Tillich: Of Grace, Providence and Cheeseburgers

I grew up in a small town in Southern Illinois called Carmi. Fourteen miles away, just across a rickety toll bridge over the Wabash River, was New Harmony, Indiana - a site of several communal living experiments in the first half of the 19th century. 

Mainly New Harmony was a place one drove through on the way to Evansville - the largest city within easy driving distance of Carmi. My parents would occasionally go there to shop for groceries, and it was here that I went to see a podiatrist who told me that I had the flattest feet in seven counties. When I was in high school, friends and I would occasionally go there to see a new release movie. This is where, for example, I saw the "Exorcist."

The bridge across the Wabash

The toll booth on the Illinois side of the river

I heard recently that this old bridge is going to be torn down. Back in the 70's, I think the toll was 25 cents. There are probably all kinds of stories that could be told about this bridge and toll booth. One that I recall was when Ruth Ann Smith, my employer when I worked as a bus boy at Two Tonys Smorgasbord in Carmi, told us how, instead of paying a quarter (or whatever it was) she handed the toll booth operator a cheeseburger and drove on.

But I digress. When I was a kid, my family occasionally went to New Harmony, and I recall the "Roofless Church" that is pictured in the lead photo. I also vaguely recall a park adjacent to the church dedicated to the memory of the German Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich. In those days, I had no idea who Paul Tillich was, nor did I know that his ashes are interred in the garden. (Why I don't know - yet.)

I was introduced to Paul Tillich in my freshman year in college at Illinois Wesleyan University. (It's interesting ... I have written before about memory. As I have been thinking about that year at Wesleyan, memories have come back of hallways, of classrooms, of professors - places and people that I haven't thought about in years and thus thought that I had lost my memory of that time of my life. It is so exhilarating to experience the thrill of memory!)

That year really opened my mind to a lot of new ideas and concepts as I took Humanities classes and a religion class called "Man and His Quest for Meaning." It was in the latter that I first heard the terms "Christian existentialist" and "Christian Humanism" and read some writings of Tillich, who was a German Lutheran theologian and one of the most profound religious thinkers of the 20th century.

I was so taken with Tillich's writings that I read more than was assigned in class and even purchased the first volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology to read over the summer. But the following fall, I transferred to the University of Illinois, joined a fraternity and largely abandoned what I had found so exhilarating the previous year. What residual interest I had was extinguished when I joined the Mormon Church at age 24.

It wasn't until I came out three years ago and started on my (rather rapid) journey out of the Mormon Church that I once again encountered these words of Tillich, which resonated deeply:

This is only the last couple of sentences of a passage that speaks of grace and acceptance, both divine and by oneself - a passage that I plan to revisit and perhaps blog about.

In my reading over the past couple of months, I have run into numerous references to Tillich, most recently a couple of days ago in my reading in Catholic Means Universal, by David Richo. In writing about faith, Richo quoted the following passage from Tillich's book, The Shaking of Foundations:

"Faith in divine providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Providence does not mean a divine planning by which everything is predetermined ... Providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. Providence means that the demonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world [such as those unleashed during the Second World War] can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted."

Bust of Tillich in New Harmony, Indiana

Richo added his own thoughts about "providence." "Actually," he writes, "providence means that in the face of suffering, cruelty, death and injustice, we have it in us to go on loving ... It is not that external situations rectify themselves but that interior powers of love remain intact no matter what. Our capacity to love surveys the pain and abuse we have experienced."

This, I think, is a large part of where faith comes in. We, I, need to have the faith that, no matter what,  we have it in us to love, to go on loving, to grow in our capacity to love.

I'm grateful that I have discovered Tillich once again after all these years. This post turned out entirely different than what I had originally contemplated, and it is a grace that, through this post, I have continued to re-establish contact with and embrace who I was before I joined the Mormon Church.

Surprised by ... Memory

Me and our dog Herman on our front lawn in Salem, Illinois about 1963/4. St. Theresa's
Catholic School is visible across the street. My older siblings went there, and I attended there 2nd and 3rd grade.

This post starts out on somewhat of a bit of a down note, but it gets better.

One of the saddest legacies of child abuse can be the loss of memory of one's childhood. I never thought much about the fact that, as I aged and became an adult, I couldn't remember much of my childhood - until, that is, I started meeting people whose memory was much clearer. My former wife, for example, seemed to have volumes of crystal clear memories of her childhood. 

