spontaneous, dry humor, witty, confident. well, i say that i "started"… in fact it had been a work in progress for years, without me ever fully realizing what was happening. but now, here at college, with so many people to experiment my personality on, it exploded and grew exponentially. oh, and it seemed to be working. i became "friends" with dozens of people instantly, i was learning how to catch a guy's eye… i would become more and more energetic around my friends, and they would respond likewise, and i would get an emotional high, and that was the closest i got to filling the emptiness.

and the night would come, with its lonely silence… and i would sneer at myself with contempt for my melodramatic tendencies, and pack up and go to a friend's suite and stay in the light and noise until i fell asleep on their floor or couch, then make my way back to my room hours later and fall asleep before i could be left alone with myself.

this new me was fun to be around… i had every right to be fun, didn't i? i saw it almost like something noble – to resolutely have a smile on my face despite hardships that came my way.

but kneeling there, in the chapel, the silence pressed in. i knew that something deep within me loved this God i was praying to. the first few days, praying was pure bliss… losing myself in His Presence.

and then He started to stretch me. praying became stressful and exhausting. prayer in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, and talking about God in between. i felt heavy, tired, weighed down. i started to think that maybe i got more than i bargained for when i told God to "take my life."

but God, God wasn't taking anything. God never takes anything. He says, "you must give it. and not by cheap words or a quick prayer. We mean, you must truly *give* it, actively, actively, in every moment of every day, you must give your life to Us, if that is what you desire."

so if God wasn't taking my life, why did i feel so… drained?

He looked at me, and perhaps He knew that there was a seed of sincerity in my prayer, as naïve and simple though it was, and as He listened to my prayers He eventually had mercy and He whispered, "my child, my child, how can you give Us yourself… when you have lost yourself? What is there left for you to give?"

but my mind was filled with tumult and noise, and i didn't hear the whisper.

and yet still, He had mercy.

i remember that night, and yet i don't… there i was, i was kneeling…..

and suddenly it was like a… a tidal wave. or something. just… slammed into me. my whole self-construction… my delicately arranged personality, my ideal person, my idol… just… blasted away.

gone.

and i knelt there. and I was afraid… horrified. what have You done?! my beautiful… my beautiful work of art, so painstakingly constructed… in ruins. can't i keep any of it?! it was beautiful, wasn't it? please, please, can i keep any of it?

no.

but… that took years! and… doesn't it enable me to spread Your Word to more people, i can reach out to more people when i'm not afraid of them? i can be a better servant to You if i keep this, can't i?

but there was silence. nothing beyond that first, resonating, no.

something inside was screaming like a child throwing a tantrum, furious, panicked, helpless.

and then…

fine.

i was sad, heavy. the water from the tidal wave hissed away, leaving muddy puddles and broken debris. But beneath it all, i felt a needle of shock – recognition. it was as though i recognized myself for the first time in years, myself as i used to be, a long time ago, someone that i hadn't even realized had faded away, or who i'd thought had died with my childhood.

there was no joy in the recognition; just sadness and weight, and a quiet murmur of acceptance of this person that had found no place in the fast world i am living in, someone who did not adapt and who was not fit to survive. there was something sad, almost sullen about the reunion. but apparently this was what God wanted… for reasons unbeknownst to me, God destroyed my glorious construction and wanted me to repossess this homely, quiet, unexciting and un-glorified self.

i should have been collapsed in my gratitude for the restoration of self, but all i could do was lament the loss of my creation and think about how much more attractive it was than God's creation.

but the fact remains that God is good and merciful, and despite my lack of gratitude He did not rescind His gift.

and so i slowly grew into myself again, convinced that it meant the sacrifice of every attractive quality i had developed. i dreaded coming back from honduras, i dreaded going back to uva – i would have to learn everything all over again. and now that my constructed self was gone, i was convinced that most of my friends would fade away when they saw my original homely self. but this was what God wanted, and if there was anything that I did right, it was that i tried to accept this and cut my losses.

and then: a miracle.

i got it all back.

my cheery smile, my dry sense of humor, my ability to strike up a conversation with anyone… all of these things i had tried to make for myself. before, they had been a part of my construction, and i thought they had been destroyed. but now, they emanated from my heart, more Real and genuine and loving than ever before, and i see now that every quality I tried to cultivate in myself was just a shadow, a poor imitation, of the True Qualities… like a child who hacks away at a block of wood, trying to imitate the grace and beauty of the Sculptor's work.

and that heart, that heart that He gave me back, it is beautiful.

