Our Own Manufactured Perceptions as the Producer of Illusions

dictionary.com defines illusion as:

“Something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.”

It is fascinating to me to think about how deception is produced. 

Is it through an out-right intention to deceive emanating from another person or entity? 

Is it an unintended deception, a misunderstanding or miscommunication, that leads to a wrong impression?

Or, and I think this is much more common that we know, is it because we, the receiver, illude ourselves? 

When this is the case, our takeaway of another person’s personality, or a company’s political and ethical climate, or a house we want to purchase, is warped, not by the person, company or house, but by our seeing—sometimes manufacturing—what we want to see.

It’s the subjectivity of existence vs. the objective.

At times in our life we can see everything as it really is with crystal clarity. 

But at other times, due to a temporary or ongoing vulnerability—sometimes lasting years—we live in a fog of our own perception. Perhaps it is out of self protection—we need to believe such and such about this person, place or thing to keep us steady and to be our anchor when we lack maturity or coping mechanisms. 

And then—what a weird but exhilarating experience—often without any warning, that person, place or thing is revealed for what it really is, and always has been.

It is when, for lack of a better phrase, “the stars align” and we feel foolish and maybe irritated for having thought otherwise all those months or years. 

This sudden spotlight that shines on friendships we thought close but never were, parents and extended families that we attempted to force into our idealist molds, and past periods of life that we had been clinging to as if they still meant something, but don’t—all of it is transformed into lucid, 20/20 vision.  

We can let go now of the dysfunctional security blanket that kept us tethered to these past fossils because we thought they must remain somehow relevant in order for us to be relevant, or to have at least not wasted our lives. 

Our illusions, those larger than life dinosaurs that roamed and stalked our inner being, become extinct; closing (to our grateful and utter relief) those history books for good. 

Recently, I looked across the table at a close friend of many years, and as our conversation turned to those we no longer stay in touch with, it dawned on me that she has traveled with me through much of my history. Yet here we were, sitting across from each other filling hours that seem like minutes with raptured conversation! I sputtered suddenly to my friend, 

“Not you! You and I  still get together because you have evolved!” 

We both thought about that, and she said, 

“The word is evolved. And you’re right. We both have evolved.” 

That is true of every close and authentic relationship I cherish today, especially with my husband, sons and daughter-in-law. 

That evolution, the heroic ability to change, is the result of each one of us taking off the rose-colored or grimy rimmed glasses, as the case may be, and seeing our past, present and future; our faith and our families; our acquaintances and personal histories, as they are, no illusions whatsoever.

The dross of illusion thus burned away, we carry on, lighthearted and still, not to be subject again to this yoke of slavery. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

The Healing in Being Right With God

When we’re troubled, when fears rational or irrational plague us, we can tend the storm within us by asking ourselves, 

“Am I right with God?” 

If we can bravely, in utmost honesty, affirm that yes, we have been washed by God and a right spirit has indeed been put within us, it is then that the life waters grow still and the demons rush out of us, leaving the quiet, undisturbed peace and renewal of God.

“Be gracious to me, God, according to Your Faithfulness;

According to the greatness of Your compassion, wipe out my wrongdoings.

Wash me thoroughly from my guilt

And cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my wrongdoings,

And my sin is constantly before me.

Against You, You only, I have sinned

And done what is evil in Your sight,

So that You are justified when You speak

And blameless when You judge.

Behold, I was brought forth in guilt,

And in sin my mother conceived me. 

Behold, you desire truth in the innermost being,

And in secret You will make wisdom known to me.

Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean;

Cleanse me, and I will be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness,

Let the bones You have broken rejoice.

Hide Your face from my sins

And wipe out all my guilty deeds.

Create in me a clean heart, God,

And renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me away from Your presence,

And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of Your salvation,

And sustain me with a willing Spirit.

Then I will teach wrongdoers Your ways,

And sinners will be converted to You.

