The ladies room at work is evil.

Truly.

(So evil, I call it “The Ego Deflator”.)

You see, no matter how cute I am feeling, one look in the ladies room mirror will strip me of any such delusions.  Every line, every shadow, every broken capillary, every imperfection in my face screams from the mirror, assuring me of my soon-to-be-celebrated 40th birthday. When I look in that mirror, I look pale, sallow, washed out, tired, and old.

To be fair, I am not the mirror’s only target. All the other women at work have the same complaint: We just end up looking SO bad in that mirror.

Now some might say that our irritation is just vanity: We don’t want to accept our imperfections or the fact that we are aging.

(This is probably true.)

Yet this mirror doesn’t tell us the truth about how we look. It can’t, because the lighting in the ladies room is horrid. The bulbs are of the ultraviolet variety, and not only do  they give off a rather unflattering glow, there aren’t enough of them, and the walls of the washroom are a nasty, dingy grey which reflects badly in the light.

So while we ladies do see some very real flaws when we peer into that ladies room mirror, we are also seeing ourselves, not as we really are, but how we look in contaminated light. We see our true flaws, to be sure, but we also see “flaws” that aren’t really there.

(The light can be corrupted. The light can be distorted.)

(And because I am human, I am quick to believe in the distortion.)

The mirror doesn’t tell me how I really look, because all it can do is reflect the light available to it.  It took me awhile to realize this, though. I assumed that light was light. Eventually I paid more attention to my environment, and talked to others that shared it, to realize that the light was contaminated.

(I need to know the light better. When I truly know the light, I can know when it has been corrupted. Then I might be able to only see what is truly there.)

This blog post is part of this month’s Synchroblog on Light and Darkness as Motifs of Spirituality. Check out the other posts below:

Phil Wyman finds Darkness: a Thin Place for the Soul
Adam Gonnerman on being “In Darkness”
Jeff Goins is “Walking in the Light with Jesus”
Ellen Haroutunian finds Holy Darkness
Bethany Stedman thinks Light is Coming
Julie Clawson walks through Darkness and Light
Kathy Escobar will Take a Sliver Anyday
Susan Barnes at …and here’s a photo of one I made earlier
Joe Miller thinks you can Discover Light in Darkness
Beth Patterson talks about Advent: Awaiting the Ancient and the Ever New
Liz Dyer says What the Heck
Sally Coleman muses about Light into Darkness
Steve Hayes with the Lord of the Dark
Josh Jinno with Spiritual Motifs of Darkness and Light
KW Leslie contrasts Darkness versus blackness
Erin Word writes Fire and Sacrifice

The total delay for the second car? Probably about three seconds.

Apparently this waste of three seconds was enough to make the second car’s driver very irate. He began to lean on his horn and curse the driver of the first car. Then the driver of the first car stopped his car, further delaying the driver of the second car, and responded with cursing and horn-blowing of his own. After a bit of start and stop, both drivers drove off the lot, gunning their engines as they did so.

The time taken up by the angry exchange? Probably about fifteen seconds, and I’d bet anything that both drivers were fairly steamed for at least a minute or two after they drove off.

Total time of delay: 3 seconds.

Total time of angry exchange: 15 seconds (at least).

So for wait of 3 seconds, the second driver (roping the first driver along with him) invested 5 times the length of the delay in unproductive honking, cursing, and, yes, being delayed even longer.

Christians might call this poor stewardship of time and emotional energy. The rest of the world would probably just say that this was a boneheaded thing to do. No matter what you call it, though,  the neither driver will ever get his squandered time or energy back.

After watching this little drama unfold, I came to the realization that I am often (ok, usually, even)  just as wasteful of my energy and resources as these drivers. A slight inconvenience, a careless word, or, in some cases, even a positive exchange can result in behavior that is totally out of proportion to the actual stimulus. Thus a good stimulus is minimized by wasted time and energy, while a bad stimulus has the distinction of being made, by myself, even more damaging because of energy and time I invest in it.

I have some thoughts on why I (and perhaps others) do this, and I will write about them in my next post. But for now, it is enough to remember those squabbling drivers, investing fivefold in their own misery over a measly three seconds.

“Shocking allegations” (as the reporters in the accompanying news clip put it) indeed. Journalists and police and probably most of the people reading/watching reports of this incident are “disgusted” and thinking: What kind of parent puts their child in a cage?

At the risk of being called a bleeding heart liberal, I’d like to offer a possible answer to the above question:

“A poor one?”

(To those who are rolling their eyes right now, let me point out that I don’t think that putting children in cages and leaving them unattended (in a vehicle, at that!) is ever acceptable. If you read this blog post thinking otherwise, that is your problem, not mine. I don’t like inept parenting, particularly when children are endangered by it.)

But I’d like to ask another question. What alternatives did these parents have?