This fact became increasingly distressing to me until, in the mid-90's, I had a sort of a breakdown and, for the first time, started dealing with my childhood abuse. I made numerous phone calls to my older siblings, trying to pump them for memories, recollections and "evidence" for the case I was building against both my parents, but particularly my mother. 

Me and my best childhood friend, Chuckie, who lived two doors down

I recall meeting with my doctor/counselor at that time and telling him about my investigation, about how I would examine my body for scars after having been told something by a sibling of which I had no memory, e.g., looking for evidence of the time Mom hit me with a hairbrush. As I counseled with Dr. Mate, he told me I couldn’t approach this as a lawyer looking for evidence in order to validate what happened. It happened. My body knew it happened and my psyche knew it happened.

Over the years, through reading and counseling, I learned some important psychological principles that bore directly upon my lack of childhood memories. A couple of these were succinctly summarized in the book by psychotherapist David Richo to which I have been referring in the last few posts (Catholic Means Universal). First of all, the psyche knows best when it comes to memory:

“It is important to respect our own timing in the process of remembering abuses. We let in only what we can handle as we can handle it. Temporary denial of some of the facts is useful in grief work because our psyche knows how much we can deal with at one time and lets the information in, little by little, as we become able to stand it. When we are ready to know, we will know. We may never know it all. Only then can we allow a full venting of feelings like sadness, anger and fear."

Secondly, a survival mechanism employed in childhood distorted and drew a veil over memory:

“Part of the abuse cycle is learning to dissociate. Dissociation can be described in this way: while we are being abused, physically, sexually or emotionally, we become numb to the hurt and pain that is happening to us. Unconsciously and automatically, we ‘turn off’ the stimulus and take flight into fantasy or distracting behavior. This dissociation has a wisdom in it because it helps us bear the pain without being overwhelmed by it. Such dissociation accounts for the fact that later in life we forget the abuses that happened to us. Part of the work of mourning is re-associating with the occluded vision of our pain. What was necessary and wise in the past is no longer so in the present. We now allow ourselves to know our hurts and others’ abuses of us in order to clear our path to healing."

Because my psyche, through dissociation and because of its role as guardian, couldn't handle a lot of my childhood, it simply closed most of the doors. When I first started the recovery process almost 20 years ago, I relied chiefly on the memories of others ... but in many cases, they might as well have been describing someone else because I couldn't remember what they were describing - and this was the case for memories when I was as old as eleven.

I mention all of this because a week or so ago, I had an experience where images popped into my head while reading an author's reminiscences of his childhood. It was a simple story about his journeys to and from his elementary school when a boy. In autumn, he recalled riding his bike down a bumpy dirt path "through a meadow fully of crunchy brown leaves, desiccated grasses and dried milkweed plants ..."

Flash.

The simple image of a milkweed plant took me right back to my childhood. I couldn't recall where I had encountered these, but knew that I had.

The author continued, describing his winter journey over "an open landscape of white snow that rose wetly over the tops of my black galoshes."

Flash.

Suddenly, I could remember the black galoshes I wore as a boy. The kind that fastened with several buckles, sort of like ski boots. I recalled the cold. My freezing fingers after I came in, trying to undo those stupid buckles that were caked in snow. I recalled the clinging sound the buckles made as they loosened and snapped back.

The author next described an incident that happened one spring. "My schoolbooks, heavy in the bike's metal basket swung violently to the side ..."

Flash.

As soon as I read these words, I envisioned the old red tank of a bike I had (after I had outgrown the one in the above picture, which I don't remember). I recalled the huge tires and the big basket in front, how it could easily upset my balance, just as the author had described. I recalled using that basket to deliver newspapers when I was about 11 or 12.

These are such simple memories. One might wonder why I even bother writing about them. Well, I write about them because of the joy that I felt at recollecting such simple things from my childhood. It was as if a fragrant summer breeze had wafted from distant corners of my psyche, bringing - unexpectedly - feelings of contentment and happiness. And the sheer unexpectedness ... I had chased memories like a butterfly earlier in my adult life; these simply came and "sat on my shoulder."