Save me from the guilt of bloodshed, God, the God of my salvation;

Then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness.

Lord, open my lips,

So that my mouth may declare Your praise.

For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it;

You do not take pleasure in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

A broken and a contrite heart, God, You will not despise.

Psalm 51:1-17

Copyright Barb Harwood

Five Reasons People Do Not, or Cannot, Forgive

BJ Foster, writing on the website All Pro Dad, writes a succinct, insightful and, in my opinion, correct explanation of why human beings do not forgive. 

In many cases, it is because they cannot forgive, which, of course, I attribute to not having first experienced the forgiveness of God for their own personal immaturity, mistakes, and times they themselves have hurt others (but don’t keep the same account of as they do for others who have offended or hurt).

Here are Foster’s five reasons folks don’t, or cannot, forgive, in condensed form. You can read the entire article here:

https://www.allprodad.com/5-reasons-people-dont-forgive/

Foster’s Five Reasons:


1. Many people believe the myths that have grown up around forgiving: They think that if they forgive, they are somehow saying that the wrong to them was justified or is now forgotten. In addition, Foster says,

“Many also believe it means that the person must admit wrongdoing, trust is restored, there must be reconciliation, or the offender is released from the consequences of their actions. That all can be a part of forgiveness but doesn’t have to be. Forgiveness is simply giving up your right to condemn…Forgiveness is letting go of ill will and making peace.”

2. “Holding on to anger and bitterness somehow feels like justice. It’s what the people who hurt us deserve, our wrath. Somehow we convince ourselves that our bitterness keeps them on the hook. Bitterness is hard to let go of because it is a security blanket that provides false comfort and a distraction from our hurt. Forgiveness means letting go of bitterness…”

3. “We want people to get what they deserve, especially when they hurt us…

Forgiveness means they are released from the vengeance we want to administer.”

4. “We are right and they are wrong. They are the bad guys and we are the heroes. That’s what feels good. It’s easy to place someone who hurts you in the category of an evil person. It makes life much more simple, but it’s not that simple. The person may be wrong, abusive, cruel, manipulative, controlling, a liar, or a bully. However, forgiveness causes us to consider what led them to be that way. What pain and abuses have been perpetuated on them? It doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it does give some insight. Forgiveness also challenges us to think about the pain we have inflicted on others and our need to receive forgiveness.”

5. This fifth point is where Foster knocks it out of the ball park, because he states a very simple truth that is rarely stated in articles on forgiveness. Foster writes:

“Finally, forgiveness is an act that comes from a position of strength, a strength many people don’t have. It requires resilient bravery, love, faith, empathy, openness, and vulnerability.”

The only thing I can add to Foster’s above list, is this:

For each and every one of us, life at times is a huge, overwhelming struggle.

Coping mechanisms vary at different stages of life.

If we all were born knowing how to navigate our emotions and mental weaknesses, we would never step on anyone’s toes.

Events and stressors in life do to us what we never received an instruction sheet for. Instead, we have to wing it, and creep into our shells for self-protection when that’s all we can do, often shutting others out.

People love to throw around the “cancel” word when someone is having a mental health crisis or is attempting to get their life back on track and thus needs to keep their distance from those who at that time in their life pose a risk or a threat.

Sometimes those feeling “canceled” would do well to take an inner look to gain some insight as to what they themselves perhaps are doing to contribute to someone else’s pulling away. At minimum, if they are so concerned with having been “canceled,” then maybe they should simply ask if they indeed have been canceled before jumping to the conclusion that the other person is the problem.

To those who harbor ill will and unforgiveness because they feel they were cancelled (and never directly asked the other person why), I posit that unforgiveness is an equal form of cancel, especially when the other person is attempting to make amends.

We can’t really criticize someone for canceling us if we are doing the same back through unforgiveness.

Self-righteousness is the monster that it is because all of the mud it slings at other people is never recognized as one’s own mud too.

