Isn’t She Lov-er-ly? by Sharon Lurie

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-->© 2014 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Secure

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional…or, at least I hope so.  If people really are dropping like flies around Nicholas Sparks, someone needs to call the cops.

Recently, for reasons unclear to me at the time, I felt a pressing need to watch all of the movies of Nicholas Sparks, author of perennial favorites such as “The Notebook.”  For those unfamiliar with his work, his stories strongly resemble Mark Schultz songs and episodes of “24”:  gutwrenchingly sad, and in the end, there will be a body count.  If I remember correctly, “The Lucky One” had a higher death toll than the last installment of “Die Hard.”  If you are reading this and you have never seen a Nicholas Sparks movie, you can save your time, because they are exactly like Shakespeare’s tragedies - in the end, everybody dies.

I don’t mean to sound negative, though.  I think everyone should familiarize themselves with Mister Sparks’ repertoire because his films teach an important life lesson:  if you treat others well, don’t compromise your standards, and if you wait long enough, you will eventually find the love of your life who will bring you the greatest joy and fulfillment you have ever known…only to have that person snatched from you via an incurable disease or natural disaster two weeks later.

Just kidding…sort of.  Though I am not a fan of romantic comedies or romantic dramas, I found the schmaltzfests of the Sultan of Star-Crossed Lovers consistently entertaining and endearing.  However, when I watched “Nights in Rodanthe,” I got a lot more than just a good cry.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Jill Torrelson, one of the secondary characters in the story, died during an operation to remove a hemangioma, a benign cyst, from her face (she had a fatal allergic reaction to the anesthesia).  In a critical scene, Paul Flanner, the male protagonist, went to talk to Jill’s widower Robert who had the following to say about his late wife:

“Her eyes were dark brown and soft, like she’d never hurt a soul, and she wouldn’t, neither.  I knew Jill since we was in school.  That thing on her face, she always had it.  I didn’t care about it.  I never even saw it, but she wanted it off.  I’d find her in the bathroom crying, looking at it.  She’d be saying, ‘I want to be pretty for you.’  It broke my heart when she’d say that, because she was pretty.  She was so…but, that’s what she wanted.  She wanted the operation, and in our whole life, I don’t remember her asking for anything.  So, I said yes…She had all the love and kindness in the world right inside her.”

I want to talk about a disease that is running rampant today which seems to affect women mostly.  This plague upon the land is called Toxic Self-Loathing.  It is the practice of not seeing or actively degrading worth in ourselves because of our perceived lack of external or internal beauty (for those unfamiliar with the disease, click here).  Contrary to what we think, it is not harmless, it is not “cute,” it is not representative of Godly humility, nor is it something that goes away on its own in time.  It is a disease, and, if left unchecked, has devastating consequences.

What Toxic Self-Loathing Does to Us

The aforementioned scene in “Nights in Rodanthe” opened my eyes to something important:  Toxic Self-Loathing is deadly.  I never would’ve thought before that a little insecurity could be lethal, like it was in the case of Mrs. Torrelson, but often it does kill the one infected, though not in the dramatic and abrupt fashion seen in the movie.  Think about it:  the woman who hates herself will often give herself to abusive men, and many of those women end up dead at the hands of their abusers.  Another woman who can’t see physical beauty in herself will starve herself in an attempt to attain a physical ideal which, in the digital age of airbrushing, isn’t even real.  Yet another woman, believing she can’t be or do any better, might turn herself over to self-destructive behaviors such as alcoholism or drug abuse.

Every time we knock ourselves for reasons other than the conviction of the Holy Spirit, every time we call God a liar by telling ourselves we are not fearfully and wonderfully made, we are drinking poison into our spirits, pure and simple.  And if we think we are no good, we will behave in such fashion.

Mrs. Torrelson, despite all the reassurances from her husband, could not believe that she was beautiful unless she got rid of that cyst.  Her lack of belief in her own value literally cost her her life.  However, her Toxic Self-Loathing didn’t rob just her.

What Toxic Self-Loathing Does to Others

I have a good guy friend I will call the Shadow Boxer.  One night on the phone he told me about his ex-wife.  She was very insecure and suffered from congenital Toxic Self-Loathing.  He said, “She was physically beautiful, intelligent, and had an engaging personality.  But she never liked herself.  She thought she was ugly, for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom.  At first it was flattering, because she needed me so badly, but over time it became draining.  It was like a constant drip, drip, drip energy drain. I felt like I had to carry her all the time. The weight became unbearable, and I started to rebel.  At some point, I gave up trying to convince her that she was beautiful, because it never worked.”

