"Don't Go Out Of Your Mind!"
A Jules Feiffer cartoon one time depicted a man, his head sticking out from under a blanket where he was hiding, saying:
When I was five they made me go to school and I wasn’t ready.
When I was ten they made me go to camp and I wasn’t ready.
When I was 18 they made me go to the army and I wasn’t ready.
When I was 21 they made me get married and I wasn’t ready.
When I was 25 they made me have children and I wasn’t ready.
And now that I’m 50 I am going to stay in here,
and I’m not coming out until I’m ready.
Shaking in his sandals, back-talking to the Lord, he said, “Not me, Lord! I’m not going out there! I’m no prophet. I’m not ready.” But the Lord said, “Get moving, Jeremiah. I’m with you. Don’t you be afraid.” “You and who else are with me, Lord?” asked Jeremiah. It was as though he had heard the proverb: “Pray to God but swim for the shore.” And he didn’t even know how to swim!
Fear can just about drive you out of our mind—panic to flee or to freeze, to fly or to fold. It even happens to the lower animals.
I remember when I was in the first or second grade, they had to call the fire department with its long ladders to come and get a cat, a cat mind you, out of a very tall tree on Colonel Robert’s property across the street from our house. I was so grateful to that scaredy-cat! The fire department came!
I’ll never forget it. I thought a cat could climb anything (and climb down from anything), but no, sir, it would not budge from that high, high perch and the fireman had to bring it down.
It was in that same bunch of trees that a large hornet’s nest had hung and I had experienced the delicious fear of throwing a nice, round hefty rock right into the center of the gray mass, then jumped away and ran lickety-split to escape the mad hornets; all but one.
It stung me right under the eye which proceeded to swell shut like an unmentionable scar across my puffy face!
Somehow we young ones were always risking fearsome hurt of a certain sort and gladly so. It was our mother we were driving out of her mind.
Fifty years later I had climbed a tall tree down along the line of the woods below the Dossage in Windybush. I had taken my bow handsaw up there to remove some dead branches when a branch too small to accept my weight had broken under me, four stories up on the air, and I was left with a skinned and bleeding cheek and neck embracing the stout branch above me.
“Hold on for dear and threatened life!” “Don’t panic,” I thought. “Hold on.”
“Inch yourself down the branch bit by bit until you can swing your leg over a smaller one below and make your way down out of this tree carefully. A little blood won’t hurt. One step at a time, just the way you got up here.”
Don’t go out of your mind.
Fear. Fear will do it, or more accurately, not dealing with fear, refusing to recognize real feelings. Feelings come first, after all, before intellect.
When we first start to feel upset, oppressed, anxious, angry, guilty, depressed, we could begin to understand why, perhaps, if we asked ourselves questions: “What am I afraid of?”
Do I think I will lose something? What? And is it worth it if I do? Am I threatened? May I be hurt? Am I being pressured, or do I think I am, to do something that scares the sunshine, moonlight, and roses out of me? Am I in danger? Am I angry but can’t show it? Do I dislike something about myself? Did I hurt somebody else? Was I at fault?
If we can ask such questions non-defensively—being honest with ourselves and the feelings aroused—maybe we could accept the feelings without automatically either covering them up while pushing them down or reacting as we did when we were children and something hurt us or threatened us and we find ourselves acting childishly now as adults.
It is not fun to feel, but it is okay to be vulnerable. Nobody escapes vulnerability, not the wealthiest people in the world, not the most powerful, not the most heavily armed, not the hermits—Nobody!
If by recognizing the feelings of discomfort that go with vulnerability, we can accept our being vulnerable; that is the way of life. Then we can learn to accept that we are perfect and that it’s not our duty to become totally invincible! Defend ourselves, yes, but not from ourselves unless we have forgotten who we are and what we stand for. Then we have to go to the mat and the mirror with ourselves.
So very many of the ills to which we fall heir come from the pretense of perfection.
I am not perfect, let me accept that and not just toss it off the tongue like one more flick of platitudinous pulp!
“I make errors. Oh, yes! I’m not good at everything I try. Oh, true! I never have a 100% error-free performance. You bet! Suppose we could just relax enough to admit these things and stop defending ourselves as though we were perfect or were even supposed to be.
When we can forgive ourselves our blunders and our lack of goodness, and smartness, and skill, and accomplishment, then we may learn from our hurt and be pretty good, and smart, and skillful, and accomplished.
And we know …
We know we cannot expect other people to take over and do all the tough parts of our lives for us.
When we feel self-pity, again it is time to reach our arms all the way round the back of our heads, pat ourselves on our own foreheads, and say, “That’s all right, Booby. That’s all right.”