I am also writing about them because I saw these images through my eyes. When I was going through counseling immediately after my mid-1990's experience, my counselor asked me whether, when I remembered scenes from my childhood (particularly those of abuse), I saw the scene through my eyes or through the eyes of an observer (who would also see me). This, of course, is precisely what dissociation is. The child sees himself in the memory through the eyes of another - the child who chose to detach himself from himself in order to survive - not through his own eyes.

That is a large part of the reason why these seemingly silly little memories brought such happiness to me - because I realized that my psyche was allowing me to see my childhood, and that it was allowing me to see it through my own eyes, through my own memories. It was an indication of healing and a promise of more to come.

The Real Sin: Withholding Consent to Life

"Adult faith is fidelity to our own intuitive experience ..."

~ David Richo, Catholic Means Universal

One of the books I've been reading the past while is entitled Universal Means Catholic, by David Richo, who in the prologue describes himself as "a formerly active Catholic priest, now a Jungian psychotherapist and teacher on a Buddhist path." I have read a couple of his other books, and I am finding Universal to be even more thought-provoking, especially as I have recently embarked on a new path in my spiritual journey.

The basic thrust of Richo's book is that disaffected Catholics can look at Catholicism in new ways, ways which are reflective of an "adult faith." In his first chapter, Richo addresses those who may have felt abused, in various ways, by the Catholic Church in their youth. I have found that discussion to be extremely interesting, not because I was abused by the Church, but in connection with the abuse I encountered at home.

But Richo's discussion also resonates with respect to my experience of being in the Mormon Church for almost 30 years. The following passage, in which Richo writes of Catholics who may have defied the church's strictures to forge a new path, also spoke to my own departure from Mormonism:

“We have stepped out of line, taken power into our own hands. To do this is scary because it entails risking the loss of approval or endangering the means of survival. Actually, we have explored or exposed a part of ourselves that reveals us to ourselves. We have come to the frontier of a new identity: one that allows us to say no to an external voice in favor of an inner intuitive voice. Identity for adults begins precisely at the point where blind obedience to external imperatives comes to an end and new steps beyond the safe horizons begin. A common theme in myths is that of the hero or heroine who enters the secret room, opens the locked box, or eats the forbidden fruit of knowledge. This knowledge is power, and reclaiming it may be what scares us most of all. The hero is the personification of our urgent desire to individuate no matter what it may take.”

Of course, when I read this, I immediately thought of my coming out. When I had that visceral reaction to LDS Apostle Boyd Packer’s talk a little over three years ago, a very big part of my identity was revealed to me. I came to the frontier of my new gay identity, allowing me to say no to external voices and embrace my inner intuitive voice. I left behind blind obedience to external imperatives and stepped beyond the horizon into a whole new world. 

The inner intuitive voice is the articulator of "inner liveliness." Writes Richo:

“Healthy community enterprises [such as churches] are aimed at serving individual wholeness. This means encouraging our lively energy to be released. Lively energy is our exuberance, our brightest enthusiasms, our imperishable passions, our irrepressibilities – what becomes our bliss. This energy is meant to open more and more in the course of life in the service of our deepest needs, values and wishes. It makes us capable of giving joy to others. This is the very same elemental energy in the universe itself. It is what raises a storm at sea or erupts as a volcano … 

“A personal relationship to God means honoring the organic unity of ourselves, nature and God. This happens when we are in touch with our liveliness. Nothing can annihilate it, but can only divert it. We can get it back at any time by our program of recovery: grieving the past, feeling our feelings about it, and letting go of it while preserving its riches. 

“Our lively energy makes us able to dare and to defy. Recovery from our religious past may mean defiance of its power over us in the present. Morality is not moral if it contradicts good psychological sense or the healthy inclinations of nature. Morality was never meant to interfere with the full activation of our human powers and possibilities. When we remain afraid to say no to violations of our liveliness, we are at the mercy of them and eventually even inflict them on ourselves. If we are afraid to laugh or weep or sing because of prohibitions, our lively energy is blunted and even dispelled. Once religion is recognized as a tool for liberation, withheld consent to life is the real sin.”

To quote Mormon founder Joseph Smith, "This is sound doctrine. It tastes good." It resonates. It feeds. It inspires.