Forgiveness.

The only way I got to where I am today is because of God’s teaching me forgiveness. It is a most difficult thing. And that is why I have also learned, from God, to forgive those who cannot, or will not, forgive me.


Copyright Barb Harwood

To The Morning

Such a peaceful, bucolic morning here. 

As I stood with my coffee on the back balcony, overlooking the marsh that, in the early misty light, hosted a statuesque Blue Heron and a muskrat gnawing grass stems at the age of the waterline, I took in this glorious beginning of a day, and my thoughts traveled back to the sixteenth summer of my youth spent at a conservation camp.

It was there, still in deep slumber in our bunks in rustic cabins, recovering from our physical endeavors of the previous day of trimming trees, cleaning state park restrooms and beaches, and clearing clogged streams of debris, that each morning we would wake to Dan Fogelberg's "To the Morning." As the notes rose softly from the camp loudspeakers, along with the sun, both gently crescendoed into an invitation to all that the fresh day had in store.

This is my recollection of those waking hours:

To the Morning

There’s a song, called To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg, which I became acquainted with during my sixteenth summer while working and living at a Wisconsin Youth Conservation Camp. 

Each morning, as we campers snoozed in cozy bunks in rustic lumberjack-era cabins shrouded in pre-dawn mist, we would perceive, from the corners of dreams, the ever so slight inklings of piano music emanating from the camp loudspeaker. 

The song tiptoed at first into our heavy-lidded slow-to-come-to-life consciousness:

“Watching the sun

 Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops”

Then, in slow but sure crescendo, it spread out across the camp, eliciting the first no-going-back-to-sleep stirrings among the slumbering workers.

“And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange”

Every morning, in rumbling thunder or windy restlessness, that song woke us to the day that lay before us.

Not a morning person at that time in my life (show me a teenager who is), I loved waking to that song. It modeled for me how to rise and meet the day in the possibility of romance with life itself.

Years later, I used to occasionally play this song to rouse my boys before school, and have returned to listening to it, once again, in the last year.

It reminds me of that summer—of that soft dawn light carried on a breeze of fresh pine through screened cabin windows—of when the song did justice to a time of day I had previously loathed. That summer, I learned what morning is—the very best time of day.

Back then, physical sweaty work in the bright, harsh afternoon sun or bug-buzzing forests followed this fleeting moment of ante meridian joy--flushing pheasants from pre-mown fields of chest-high grass under a cloudless, one-dimensional sky, and trimming sap-stained branches of tall pines, our necks sore from hours spent looking up. 

Other days, the aroma of bleach and pit toilets painted the walls of our nostrils after a week of State Park Campground clean-up duty.

Sentimental-tinged realities swirled in my adolescent head as each day of camp wore on. I missed my best friend back home, and yet at the same time, dreaded the ever-approaching end of summer when I would leave this brief, but thoroughly established and adapted-to camp/work existence, never to return to it again.

But when I play To the Morning now, after these many years, this time, of course, on Spotify (which certainly can never quite measure up to a rusty loud speaker as conduit for a tune spinning on a record player in a northern conservation camp office), it all comes back and I remember--that when I meet the day in this way, and watch the eggy orb reveal it’s cherub face, be it above a stark frozen landscape in January or one teeming with the early June croaks and bleeps of frogs and trillings of Red Wing Blackbirds in the marsh outside my door, that morning is when we establish how it will go—this day. 

And so I toast the morning in determined commitment, in a non-negotiable and oddly confident way, that, in the words of Fogelberg's song, 

“Yes! it is going to be a day where there really is nothing left to say but ‘come on morning.’”

Copyright Barb Harwood

To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg

Watching the sun

Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops

Cloudy and warm

Maybe a storm

You can never quite tell 

From the morning

And it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no 

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to

Say but

Come on morning

Waiting for mail

Maybe a tail

From an old friend

Or even a lover

Sometimes there’s none

But we have fun

Thinking of all who might

Have written.