“Don’t go out of your mind!” You body won’t like it and will get sick on you! Don’t squelch feelings. Neither should we act upon them foolishly. Don’t act out feelings, like knee jerks after the mallet! Feel feelings, and then deal straightforwardly with them. Don’t go crazy!
If somebody hurts you, tune into yourself. Do not wait until you get home and say to your spouse or to your dog, “I wish I had told that old vulture off!”
If someone hurts you, the thing to say is, “You hurt me. You hurt my feelings when you said that or did that. What did you mean by it?”
Then you are dealing with the real stuff and they are, and not carrying around a load of bile waiting for it to ulcerate the spirit. Or suppose you’re dealing with a guilt-producer? You do not have to flatten them, and don’t bite. Just be straightforward with them.
Anyone here have a guilt-producer in your life? Anyone here a guilt-producer yourself? In my files I have a mother-daughter dialogue that starts this way:
Mother says to daughter: “You never called me back.” Daughter: “I’ve been very busy, mother. Bobby has a cold, Charlie’s getting ready to deliver his talk at the California sales meeting and he’s been pretty tense.” Mother: “Well, I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to go to Los Angeles with the two of you. I mean I could come out after the meeting and we could spend the next two weeks together.”
Then daughter is faced with a choice. Mom is turning on the old guilt trip tape. I want to go on your vacation with you, “and I’m going to eat worms if you don’t say yes. Or rather, I’m going to make you eat worms.”
Now, daughter loves mother but her coming along this time is out. Will daughter then lie to her mom and dig herself into a sand trap of lies, eventually to be trapped there in guilt? Will she bite at her mother’s guilt bait? Should we bite when people upset in their own lives, try to make us feel guilty? The daughter chooses honesty.
“Mother,” she says gently but no nonsense, “Charlie has told me he’d really prefer to be alone with me on our vacation after the meeting, that he works very hard, and doesn’t want anyone else around but me. That means no children, no mother-in-law, no work.”
Well, you don’t have to hear the rest of the dialogue. Needless to say, mother tries a time or two to turn on the guilt spigot—to no avail.
She has to deal with openness. Facts are facts. Honesty was honestly, not cruelly, presented. No amount of saying, “Well, if you don’t want me to go with you,” will bring the daughter to give in or to be dishonest. Daughter does not take the guilt bait. And you do not owe dishonestly to anyone! Not even, maybe especially not, to your mother or your father, not to your spouse, to your partner, to no one, most of all, not to yourself!
Honesty, leveling, not harsh but straight out there, is the best policy in relationships, in family, business, church, and friendships.
The biggie in all of this, of course, is hurt: the feeling that you are going to hurt someone if you are truthful with them, or that they are going to hurt you for having said or believed what you believe.
The kinds of hurt most people fear come from three kinds of loss: (1) the loss of one who loves you or the loss of their love or of the sense of being loved and loveable; (2) the loss of personal control; and (3) the loss of self-esteem.
Why does the fear of loss run so deep? It starts very, very early. We fear the loss of the love of a parent, and, fearing, become angry with them over that threat, then feeling guilty that we are angry with someone we’re supposed to love.
Mom or dad, as you were growing up may have, with volume or with icy quietness, caused certain feelings, and it felt like, and still secretly somewhere feels like, they were saying, “Don’t you ever say a thing like that to me again.” (Feels that way or they did it that way). Parent says, “I’ll fix you so you’ll never want to sit down again.” “I’ll bat you across the table if you look at me that way again.” Feels that way or was that way, or perhaps worse. “Johnnie/Janie, you will not speak of this again, not ever again. Go to your room! When you have composed yourself, when you can be a perfect gentlemen again (a perfect lady again), you may rejoin us after the rest of family has dined.” The propriety of ice.
Some such scenario (not in those words, but with similarly aroused feelings) has played itself out in countless lives. It’s the way it is, or was. Enough of that and one fears the loss of love…at every turn…and it lasts, and lasts.
When I was 22 I wrote my first sermon. I think I did not write another for a church for perhaps another 10 years.
I do not remember the name of that first sermon but I remember the feelings. I was to be the student preacher at my home church before going off to study for the protestant ministry.
I had been raised in that church from childhood. And oh, I would have to shine there in front of everybody, including family. I would work so hard. I would work that sermon until it rang like struck-spun-brass. It would be brilliant. It would have to be brilliant and humble, outstanding and meek, boldly virile and gently Christian. Why, it would be so intelligent the people would close their eyes and think “young genius theologian” and open their eyes to such purity they would think, “He’s a saint and an angel!”