Abuse and the Victim Identity: It Doesn't Belong to Me

Journal writing can be such a meditative and revelatory process. The other morning, I sat down to write about a thought I had noted in my iPhone notes either just before or during our recent trip back East: "Do I believe Mom wanted to be different than what she was?" When I got home and looked at that note, I asked myself what I had meant by that question when that thought came to me. I think what I originally had in mind were the external forces that contributed to Mom being the way she was - a subject for another post. But as I started writing in my journal, different thoughts came to mind, and as a result, I had what I would describe as a revelatory and game-changing experience. 

I certainly don't remember hating Mom when I was a child or even consciously disliking her, i.e., because of her abusive behaviors. Afraid, yes. I was afraid of her, particularly in my younger years, and I did what I could to steer clear of her temper outbursts which all too often led to physical attacks. She was mercurial ... 

As I write this, I am having another insight: I thought back on the time when I was six or seven years old that she grabbed me on either side of my head and repeatedly banged it against the plaster wall in the dining room of our house. It has just occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons this incident stands out so traumatically in my memory is that it was so unexpected; I didn't see it coming. Life was ok one minute, and the next minute I was being horribly violated. Life could go into a tailspin at any moment.

Anyway, like I said, I don't remember hating her or consciously disliking her. She was the way she was. It was my "normal." 

Shift in thought while writing in my journal: I asked myself whether - to paraphrase the words of John O'Donohue in Anam Cara - I had carried around in my heart the "corpse of a past relationship" and became "addicted to hurt as a confirmation of identity." 

As I continued to reflect and write, I came to clearly see how I did in fact become so addicted. I realized that this addiction is not something I need to exist, to be. My ego had told me that I needed this hurt in order to validate my existence and what happened to me, that I was justified in holding onto it; that I had suffered a grievance and that it was totally normal, acceptable and right to hold onto it. But as I sat there writing in my journal, I realized with laser-like clarity that I do not need to hold onto it. 

I can simply let it go because it is not part of "me," but is, rather, a part of my ego. 

"So," I wrote in my journal, "I choose to let it go, casting out into the river a raft I no longer need. It's not the same thing as 'forgiveness,' as that term is usually thought of, which implies grievance and moral superiority and notions of self-righteousness [i.e., I am the victim, what was done to me was wrong, and I have every right to hold onto the wrong and will 'forgive' when I decide to forgive, recognizing I am in the superior moral position] - all of which are notions that the ego clings to. Letting go, however, is morally neutral. It is a process whereby one simply observes something that belongs to the ego - not 'me' - affirming that 'ownership' and turning and walking away. It simply doesn't belong to me."

"Wow," I concluded, "it feels really good to let go."

I know, however, that I wouldn't have been able to come to these realizations had I not done the work to get to the point where I could let go. This was validated in passages I recently read in a book by Jungian psychotherapist David Richo (Catholic Means Universal) when he wrote, "True compassion and forgiveness follow the anger and remembrance [of abuse] ... Reminiscence means baring the abuse instead of bearing it. It is an admission to ourselves of what happened and what we felt about it ... The result of knowing and grieving will be to shift our focus from how we were victimized to a disidentification with the victim role. The healthy version of dissociation (denial) [a common phenomenon among abused children] is disidentification (freedom from the sense of oneself as victim) …" 

I also would not have come to these realizations in quite the way I did had I not embarked a few weeks ago on a new spiritual path/journey. I sense very strongly that my spiritual path and my own path of recovery toward emotional and psychological health and wholeness have merged and are one and the same. In this regard, I'll close with another quote by David Richo in Catholic Means Universal:

"Renewal of faith in an adult requires the psychological ingredient of mourning the pain of the past and letting go of it. This brings recovery and moving on. A space opens for us where before there was none [which is precisely what happened to me the other day]. We find the reserves of our own energy and the graces always accessible to us but never fully evoked."

I'm now looking forward to examining and letting go of other "roles," to spaces opening where before there were none, and to finding other reserves of my own energy and graces.

From the Archives: Me, My Inner Catholic Boy and Coming Out

In May 2011, I published the following piece on my former blog. I have slightly edited it and have added some additional comments at the end. (The picture above is of my first communion class at St. Theresa's Church in Salem, Illinois, 5 December 1965. I am second row far left in front of Sister Mary Josine. Father (stern-face) Sulkowski is in back.)

