Making Peace with Intensity

Trying to reflect in writing about the training I'm receiving is a little bit like drawing, for a moment a eyedropper full of water out of a fountain, looking at it, then putting it back in. It's not possible or desireable to look at everything at once, but I take this one bit that stood out to me and pull at it a bit (to completely mix my metaphors) to see what's inside.

So today in talking about St. John of the Cross, there was a comment made about looking at emotional dissonances that can come up, and the question of whether one might attempt to dissipate strong internal movements. The context of course is prayer. I'm there with God, God is moving, causing something in me to move as well. How do I respond to that? 

Am I, for example, attempting to "calm down" the movement that churns up in me. Dissipate it. The context here was that sometimes we learn certain survival techniques to deal with woundedness. Or maybe we see them modeled by others. I remember, for example, how my Mom would stress-clean the kitchen sometimes when she was obviously upset. That can be a way of letting off steam so that that energy has a constructive rather than destructive place to go. 

The idea is, though, that what can begin as a survival mode response can become a coping mechanism, and now it is actually not necessary. I'm out of survival mode, but I'm stuck in coping behaviors. But now it is God who is moving, and I'm trying to "cope" with this as if it is something to control, something to escape. Do I then avoid the silence, the solitude. Do I habitually skuttle about as if to keep myself "safe" from God?

And like little spring crocuses, I see these little heads of things popping up that shows me I do in fact have points of this.

One of these is in fact about writing. 

But really it is about my real or perceived intensity, and whether I like that or whether it is good or not. 

I have a clear memory of going up for prayer at my charismatic fellowship in my early 20s, a Vesuvius of emotions roiling over as I first began to stop jamming them down inside with equal pressure. I was a disconcerting sight to the deacon who was going to pray for me, and he said something, gently, to the equivalent of "Ok, so before you go getting all intense here..." He was trying to calm me down. I remember that I took it as being shut down. Sure, I was a mess, but I took away that I should keep trying, at least a little, to push that stuff inside, at least so that other people would be more comfortable with me. 

I recall this without judgment. I can see myself telling someone the same thing. But objectively it wasn't what I needed to hear.

I also remember for many years around that time and after, if I was with someone pastoral having a good cry, the other person would tell me they could see I really wasn't done crying yet. I didn't empty out; I merely managed to turn off the flow.

In the course of my life I recall a good half dozen or so people to whom I have written letters by dipping my proverbial pen into the inkwell of my actual soul, like writing in blood -- or at least sweat and tears. In a more artistic sense, for a long time I wrote songs on a rather regular basis, and sometimes (forgive the indelicate expression) writing it down almost had the sense of scurrying off to the bathroom to have a huge dump. Like, this is coming out of me Right Now. In an even more generic sense, I remember sitting down to write something -- it may have even been a blog post here many years ago -- and in my hyper-pious sense, I paused to ask God for his words as I wrote. It dawned on me: what I needed to be looking for was my words. To access my heart. To write from my own dignity.

All of these in one way or another have been exercises in vulnerability, to myself, to another. In the case of writing to another, there was a point at which I had to realize that I would end up in total frustration if I did not realize the true aim of my life, my writing, my everything, is this thing I wrote about in the last post: to become more responsive to God. I have had a long road from absolutely dreading interaction with other people and avoiding it like the plague, to clinging to them like a leech that had to be pried off at great mutual pain.

I am healed of this. Selah.

But now I do see a little crocus popping up, and if I sense God moving and I start to feel these movements of intensity I might say, oh, let's read Facebook. Let's play a game online. Maybe go find something to eat. 

Could it be possible that for all these years the Lord was forming me to turn to Him with this capacity He created me with, so that He can show me what it does and Who it is for?