The story did not have a happy ending.  For all he did to love her well, after a short time she left him for another man without much of an explanation, causing my friend a world of longstanding hurt.

I couldn’t get the conversation out of my head for many days following.  Shortly thereafter, I conducted one of my famous Facebook opinion polls.  I asked, “Which is harder for you to handle:  a person who is conceited and thinks he’s perfect and doesn’t make any mistakes, or the person who is rabidly insecure and always putting themselves down?”  Overwhelmingly, my friends answered the latter, to my shock.  They said it’s easier to bring a haughty person down than to lift an insecure person up, and most said that being around a self-hating person is draining.

The conversation with Shadow Boxer and the surprising results of my social media survey were hard to hear, but I needed to hear it.  A lot of women need to hear it.  So many of us become emotional black holes, so incapable of believing we are beautiful, valuable, and deserving of love that all the validation we receive is like pouring water down the drain.

Toxic Self-Loathing is not only a danger to us but a danger to those who love us.  Shadow Boxer’s ex-wife didn’t believe she was worthy of love, so she left (and thereby hurt) a good man to be with a bad man.  It is not uncommon for someone who questions her own value to leave a healthy person for an unhealthy one, which often causes the healthy person to wonder what was so terrible about him that his woman left him for an axe murderer.  A woman who marries and stays with an abuser because she thinks she doesn’t deserve any better sets the example for her daughters that they deserve to be abused, too.  I have also talked to a number of women who said they learned to berate themselves and their physical appearance because they had a mother who denigrated her own figure on a regular basis.  After all, if Mommy is ugly, and I come from her, then I must be ugly, too, right?

So, in other words, and I don’t know how else to say this, our not feeling good enough, in one way or another, makes those who try to love us feel not good enough, too.  Therefore, unless we do something about it, Toxic Self-Loathing is not only in danger of killing us, but infecting those around us.  Just ask Mister Torrelson what it was like every time he tried to reassure his wife she was beautiful.

(For the record, it’s not just women who suffer from Toxic Self-Loathing.  However, men usually berate themselves over their perceived lack of accomplishments and the mark they’ve made on the world, whereas with women it’s usually about their appearance or loveability.

I have a good guy friend who for many years constantly beat himself up because he felt he wasn’t where he needed to be in life and would never be good or strong enough to achieve anything.  Every time I tried to encourage him, he would tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about.  This is a man who started several extremely successful and profitable businesses and has also received numerous well-known accolades in the music world!  To hear him speak of himself as an utter failure, no matter what I said to the contrary, left me devastatingly sad .)

The Solution

Now that we’ve clearly defined the problem, what is the solution?  Telling ourselves or others to stop the Toxic Self-Loathing doesn’t work.  No one gets into the habit of hating herself overnight, so she won’t break the habit overnight either.  (For those who doubt the ineffectiveness of just telling someone to stop thinking negative thoughts, watch this.)

Jesus said the second greatest commandment was to love our neighbors as ourselves.  That says to me that there is a kind of selflove that is not only healthy, appropriate, and beneficial, but also natural.  I don’t think anyone comes into the world thinking they are ugly and worthless.  I think we all start out with a good self-concept, because apparently a good self-concept will allow us to see others in a positive light.  Therefore, the question is when is it that we begin to hate ourselves?  It is usually a traumatic event or a series of messages from people whose approval we seek early on that begins to plant those seeds of doubt about our own worth inside of us.

Many of us think all kinds of crazy things about ourselves:  we’re not pretty enough, we will never be successful, we will always screw up the good things in our lives, we will sabotage whatever relationships we have so it’s best not to get close to anyone, and the list goes on and on.  What I have discovered, however, is that there is usually one or a few foundational lies from which the Redwood Forest of Self-Hatred sprouts.  As with a tree, the most effective way to destroy those lies is to burn the root.  Kill the root, and the fruit has no choice but to follow.  The hard part often is finding that root.

I had a terminal case of Toxic Self-Loathing from the time I was eight years old until March of 2013.  Lie upon lie that I believed about myself compounded, and the weight of them almost killed me.  I got desperate and asked God to show me when and why I started to believe I had no value.  He showed me what that root was.  It was a lie, a message given to me by someone I both loved and trusted.  It was also deeply rooted around my heart, and it wasn’t going to give up that ground without a fight.