• Both parents were employed. The father was salvaging scrap metal and the mother was working as a dental assistant. Neither job is high paid, and this family was probably barely scraping by on both parents’ wages and likely could not afford child care.
  
• The family had got into trouble with the Department of Children and Family services before for leaving one of the girls “home alone”. The family was offered “supportive services”, though this apparently did not include continuing child care.
• The children were not simply left alone in the truck, but were caged and strapped in so they would not “run away”. While this action clearly offends the sensibilities of the local constabulary and the media, it is probably preferable to leaving the girls “loose” so that they could escape the truck and go out exploring.
• The television news report makes much of the fact that the truck had tinted windows and a plywood barrier that prevented outsiders from seeing the children. But if children are going to be left alone, wouldn’t it make sense to conceal them so that potential kidnappers and molesters cannot see them?
• There is no mention in this story of any evidence of physical or sexual abuse. Evidence of such may be forthcoming, but the problem so far seems to be that the kids were left alone because their parents (who already had reason to be fearful of the child welfare authorities) couldn’t afford child care.
• It should be noted that, as poor as this family is, both parents are working. If they weren’t working (and thus looking after the children at home) the same people condemning the father for securing the girls in his truck while he worked would be condemning the parents for being “lazy”.

So now these children are in foster care and away from their parents. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they are probably more traumatized by being in foster care than they were in a cage, in the back of their father’s truck. While they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, I am wondering what putting the kids in foster care is supposed to solve. Clearly these parents need some, ahem, help in caring for their children appropriately, but given their circumstances, it sounds like they may have been doing the best that they could.

They are poor. They are caring for their children the way the poor have always had to care for their children, which involves few resources and even fewer choices. The police and caseworkers and media are quick to condemn and arrest and confiscate, but one wonders what they were willing to do to help a family, who, despite both parents holding jobs, could not afford a baby sitter.

Is it a crime to be poor?

Is it?

Insight #3

“Self-development programs often concentrate on helping people to distinguish between their “needs” and “wants”. Wants are minimized as something that we have control over and that can be changed via discipline, insight, character improvement, etc. Needs, however, are seldom questioned. When people want to make changes in their lives, they are asked to distinguish between wants and needs such that people focus on their wants and end up paying far less attention to their needs.

But needs (with very few exceptions such as food and oxygen) are also self-constructions. They just don’t seem like it because they appear to us to be crucial to the very foundations of our being. And in some cases, they probably are, but this doesn’t mean that we are going to wither away and die if we challenge them. It does mean, however, that we are going to have to change, oftentimes dramatically, and in ways that are distinctly uncomfortable for us.”

This was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to work on. In fact, it was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to even identify. By the time we reach adulthood, we have built an identity that is based on assumptions about what we “need”. This identity (and the assumptions) are the result of life experiences (both positive and damaging, examined and unexamined). The trouble is, while these things may well be “needed” by us, they aren’t necessarily good for us. In order to get healthy (spiritually, physically, mentally, etc) we are going to need to change, and part of that change is going to have to be questioning and (in some cases) dismissing our “needs”.

This is hard to do because we have deceived ourselves into not questioning our “needs” because they are so ingrained in our psyche. Consequently, we think that not feeding a “need” will result in our crumbling into a million little pieces. We also believe that we are entitled to have our “needs” met, even if meeting these “needs” has consistently resulted in negative consequences for ourselves and others. Finally, even if we decide that we are not going to feed a need, or to (gasp) admit that it isn’t a need after all, we are going to be in for some rough times.

Some very rough times indeed.

When I was a teenager, ads for anti-acne and “skin cleaning” products insisted that we could tell that the product was working because it made our skin “tingle” (i.e. burn). This clever marketing led my generation to erroneously connect pain with the medicinal efficacy of a skincare product.

I say “erroneously” because these nasty, burning products did nothing to keep the zits at bay: Instead, they burned because they were, in fact, really irritating our poor skins. The irritation had nothing to do with curing acne or keeping our pores clean, it just made our skin problems worse. Fortunately for younger generations, consumer advocates like Paula Begoun came along to set women straight: Girls now know that if a cosmetic product “burns” it is irritating and harming your skin, not healing it.

So eventually I got over the notion that in order to make my skin look better I had to apply stinging astringents. But I didn’t necessarily get over the notion that pain=healing. I kept with me the idea that the “right” choice for a Christian was almost always the most painful one.

Now I am perfectly aware that pain is unavoidable and that, indeed, oftentimes the right choice in a given situation is one that results in suffering. At the same time, however, I want to challenge the idea that we, as Christians, should assume that the most painful choice is always the correct one.

