I have often referred to my path of faith as one that looks a bit like spaghetti junction, but without the signage (I’ve also referred to Croydon in this way but, for the purpose of differentiation, Croydon is the noisy, grey one and I am the intermittently noisy teal one). Rather than try to straighten my path, I try to walk it as best I can but, on encountering the labyrinth for the first time yesterday, I wonder whether my path may bear some resemblance to it? The labyrinth looks deceptively simple: one entrance / exit, one path through it, only one line to follow. Yet, as we progress along its path, we find that we are both nearing the centre and seeming to be further away from it with each alternate loop. Once we reach the centre, we find momentary inertia and then, in order to proceed, we must walk the path again to the exit where we will find ourselves back at the start but subtly changed. A pilgrimage on a page.
I am very open about my participation in the 12 Steps of Co-Dependents Anonymous (in brief, like Alcoholics Anonymous, but for people who are addicted to other people rather than alcohol) and have come to see it as a part of my path to the Divine (which I refer to by any of the names of the three persons of the Godhead interchangeably, but my preferred term is a Jewish one: Ha Shem – The Name). Those 12 steps look simple, too; they fit easily onto a single page, yet they too are a journey, a pilgrimage and a transformation; there may be just 12 steps, but they take a lifetime to walk. We often feel that we are going backwards – identifying our shortcomings and wrongdoing when we have been actively denying them for years and spotting when we are falling back into old behaviours are particularly counter-intuitive. As we take the steps, we accept our own powerlessness, come to believe in and surrender our will to a loving Higher Power of our own understanding, identify and ask for God’s help with our shortcomings, make amends and continue to take our own inventory, trying to carry the message to others in need. Transformation is gradual and, until we look back across the years in the program, almost imperceptible.
And the path of faith? As with pilgrimage, labyrinth and 12 steps, it is essential that we surrender control and place our trust in God to bring about our own transformation. Each of these is a tool that allows us to become reconciled to truth, to ourselves and to God and this is the first step in becoming reconcilers ourselves. Through compassion and the transformation of our pain, we can become wounded healers, but the only way to become reconcilers is for us first to allow the transformation of that within us that is unreconciled. To begin that transformation, we must first allow the light of God’s love to fall upon that pain, which means making ourselves vulnerable. Invariably, no matter how grave our unreconciled thoughts, words and deeds might appear to us, opening them to God diminishes their power over us and the process of transformation begins.
Domine, exaudi orationem meam et clamor meus ad te veniat.
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Here is a portion of a story that highlights vulnerability, need, dependence on God, and renewal. It touches me that you stuck with it, though hurt more than once. So proud of you that you name your dignity. Blessed be!
Of course! I grew up in a home where love was entirely conditional on acting according to the roles we were intended to fill, very likely in order to bolster the inadequacies of two parents, who each demanded the opposite from me and I found myself in an unwinnable war. I sought affirmation, acceptance, acclaim and affection anywhere that I might find it and (like many other co-dependents) assumed that one day the right person would come along and make me feel complete. The interaction of co-dependency and what I now know to be autism meant that I would centre my life on an individual with whom I found common ground, who appreciated me or filled other voids in my life, leaving no space for anyone or anything else, imagining each of them in turn to be perfect and, as each one turned out to be just human, sinking further into the belief that I was the one at fault, not them. Having spent my childhood trying to appease and please two parents with opposite wishes, I had no boundaries, no sense of who I truly was and had become little more than a bundle of unmet needs.
How ironic, then, that the person who was instrumental in bringing me to a deeper faith and to the 12 steps was actually another link in a chain of these unhealthy relationships. I shall try not to take his inventory except to say that I believe the strong resonance between us was one of unmet needs and hopes that each of us would fill the void in the other. He is a priest in a small Christian denomination and, through trying to demonstrate his superior knowledge of all things liturgical, introduced me to the Tridentine Rite Mass. I immediately loved the space and the quietness that allowed me to draw closer to God; the symbolism reached places within me that mere intellect could not engage and the beauty of the words became a form of meditation for me. Until, that is, one day he showed off and used the original Latin version. That was the day when I first (unwittingly) challenged his authority: I can read and understand Latin, having studied it to GCSE, and while this meant that I could respond to the Mass that He loved to offer, it may have been the first nail in the coffin of his need to feel superior. Never mind how he felt – I had discovered an even deeper dimension in this meditative Mass. As an enthusiastic fan of languages, I often find myself thinking in more than one language at a time in order to extract different qualities in the meaning and connections between words; here I had discovered that the ‘dignum’ of dignum et justum est (it is right and proper) and the ‘dignus’ of Domine, non sum dignus (Lord, I am not worthy) were at once the same word (adjusted for case and person), yet they showed the stark juxtaposition of the worthiness on the sacrifice of that Mass and the unworthiness of those receiving the Sacrament. There are many, many more examples of linguistic links in the Latin rite that set my soul alight (and are deeply pleasing to my love of languages too) and those who sit near me during Common Worship services in the Church of England may manage to detect quite a few of the responses escaping my mouth in the pre-1968 Latin version, so embedded in my mind are they.
Through the liturgy that rocked me gently into a state where I could allow God into my heart and through my discovery of the Rosary, I began to build a relationship with God for the first time in my life. The same could not be said for myself and my priest friend: a year or so of daily Latin Masses later, I challenged a lie that he had told me and we parted company. When asked by a mutual friend whether or not I missed him, I responded with ‘no, but I really miss the daily Mass!’ The demise of the relationship brought me to my knees emotionally. I felt rejected, unlovable and an utter failure. I had a relationship with God, but I instinctively felt that I needed a pathway that would help me to surrender to Him. Looking online for sources of help, I discovered a Co-dependents anonymous meeting an hour away from me and placed my hopes of becoming a ‘normal’ person in that. Faithfully (maybe obsessively), I took 2 trains each way every Wednesday. In those meetings, I was listened to and never judged; as time went on, I realised that I was no longer considering what little theology I knew as an abstract concept but had begun to live my faith and to walk my own path.
I haven’t turned out to be the ‘normal’ person that I hoped to become and I thank God for that! The path I am walking is an individual one, perfectly tailored for me by God, and only in recent years (and with the autism diagnosis and self-acceptance that it brought about) have I realised that God simply wants to lead me back to being the unique work of His own creation that has become corrupted and skewed over the years – I don’t have to become anyone or anything but myself.
As I have said in my original post, there are only 12 steps on this pilgrimage; those steps take a lifetime to walk and I don’t expect to be entirely cured of my shortcomings in my earthly lifetime. The path of faith runs the same: a mere 10 commandments (plus ‘love one-another, of course) which take a lifetime to follow, no hope of perfecting them all in earthly life. Yet, in both cases, each time we succeed we grow closer to God and each time we fail we are given an infinite number of chances to learn, to try again and to be changed.
About 15 years ago, I attended my first Maundy Thursday service in the Anglican church. Still unsure of my commitment to faith, I watched the stripping of the altars and I was overcome by tears. I prayed ‘God, why can’t you strip me down like those altars?’ It is only with the benefit of hindsight that I can see that He has been doing just that, very gradually (and not without considerable resistance from me!), very gently and at a pace that causes me little fear. This Maundy Thursday, I will be preaching in that same church on the subject of stripping and transformation.
Franceska. Thank you for the vulnerability you demonstrate in this post…and also in your beautifully articulated biography. As I read your post, I resonated so deeply with your conviction around receiving grace and healing in our points of pain as necessary for becoming wounded healers. If you’re comfortable doing so, would you be willing to share a bit more about how you came to understand your addiction to people and your choice to pursue the brilliance of a 12-step program?