I did not think those things then. I think them now of what I was feeling then, and laying on myself.
Actually, what I was feeling most was, “O, dear God, please make the people love me!” And then may the Lord love me too, but the people first!
Suppose they had not? Loss of love—everything, it seemed—was riding on that sermon. To have blown it, I feared (wrongly of course) would have lost me the love of all the people of my early faith, and with it any good opinion of myself…forever!
What a terrible driving thing. It still drives ministers—most of them I know—after experience with the image of such a fearful symmetry of theologian and saint balanced on either side of the sharp fulcrum of appearances.
Number two: The fear that we may lose personal control—lose control of ourselves. Ever watch men trying not to cry in a tear-jerker of a movie? No, because we were too busy trying to keep them from seeing our loss of manly control. Long since we should have learned that expressing feelings (appropriately) rarely leads to loss of control.
In truth, the way to lose control is never to lose it; that is, if we hold back and keep our cool and stuff the feelings down under, then someday they will have mounted there to such a level in our throats that on some unsuspected cue of disagreeable pitch we will blow like Moby Dick and leave the boards awash with vitriolic brine! Speak low and as soon as appropriate and necessary speak low, don’t blow! But speak.
Number three: There is the heavy fear that we may lose self-esteem. Usually this revolves about areas of feared inadequacy. When I became president of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, I was shaking in my zip-up boots! Earlier, I had chaired a committee of the denomination but never presided over a continental organization, particularly of the worst critics in Christendom and secularity, a whole continent for preachers! It scared the exegesis out of me! Different people scare over different things, you see. It was so with Martin Luther King, Jr., about whom I have been thinking a lot these last few days.
King could be frightened, with reason, by the events, the billy-clubs, the violence surrounding him, the threat of martyrdom; but he refused to be overcome, and he refused to give into those who wanted him to depart from a philosophy of non-violence. Eventually he put fear behind him, because he knew he was on the side of righteousness and peace and justice, and his leadership had assumed a life of its own, bigger than he was. Now, in the civil rights days, I went to Selma, Alabama (naively, foolishly), without fear (a scary place then, actually). I found it easy to march in marches with virtue on my side—that was the feeling.
There was no fear until one of those tough looking southern police motorcycle men drove his motorcycle up over the curb and stopped with the front tire up against my leg.
No Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would have saved me then! It was motorcycle and the art of not making a redneck even redder and madder that came into play, and I good at it in a hurry!
But fear in general: No, not then.
I would have gone anywhere to oppose racism—to follow the man who was headed for the mountaintop; the man who looked into the Promised Land; the man who said it so we’ll never forget it.
Free at last, free at last,
Great God almighty, I’m free at last!
No way could Selma bring me to feel a loss of self-esteem. But becoming president of our ministers’ association: now that was really scary. That was real fear—the fear that I could not do that and would lose self-esteem! Board meetings, delegating tasks, board morale, organization, agenda building, troubleshooting, administration (no secretarial help for a while), ministerial politics, and association in shambles in some ways, hopes not to fall on my face, a yearning to produce some worthy results, on and on and on. You know how it is. The feeling (which I wasn’t, in my pride, going to express right out in the open) in the beginning was, “Mamma, how did I get myself into this? Why did I say yes to this? How do you do this thing?” One step at a time! And now I’ll say our administration, I think, I know, has done well.
But the fear of loss of esteem was great, and I should think it is often that way if we want to do a good thing and it is new to us and sizeable at work, in church, and in the community.
“New occasions teach new duties,” says one of our hymns. And new occasions—having to learn new ways unfamiliar to us—shake us up. When something frightening happens or when hurt is threatened, feel what you feel, don’t panic, then think and take one thoughtful step after another.
Don’t go out of your mind!
Retirement is a jittery time for some, but many learn to love it. I called on a retired couple recently, and I as I was leaving the good woman, a member of our church, said, “I have had an article by Ellen Goodman on “Leaving with Grace” for ten years. It’s very good,” she said. She let me have a copy.
Back in 1976, Ellen Goodman wrote, and it still goes “The trick to retiring well may be the trick of living well. It’s hard to recognize that life isn’t a holding action but a process. It’s hard to learn that we don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the capitol or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences of growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along, quite gracefully.”
Don’t go out of your mind!
Take it along, gracefully. Trust what you own (inside yourself), and trust that something called “authenticity” looks after you in life if you’ll let it.
After last week’s sermon, one of our members, a nurse, phoned me and said that 20 years ago I had repeated a prayer that she had memorized and that she lives by:
God, thank you for what you have given me.
God, thank you for what you have taken away from me.
God, thank you for what you have left me.
That is enough. Amen