Discernment is always a difficult task, and it is made more difficult by the fact that it is often colored by our own desires and needs . But we can just as easily fool ourselves into making the choice that will cause us the most pain, just because we think that it is necessarily the “holiest” option. But just as we can deceive ourselves into thinking that God wants us to make the easiest, most pleasant choice for ourselves, we can also deceive ourselves into thinking that God always wants us to suffer.

The ugly truth is that humans are prone to self-deception. We are also prone to constructing self-images that, while inaccurate, we are deeply invested in maintaining. In choosing pain over something more pleasant, we may not be practicing selflessness, but instead might (emphasis on “might”) be engaging in a selfish boosting of our own ego. After all, if we can cast ourselves as sacrificial and selfless with our choices, the better Christian we (and others) will think that we are. In the end, though, we have made a choice that is primarily focused on us, with little concern for God’s desires or the needs of those around us.

There is no easy answer to difficult choices, of course (in fact, this is what makes them “difficult”). Thus, the easy/hard, pleasant/painful dichotomies need to be recognized as simplistic and false. Recognizing our humanity, with our creaturely needs and limitations, and honoring this aspect of who we are, isn’t selfish and it isn’t bad. In fact, it is the first step towards understanding ourselves in relation to our God and others. It is also the first step in learning that our suffering (or our joy) is not the most important consideration in our choices, nor, for that matter, in God’s decision to love us anyway.

I recently completed a writing project in which I described my return to Christianity after years of involvement with Western Esotericism. One of the things that I noted was that my reversion, as it were, was a very slow process. In fact, I compared it to a being wooed by a lover.

One of the oddest things about this period of “wooing” was the way that God would surprise me with little gifts: Lost items turned up, extra money would appear whenever it was needed, surprises lurked around every corner. But the most amazing “little gift” of all was the port wine.

I had flown to Arizona on a business trip. Tired and cranky, I made my way down to the hotel restaurant for a bite to eat. The food was not particularly good, but they had a decent wine list, and the friendly waiter and I enjoyed a few pleasant minutes as I selected wines to accompany my appetizer and entree. During the meal, I had been reading one of E. F. Benson’s “Mapp and Lucia” novels, and after my plate had been cleared away, I continued to read my book.

I had reached the part in the story when one of the guests (an alcoholic army major) was conniving to be served more than his fair share of port wine. I thought to myself: “Self, some port wine would taste really good right now. I am not going to pay for it, and I’m quite sure that this place doesn’t even have any port [which admittedly is a very unfashionable beverage] but golly, some port would be just the thing right now.”

Just as I thought this, the waiter returned to my table. He set down before me a clean glass, pulled out a bottle of port wine, and poured me some, compliments of the house.

Dazed and confused, I made my way back to my room and slept on this amazing occurrence. I reported it to a co-worker the next day, who was as mystified as I was. As she noted: “It isn’t like port is all that common.”

No it isn’t. Neither is God’s love.

I had the pleasure of attending the Chicago Up/Rooted meeting last night (an Emergent Cohort). We had a really great conversation, and I very much enjoyed meeting the other participants.

An interesting tradition of Up/Rooted is closing the meeting with the Lord’s Prayer. My new friend Helen Mildenhall, who also attended the meeting (along with her dad, who is visiting from Oxford, England), brought up some of her concerns with this practice over on her blog.

I’m still chewing on my thoughts/response to Helen’s response, but the actual recitation of the Lord’s Prayer brought back a very poignant memory for me, and I would like to share it with my readers. (Please note, my sharing of this story should NOT be taken as a response to Helen or to Up/Rooted’s practices. It is just a memory that was stirred last night.)

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On August 15th, 1999, my father died whilst we were having lunch together at a downtown restaurant. Two days later, we held his wake (i.e. a “viewing”) at a suburban funeral home.

Several friends (including my first husband, from whom I was then separated), came to the wake to pay their respects. My friends and I were to go out for pie following the viewing, so they stuck around until the wake had ended. None of them were Christians (they ranged from agnostic to openly Neo-Pagan), so I was a tad uncomfortable when the minister asked the family and remaining guests to gather in front of my father’s casket for a short devotional.

My friends did not protest, however, and we joined hands as we formed a half circle in front of the minister. The minister read the 23rd Psalm, and asked us to bow our heads and join him in the Lord’s Prayer. I lowered my head and shut my eyes, hoping that my friends would not be too offended by this. As the minister started to pray, I joined in, but expected to hear nothing from the rather large string of friends on either side of me.

But then I heard their voices, praying.

I looked up in surprise, and I saw my friends with their heads down, eyes closed. They were praying the Lord’s Prayer with me. Each and every one of them.

Stunned, I closed my eyes and returned to praying. I never said anything to any of them after this, and they didn’t say anything to me. I know that what they did wasn’t orchistrated. They just all independently decided to pray with my family and myself. What possessed them to do this, I will never know.

What I do know is that I have never felt so loved in my entire life.