Dear Dee,
This week I begin my “Sunday letter” on a Friday. I
awoke this morning in a mood of reflection and introspection, giving rise to a
desire to set my thoughts and feelings down in written form. I suppose if I had
a therapist to visit today, these are the things I would be addressing.
I am impatient for freedom; not only because I am
sick of being locked up, although that is a part of it. I am eager to embrace a
more enlightened life, only small portions of which I can experience in prison.
I am desiring of the rewards found in the act of trusting in another human
being; something that is not encouraged or advisable in a climate of
incarceration. I am in the process of rebooting my life and anxious to see if
the new program works.
I realize that I have gone through most of my life
without reflecting very much on who I am or why I make the decisions I do. I
have spent much of that time on autopilot, trusting in my belief that I was, at
heart, a good person without doing the work required to actually be one. In my
prior existence, if I wanted to do something, I just did it with no regard for
the reasons behind it or the consequences that may result from it. I can cite
my divorce as a prime example of something that I initiated without giving it
the thought and consideration that it deserved or required. My life, it seems,
is littered with such ill-conceived acts.
Growing up with no viable bond with a mother or a
father left me with a sense that I was on my own in this world from a very
early age. One positive result of this condition was a sense of independence.
But the downside was a reluctance—or perhaps an inability—to fully engage in
intimacy. A part of me always remained closed off and inaccessible. So I am
anxious to discover what a relationship could be like with all the doors open.
Ironically, it is entirely possible that I won’t get
the opportunity to find that out. Any new relationship that I might establish
will be tainted by a very heavy load of dark baggage that I will be bringing to
it; an aggregation of experiences that would scare away most mortals. That
remains an outcome that I cannot, at this point, predict.
But the question of whether or not I will ever again
have a significant relationship is secondary to the larger issue. Will I emerge
from this experience a better man than when I began it? I like to believe that
I will; and if I do, then something very positive will have resulted from all of
this negativity. Whether one believes in the existence of an omnipotent god or
simply in the concept of karma, it would seem that all of this happened for a
reason; to capture and hold my attention and direct it toward the signposts I
need to be heading in order to achieve a higher, more enlightened state of
being.
Sunday,
June 17, 2012
Father’s Day. I have spoken with my daughter but
have not yet connected with my son. But I sent each of them a letter earlier
this past week telling them what it means to me to be their father. Sometimes
it’s easier to write these feelings out and let them read them in private
rather than verbalize them, which tends to demand a response. I just wanted to
let them know how I felt and let them sit with that.
Church: The chalice lighting spoke directly to me as
the speaker talked of her personal conceptualization of God. She said, “I
understand it as energy that is within every cell of my being, in every
particle of what we often call inanimate objects like rocks. At the same time,
the Divine is outside of me and I am enveloped within the field of energy itself.”
Her beliefs mirror mine exactly.
The sermon was the first of the four that Rev. Bob
from Little Rock sent me—his Easter sermon from April. Easter for me has always
been about hiding brightly colored eggs from little kids and then carving up a
big-assed ham. But he provided me with an added appreciation for the holiday by
asking us to regard the Easter story as a metaphor for the renewal of nature in
the spring, the brown lawn turning green—or the renewal of the human spirit for
another year.
Once again, my hat is off to G. Peter Fleck. His
words in “Come As You Are” perfectly reflected what I wrote about on Friday,
earlier in this letter: “…lately I have come to believe that these negative
experiences may well be what life is all about, that success is not the absence
of failure but the overcoming of failure. Not the absence of weakness but the
overcoming of weakness. Not the absence of mistakes but the acceptance of the
mistakes, which means the forgiving of the mistakes.”
So, all in all, a pretty good Sunday. And a nice day
to be a father.
Love, Steve