I am not going to say that following that revelation I never had an insecure thought about myself.  However, two things happened.  First of all, I stopped seeing that lie as a part of me and recognized for the first time that it was a tool from the Enemy to keep me from receiving love from God and His people.  Second, with that big lie exposed, a ton of lesser but still debilitating lies I had believed about myself for years lost their control over me, too.  God showing me the source of my problem was one of the tools necessary to fix it.  I had a lot of work on my part (and still do) to see myself as the beloved child of God that God says I am.  However, the war against Toxic Self-Loathing, for me, has become winnable and and my victory permanent.

Reader, you are beautiful and you have value.  God says so, and He wants to heal you of your Toxic Self-Loathing.  After all, He loves you too much to let you become Mister Sparks’ next casualty.  *grin*

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

The Great Pill-Popping by Sharon Lurie

© 2014 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Coherent

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional…or maybe not.  Just because I was on Vicodin doesn’t mean I didn’t really see the Death Star.

Many years ago, I went for my first ride on a motorcycle.  All went well until my friend and I returned to my church parking lot.  I didn’t feel anything as I dismounted his bike, but was taken aback when I found my right leg stuck to the tailpipe.  (*WORD OF CAUTION TO READERS*  When riding a motorcycle, always wear long pants!)

I tore my leg away from the miniature incinerator, and with it a sizable chunk of skin.  I went into the church, grabbed the first aid kit, and covered my wound with burn cream and gauze.

About an hour later, I unwrapped the gauze to see how the burn was doing.  Without going into the gory details, it looked a bit like a bubbling cauldron.

A friend took me to an urgent care clinic.  The doctor gave a shot to me of something to anesthetize the burn in order to clean and dress it.  Whatever he gave me made loopier than a Slinky.

The next day, my friend took me to the burn unit of the local hospital.  I was given a prescription for some industrial strength painkillers and was ordered to return every day or so to have my burn examined and bandages changed.

I have a bunch of allergies and also get quite spaced out on painkillers, so there’s not a lot I can take.  What they gave me for the burn took me for quite the ride.

I became easily spooked.  I had trouble remembering things.  I called everyone by the name of a Star Wars character.  While at a friend’s house, I ran screaming from her vacuum cleaner because I was convinced it was the Death Star.

On a return trip to the burn unit, I was asked when I’d had my last tetanus booster.  Had I been in my right mind, I would’ve told them I was allergic to it.  In a moment of terrible lack of forethought, at least in my opinion, the burn doctor decided to give me one.  The injection site on my arm blew up to mammoth proportions and I itched like a mad woman for several days following.

Four days after I had gotten the burn, I had been scheduled to give a deposition in court.  The friend with whom I was staying didn’t want me to be spacey for my court date, so without telling me, (not that it would have helped) he gave me aspirin instead of the prescription elephant tranquilizer painkiller.  Did I mention I am allergic to aspirin?  So, I had an allergic reaction to the aspirin on top of the allergic reaction to the tetanus booster on top the small supernova that was occurring on my leg.

Upon my return to the burn unit the next day, I told the doctor my tale of woe, and he took me off all the painkillers.  Since everything I had taken either made me sick or made me discombobulated, he said I would just have to deal with the pain.

For anyone who has had to deal with an injury, there are times when we have to “grin and bear” it because the side effects of some analgesics can be more harmful than the pain itself.  This is often true of figurative painkillers, too.

In today’s world, and dare I say today’s church, pain and grief are dirty words.  Though none of us would think of telling someone who had broken a bone to not think about it and get back into the physical rigors of life right away, we often tell others (and ourselves) that emotional pain shouldn’t bother us.  In Christian circles, it is quite common, upon someone expressing feelings of loss, to be told he shouldn’t feel that way, that God has a plan, blah, blah, blah.

When I was dealing with the physical pain of a burned leg, no amount of telling myself that the wound would eventually heal would make the pain go away.  A broken heart isn’t much different.  However, because the misconception that we should be able to turn painful emotions off like a light switch, most of us learned to develop quite elaborate emotional painkillers which we hope will set us on a fast track to the mental state we had before the loss occurred.  The only hitch is these anodynes often cause more problems than they solve.

In my travels, I have seen emotional pill-popping of all kinds:  the woman who goes from one abusive relationship to another to numb the pain of being abandoned by her father, the kid who turns to drugs to assuage the pain of rejection from his peers, the divorcé who uses blame and ridicule of his ex to kill the pain the guilt he feels for not doing his part to make the marriage work, or the single who goes from relationship to relationship without any downtime in between to deal with the pain of being alone.  I have even seen and experienced blaming oneself as a painkiller, because thinking we could have done better anesthetizes the pain of the knowledge that some losses are completely out of our control.