There are still remnants of my old self here, and I feel that He probably has many more layers of Self to strip away from me before I am the person He intends me to be. it's a bit terrifying, knowing that He will annihilate the person that i am right now… that i, as i know myself, will cease to exist eventually.

but i see what He has done, i see the treasure He has restored to me like a diamond among rocks… and I know that a cut diamond does not belong among rocks, that the imperfect must be cleared away so that the perfect may exist in quiet splendor… and i am imperfect, and i must be cleared away… this is what they mean when they say that you must die to self.

but in my own annihilation, i will not cease to exist. by some miracle, this diamond within me… is still me. in some ways, it is more "me" than all the rest of me put together. i, as i know myself, will be destroyed. but in the restoration, through God, i will become more Myself than i could possibly imagine. and that is the beautiful sacrifice.

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life…

peace,

meg

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suffering and beauty

Violet Horizon; Peter Wileman

Before I proceed, I want to address something from my last post that could easily be misunderstood: I mentioned that in the past, suffering and beauty and love were always intertwined for me. It is very easy for people - Catholics and non-Catholics alike - to misconstrue this as a justification for being miserable or depressed. After meeting a few people who inadvertently follow this logic, and after falling into it myself for awhile, I feel that it is necessary to explicate the notion of beauty and suffering further so that both you and myself can have a fuller understanding of what exactly it means.

I began to liberally quote Pope Benedict XVI's "Contemplation of Beauty," but my summary expanded interminably and ultimately did very little justice to his actual words - so I recommend you read them for yourself. I will principally deal with one quote that summarizes his theology:

"Beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ man also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it."

It is this that will serve as my launching point: that suffering is inevitable; it is one's reaction to it that varies. Buddhists, for instance, seek to detach themselves from the world in order to escape suffering. Postmodernists also seek to detach themselves from it in a peculiar way - something darker than 'ignoring' it, I think... attacking it with apathy at best, but ultimately degrading both suffering itself and the part of oneself that experiences suffering as worthless and weak, something worthy of abandonment. The rational becomes divorced from the sentimental - conquer and succeed at everything, but emotionally invest in nothing; let organization, hard work, and persona compensate for a lack of genuine love and investment.

A whole society of schismatic characters arise from the chaos, individuals who have been hurt and have decided to be strong, not by embracing the hurt and growing through it, but by discarding it, spitting on it, cutting off the part of them weak enough to be hurt and leaving it behind, or simply building a thick concrete wall around that person, leaving them alone and scarcely alive, and constructing a new one on the outside, a person that others will love, enjoy, find attractive; a person that will succeed.

What one finds, if one is blessed enough to come back from such a hollow existence, is that even in the avoidance of suffering, there is the greatest suffering of all - the terrible endless loneliness of your true self. After all, your true existence is defined by your soul, which cannot help but feel. Your only two options then would be to either live in a state of awareness that you have silenced an essential part of your being (a state which would cause insurmountable pain, cynicism, or bitterness), which would of course defeat the purpose of escaping from pain - or you can even cut yourself off from the soul-consciousness that you are even in pain - completing the severance and leaving the individual with an undefinable, scarcely audible sense of being hopelessly lost, or not knowing who oneself is.

It is for this reason that I say that suffering and beauty used to be intertwined for me, and that this was a blessing - not that the suffering by itself was a cause for joy, but that my own reaction to an inevitable hurt was a full embrace of love; not rejecting the part of myself that feels, but rather recognizing it as the part of myself that can truly be redeemed; learning and remembering in my very biological composition (90% of one's memories are hardwired before the age of 7), in the roots of my soul, that a movement into suffering with love and trust results in a beautiful - tragically so, but beautiful nonetheless - testament to the true essence of Life, of Love, and of Beauty itself... that moving into suffering with Love changes knives into instruments... that we are like blocks of wood in the hands of the Maker, carved by suffering into something beautiful if we only trust. We cannot lose faith halfway and harden our wood in resistance, feeling the cuts ever more crude and brutal, to run away, only half-hewn and rough, taking half-finished work to be hideous scars, and resolving never to return to the brutal Artist who sought to mutilate us and left us so ugly, so lost, so broken. It is only through patience, trust, surrender, waiting, waiting, waiting, until the Artist is totally finished, trusting until the very moment of our death, that the lifetime of carving will finally be revealed as something beautiful... I had the tragically beautiful blessing to see those final moments, see the final work of art before it was whisked away, and to know, to know, that God does not abandon those that trust in Him - and despite everything, to hold fast, to plunge into every suffering with love, and know that He is making us into a Masterpiece.