Betrayal is an ugly word, and certainly not one I thought I’d use early on in a book on devotion as the path of conscious love. I have avoided and softened the word for years now, so discomfited have I been with the possibility of betraying myself, my faith, my life in this pathway of relationship. What I have learned is that betrayal can be a doorway to deepened faith, when healed in the sacred gaze of devotion and held in old-new containers strong enough to honor both the light and holy dark of human lives. On its own, without conscious care, betrayal destroys, disassembles, and divides. With conscious care, deep-body listening, and willingness to risk, however, the perceived (or real) betrayals of my community of faith have led to deepened faith in me, multiple intimate spiritual companionships, greater self- and other-compassion in an intensely grounded life of assurance and devotion, able to hold the suffering of self and others. In Christian traditions, we call that fruit of Spirit.
Standing on this side of my life’s calling, knowing my own wholeness more than I ever knew possible, I can concur with the dream-driver’s statement: I have been betrayed . . . by centuries of yearnings unmet and habits of mind unwilling to expand to the More that awaits us all. Speaking as a woman of faith, I find it loyal to betray institutions that have undervalued and dehumanized women for centuries. My sense of loyalty-faith-passion demanded a betrayal, perceived or real. After all, when is growth beyond the bounds of what was a betrayal, and when is it necessary for healing, for wholeness? I’m beginning to sense that betrayal is inevitable in human life. Each of us will be betrayed—by another, by ourselves, by the customs and institutions we hold most dear. We will be exposed to danger by giving information to a (perceived) enemy. Knowledge will be offered, dispersed, that is treacherous to what we hold most dear—our planet, our relationships, ourselves. And sometimes, in the face of deep suffering and hunger, disloyalty is more virtuous than loyalty. Betrayal can be a pathway to deeper fidelity.
Yet it is also true that I have not been betrayed by anyone in particular. Not my family, nor my husband, nor my faith community, nor my colleagues. It has taken me decades to be able to name my own experience, especially as it threatens many of those I love—a gentle father and ever-present mother, an attentive husband, a remarkable extended family and faithful web of colleagues and friends. The dream above arrived several years ago, startling me as a Presbyterian, patristic, and practical Christian theologian. Unknowing but not unwilling, I was finding myself on this journey of awakening to a way of the heart, a path of devotion in conscious love by means of companionship across irreconcilable difference. Step by step, I knew I was going where it felt lively to go. In very real ways, the betrayal that I sense so deeply is completely impersonal. I can offer what I have learned because of the family, ecclesial, and academic life I know, have worked hard for, have been given. Yet we have also been betrayed by ages of refusal and fear, when we persist in not seeing our interconnection and the overwhelming violence against women and children. Our world is groaning under it.
Fruit of many years, then, A Companionable Way invites each of us into this way of the heart toward an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others, a way that invites deepening of the journey in which you have been steeped, or been scarred, probably both. I’ve now unpacked a lot of boxes. Some I knew I was unpacking. Others fell off the truck and spilled open as I stayed at it. I have made a preliminary order of most of the pieces, picking up what has been fruitful and relinquishing that which seems too heavy to carry or impractical for the journey. I will show you what I am taking with me in my knapsack, and you are welcome to any of it that you desire.
A Bit on Terms: “Deep Feeling” and “Container”
A couple of observations about some words in the pages to come. Deep feeling as I use it here is a primarily relational, embodied, and intuitive force within each of us, including inarticulate and articulate awareness of emotions, sensations, intuitions, hunches and more. It is not solely or even necessarily a conscious force, though it can become so. This force labors—or we labor with it—in resistance and neglect, at the bounds of consciousness. It has great potential for self- and other-transfiguration for the common good. I awakened to it at about age six or seven in an embodied but necessarily hidden way, in my body-dissociated Pennsylvania Deutsch family. It was an awakening to the overwhelming sensation the human body is capable of, interconnected with the mind but also beyond it. The manner in which this occurred, and the isolation in which it occurred, insured that this holy capacity within me would remain in the dark, entangled in shame for decades. Maturing into an adult with it, within a Protestant religiosity that disdains the body—all bodies, especially women’s bodies—made it a burden for a long time. It’s been this journey—repression, maturation, regression, then regeneration in spirit5—that has returned me to deep feeling as gift, not burden; invitation, not danger.
The force of deep feeling, finally birthed into my conscious awareness and shared for nearly a decade now with spirit-friends, has been complicated and complicating, of course. By definition, it is exquisitely intimate in a world forgetting the nature of authentic intimacy rooted in shared vulnerability. It is excruciatingly personal, rooted in the mundane and concrete details of any one and all of our lives—the extraordinary within the cover of the ordinary. This also means it is unavoidably embodied, which is befuddling for increasingly disembodied, technological, consumer-driven human beings today, disconnected from the land, geography, earth. Even naming the body means we think it’s about sex, when it is not.
To make matters worse for receptivity in this world, coming into deep feeling that is intimate, contextual, and embodied requires a coming to consciousness of an unspoken, perhaps even unspeakable woundedness within each of us. Many traditions of religious hue jump on this reality as sin, sinfulness, even depravity deep within us as human beings. On the one hand, it’s hard to dispute the evidence—watch the evening news, or witness the vitriol overflowing in the blogosphere. Yet those words do not describe the woundedness I mean. Honoring its wordless character, I will not presume to name it. I can say this woundedness began at birth for each of us. Out of our sustained refusal or chosen unconsciousness of it, we use the evidence of the wound to deepen it more, to pretend and defend against it, its cleansing, its healing. No one wants to see, let alone know and feel deeply, this woundedness within. Without redress, we continue to cloak conceptual and physical violence with paternalistic, shaming, systemic attempts of avoidance, neglect. Sustaining ourselves this way while exploiting the world in avoidant fashion, we continue to hold onto impossible certainties and an elitist expertise for the few.
What is ultimately invited in a return to and healthy stewardship of deep feeling is an energy, form, and direction able to balance, hold, and nourish. When we are willing to return, to steward, to trust, we receive all the world pours into us in a way more and more necessary for any new life in community to root and blossom today. Stronger, grounded, and circle-way communities are the only containers I know able to hold the deep feeling of each of us in the co-created presence of the greater whole.
Container is another word used in a potentially unfamiliar way in these pages, though more and more folks I encounter are using it in the fashion I intend. Here, it describes the way we structure our communities, our shared time, even our words and our habits of mind, which are the “conceptual containers” in which we understand our world. Our public and private institutions today demonstrate a fairly common shape and energy, at least on the surface. Walk into most civic settings or churches or synagogues today, particularly traditional or (Christian) megachurches, and you’ll experience a container with a clear front, perhaps a stage, a body, and a back. It could be represented by a square, a rectangle, or even a lopsided pentagram, but there is a clear hierarchy or point of focus within such a container. Leadership speaks from up front, whether one or a few, and the rest of the gathered listen and act as they are led within social and liturgical customs (now breaking down). The leader can see the most faces, and those gathered can see just a few, unless they twist and turn to look. The cornered-container holds the words and visions of the few, within the silences of the many, at least until one of the larger community pays the cost to become set apart to lead within aging structures that can disempower the many.