And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange

The sounds of the day

They hurry away

Now they are gone until tomorrow

When day will break

And you will wake

And you will rake your hands

Across your eyes

And realize

That it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to say but

Come on morning

Written and sung by Dan Fogelberg

Get Some Rest, World

 

This today from Reuters: 

“Pope Francis made his first public appearance since returning to the Vatican mid-week after an 11-day hospital stay, telling well wishers they should take a break and switch off from the stresses of modern life.

‘Let us put a halt to the frantic running around dictated by our agendas. Let us learn how to take a break, to turn off the mobile phone,’ Pope Francis said in his weekly address from a window overlooking St. Peter's Square.”

A similar sentiment has been playing in my head since I recently read a feature story in a major newspaper about a positive, non-political topic (the history of a local record company) that was tarnished by the interjection of totally irrelevant negative political and COVID comments.

What I want to tell that Chicago reporter is the same thing Jason Bourne told CIA agent Pam Landy, surprising her, as Bourne watched her through a window of an adjacent skyscraper:

“Get some rest, Pam, you look tired.”

A professor of mine at Moody Theological Seminary once advised something similar. Perceiving that I was approaching my studies with perhaps a bit too much gusto, he said,

“Relax. Go watch some TV.”

Maybe we can all take the first step to gaining some much needed reprieve by watching, or re-watching, The Bourne Identity series. 

We need to get some rest, world. We look tired.  

Copyright Barb Harwood

"Church:" Not Just for Sunday Any More

 

Billy Graham, in The Journey, writes, 

“Nowhere in the New Testament does 'church' refer to a church building, since there were none in the first century (Christians mostly met in homes).”  

He goes on to point out that, in the Bible, 

“Church” meant “a local group of Christians, or all the Christians in a particular city or area.” The word “church” in the Bible “refers to the company of all believers, who are spiritually united by their relationship with Christ. The church isn’t just a local congregation, it includes all believers everywhere...” 

So this begs the question: how did we get to where we are today where that one hour on Sunday morning (or three times a week) has come to define us as believers and take precedence in our walk? 

What would happen if people were to stand back and stop looking at church as having an address and a program and saw it as all believers? 

What would happen if  "church" was understood as a body of individuals who work, eat, play, pray, travel and go to school every day of the week, and with whom we interact on a daily basis (maybe not even knowing they, too, are people of faith?) 

Would we act in our daily behavior with the reverence, chivalry and good will that we do on Sunday mornings? Would we live as though we are in church all of the time? Because, as a body of believers called the church, that is exactly where we are all of the time?

Our limited contemporary definition of church has constrained us and at the same time let us off the hook. 

It constrains us by keeping us from interacting with others who “don’t attend my church,” and it lets us off the hook by leading us into the false assumption that “church”—the building and Sunday morning congregation—is where we live our faith. 

So, the thinking goes, if we can pull off living our faith for one hour (or three times a week), then we can go home with our families, and to work and school on Monday, and never have to think about living our faith again until we head, once more, into the church building. 

Year, after year, after year, after year, that is often how it goes. 

But if that’s the case, we’ve got church all wrong.

Copyright Barb Harwood

Wisdom in the Heart Starts in the Mind

 

The following quote is by J.I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom, writing in their book, Guard Us, Guide Us:

“Wisdom in the heart starts in the mind and is thus about thinking and about learning and also about unlearning. One mark of a wise person, according to Proverbs, is that one is willing to accept instruction and correction and to learn to know things better than one does at the moment. The life of wisdom is a life of constant learning: constant evaluating, constant discerning, constant extension of one’s understanding. When David declares that his covenant-God leads and guides him along the right paths (Ps. 23:3), he means that God does this by getting him to think, and through thinking to understand, and through understanding to gain wisdom—and thus to discern the right path from wrong ones.”