************

About six weeks ago, I went to a Catholic mass for the first time in 25 years.  I didn’t know how I would feel or what I would think. I was amazed that morning how many memories from my childhood came flooding into my mind, how many parts of the mass came back to me, how I was able to almost instinctively give some of the prayer responses after all this time. I was also touched, that first Sunday, by the priest’s homily, which struck me as far more profound and “true” than virtually any [Mormon] sacrament meeting talk I had ever heard. I came away feeling like I wanted to go back.

That opportunity came the next Sunday, as a (gay Mormon) friend expressed a desire to attend mass. So I took him. I found my thoughts that Sunday turning toward my mother, who had been raised Catholic and who had died several years before I came out. She and I had had a troubled relationship during the last 15 years of her life because of my abusive childhood. But, as I attended mass and thought of her, I came to see her in a new light, and I felt like I was imbued with grace to forgive her for the abuse I had suffered as a child at her hand.  

My mother as a young woman with two unknown girls
in front of a Catholic church and convent in East St. Louis, where she grew up

That grace continued to bless me as new thoughts came into my mind about my mother.  It occurred to me, for example, that both she and I had tried to achieve perfection in our respective families, only to become our own worst enemies.  Both my mother and I had desperately tried to do the “right thing” – she trying to be the perfect Catholic mother and have perfect Catholic children; me trying to be the perfect straight Mormon father and have the perfect Mormon family. But in both our cases, irony of ironies, doing the “right thing” got in the way of that which was truly needful – the formation and nurturance of healthy, happy family relationships.

My older sister Karen's first communion day, with Mom and my brothers (I'm in front of Karen)

I bring this up about my mother because it made me think about the faith of my childhood and youth: Catholicism. Attending mass also seemed to be precipitating the endowment of grace I was experiencing with respect to my mother. I pondered over this and went back the following week, ostensibly to give my son the opportunity to fulfill school requirements and to see a different religious service.  

The real reason, however, is that I wanted to go back: something was resonating with me. I was having “spiritual” experiences as I attended mass. I felt like I was reconnecting to something that had been lost. I also felt like I was at the right place at the right time during this part of my journey.

Because of these feelings, I began to consider the possibility of going back to the Catholic Church. I thought about it. I looked up what I would need to do to go back. I even communicated with my brother – who is an active Catholic – about it.  

I went to mass again on Palm Sunday. I was beginning to feel other currents, however, that challenged the feelings I had been having about the Catholic Church. Specifically, I wondered whether I could ever feel at home in a church and faith that did not accept me for who I am - gay.  What I came to realize is that, though there are aspects of the Catholic faith that resonate with me, and perhaps will always resonate with me, I didn’t want to be part of a faith community that is not accepting of members of the LGBT community.  

I also came to realize, I think, that my gayness had in fact become part of my personal theology, my personal relationship with God, and I began to feel I could not be part of a faith community that conflicts with that personal theology and does not affirm that personal relationship.

This was brought home to me in a discussion around that time with my sister about religion, sexuality and faith.  I realized, during the course of that conversation, that even though I had intellectually accepted that God created me the way I am and that He loves me for who I am, I was, nevertheless, not fully “out” to God – or so I felt. I saw that there was still a part of me that believed that God could not or would not accept me for who I am. That part of me, that person, had been well entrenched within me for decades – one of the many consequences of living in the closet for all that time – and would not be easily silenced. 

I was still seeking permission to be who I am.

*********

During the past 2-1/2 years, I have given myself permission to be who I am. It's an on-going process, but I have journeyed many, many miles since I wrote the above piece. Since that time, I have come to see that I do not need permission from some members of the Catholic hierarchy to be gay. Nor do I need permission from any members of a faith community to be who I am. I realize now that the thoughts I expressed in May 2011 were those of someone who had not yet developed an "adult faith." 

A Catholic Buddhist psychologist that has written books that have had a profound impact upon me over the past 3+ years - David Richo - has expressed where I think I am now in his book, How To Be An Adult in Faith and Spirituality:

"[Adults who have a maturing faith] want to think for themselves and design beliefs based on their experience ... they trust an inner organic wisdom over injunctions that impose one set of values on everyone ... they want to feel devotion in accord with what moves their hearts."

Speaking of an organic spirituality, I had a profound realization the other day that is a reflection of where I spent almost 30 years of my adult life, i.e., in the Mormon Church. The realization? That the question is not whether a "church" is "true," but rather whether a church/religion/spiritual path is "true" for ME. 

And so I have embarked on a path that is true for ME, that is based on MY experience, not someone else's.