From my journal for November 14, 1995<\/p>\n
[I had a dream about Andy Lindsay who worked at the yacht club, had a boat called \u201cPelagius \u2014 for the originator of some heresy.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I looked it up: \u201cPelagianism<\/a>: The theological doctrine propounded by Pelagius, a British or Irish monk, and condemned as heresy by the Roman Catholic Church in AD 416. Included in its tenets were denial of original sin and affirmation of man\u2019s ability to be righteous by the exercise of free will.\u201d]<\/p>\n I have been trying to find words for what has been happening to me this last week.\u00a0 <\/span>There have been changes inside \u2014 but I don\u2019t know what they mean.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m on my way back \u201cup\u201d but that I\u2019m moving along the bottom.\u00a0 <\/span>Just having some sense of movement brings hope.\u00a0 <\/span>I also have the sense that some hard layer has broken, like ice breaking up in the spring.\u00a0 <\/span>There are jagged pieces, but they are moving very slowly, and whatever is underneath has not had time or space to reveal itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n November 15<\/p>\n …\u00a0 <\/span>something I read recently: that quote from the Bible about the last days \u201ctwo men shall be standing in a field and one shall be taken\u201d and a child terrorized by it and thinking that she was the one who would be left behind.\u00a0 <\/span>That made me angry and I thought how God doesn\u2019t do that, god is infinitely merciful, infinitely forgiving.\u00a0 <\/span>And then it occurred to me, as I was driving down toward the causeway at Moore Lake, that god forgives us even when we mean to do it, even when we aren\u2019t doing our best, even when we make the perverse choice instead of the healthy one.\u00a0 <\/span>If we make a stupid mistake \u2014 no, let me claim this \u2014 If I make a stupid mistake, god forgives me, and if I make the same stupid mistake again, god forgives me again …and again …and again.\u00a0 <\/span>Jesus came and died on the cross to teach us this.\u00a0 <\/span>Those whiny excuses that we keep offering, that I keep offering: \u201cit was the best I could do,\u201d \u201cI couldn\u2019t help it,\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t mean to\u201d \u2014 those are excuses offered to a judgmental parent to try to get them to lay off.\u00a0 <\/span>As though you could be forgiven if you had tried your best but not if you hadn\u2019t.\u00a0 <\/span>Actually, I\u2019m seeing now, you can be forgiven for not trying your best, over and over again.\u00a0 <\/span>How astonishing! and even though I don\u2019t quite believe in god, the knowledge of forgiveness is, at least at this moment, real and palpable.\u00a0 <\/span>Is this the rain coming down on the dark cold barren marsh in the November twilight, the tide rising?\u00a0 <\/span>Is this what is welling up around the broken fragments of that layer of ice that\u2019s been lying at the bottom of my psyche all this time?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I find this so interesting! First, the issue of forgiveness<\/a> is a huge one for me, because Mother never forgave me for anything. Then my sense that I am traveling along the bottom of the depression? my psyche? the land of death where Persephone<\/a> travels through the winter? It’s only a couple of years before I come out of depression and end the noise phobia. It looks like my intuition is much better than I ever realized. I always thought I didn’t have any intuition.<\/p>\n I also mention the “dark cold barren marsh” which was an effort to describe how I felt about ten days ago.<\/p>\n November 5: During the massage, I just tried to let myself stay in touch with my sadness, and when it was over I lay there feeling like a bleak landscape: a salt marsh, in the November rain, at twilight, a bleak grim place of black mud and dark sand and sharp grasses and dead brambles, with windy channels of water.\u00a0 <\/span>The odd thing was that it felt OK to be this landscape, and in fact I love the salt marshes, love their bleak emptiness, even under the November twilight, even under the cold rain.\u00a0 <\/span>And my sense was that the rain was needed, felt good, and that the tide was rising, slowly but inexorably, in the water channels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From my journal for November 14, 1995 [I had a dream about Andy Lindsay who worked at the yacht club, had a boat called \u201cPelagius \u2014 for the originator of some heresy.\u201d\u00a0 I looked it up: \u201cPelagianism: The theological doctrine … Continue reading