I experienced a loss that also served as a wake up call for me, teaching me that if we don’t let pain run its own course and grief do its work, we will become someone neither we nor those we love will recognize.

I had a gentleman friend.  He was my boss at a temporary job, and we stayed friends after my assignment ended.  He was the kind of dude a girl would want to take home to meet her dad.  He was smart, strong, humble, and had a huge heart.  He had been quite kind to me, and I had learned a lot from him.

He started dating a girl who wasn’t what she appeared to be.  Long story short, she took him for a ride emotionally and financially.  When she got what she wanted from him, she dumped him, but it didn’t stop there.  She treated him terribly in public and forced their mutual friends to choose between him and her.  For reasons I won’t divulge, they chose her.

I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a good man get taken out, but I have, and watching someone’s heart die is excruciating.  He started retreating into himself.  He stopped doing things he used to love.  He stopped dreaming and fell into the rut so many men do of trying to become successful in business at the expense of his soul and his relationships.  Worst of all, he began to hang out in different crowds.  The deep conversations I used to enjoy with him came to an end, and he would become irritated even with me asking him, “How are you?”

His painkiller was to surround himself with people who would never inquire to the condition of his heart, and to keep his heart under lock and key and open to no one.  He terminated our friendship in short order, and it is a loss I still feel to this day.

One of the biggest problems with trying to kill our pain in dishonest and unhealthy ways is it almost always ends up inflicting pain on those we love.  Think about it.  Our addictions cause us to break trust with those we love.  Running from relationships for fear of getting hurt robs those around us of the blessing of our presence and personhood.  Not dealing with the anger we have towards those who have wounded us turns into rage against those around us who haven’t.  The list goes on and on.

Seeing what happened to my gentleman friend opened my eyes to the direction I was heading.  I had not really allowed myself to grieve anything.  I let others dictate to me what I should and shouldn’t feel.  As particular losses piled up, I realized if I didn’t take time out to heal, the emotional and spiritual damage would be irreversible.

I think letting ourselves feel pain scares us because it shows us how little control we have in life.  Sometimes losses hit us even with the greatest of precautions taken.  Sometimes those we love change for the worse, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  God doesn’t ask us to turn off our hearts and avoid pain at all costs.  After all, there was pain from which God didn’t even shield Himself.

I started this process of being authentic and allowing myself to literally count my losses about a year ago.  (I don’t recommend stockpiling forty years worth of grief to anyone.)  It has been hard.  Letting myself cry and feel angry and show vulnerability to trusted friends has been unchartered territory for me.  Telling God what I actually feel instead of what I think He wants to hear has proved the most challenging discipline of all.  However, as I continue to be real about it, I am beginning to see the fruit of it, and the fruit is both sweet to the taste and nourishing to the heart.

I have abandoned the Great Pill-Popping, and I encourage all of you, my readers, to do the same.  The upside of grieving honestly is that we don’t do it alone.  The Man of Sorrows, who isn’t unable of sympathizing with us in our weaknesses, not only feels our pain, but chooses to bear it with us.

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

Yippee-kai-yay, Mother and Child By Sharon Lurie

© 2013 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Explosive

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional, so I don’t want anyone to think I am promoting violence on the holidays, unless it’s necessary to get out of uncomfortable Christmas gatherings in which nosy people insist on asking you why it’s almost the end of another year and you’re still not married.

“Die Hard” is my favorite Christmas movie, which is a conundrum since I am also a big Jane Austen fan (a woman who likes both Georgian gentry romantic fiction and action thrillers walks a lonely road).  Alan Rickman, who plays the main antagonist in “Die Hard,” also plays Colonel Brandon in the 1995 film adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.”

My girlfriends think Alan Rickman as Brandon is on parity with Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the 1995 “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries.  They don’t understand why I can’t bear him as Marianne Dashwood’s future husband.    However, every time I watch “Sense and Sensibility” and try to imagine Alan Rickman sweeping off my feet in the rain, as soon as we get to the wedding scene, I imagine him reverting from an English brogue to a German accent, shooting me in the head, and running off with my negotiable bearer bonds on the way to our honeymoon.

Anywho, for those who don’t know, “Die Hard” is a film from the 80s starring Bruce Willis as New York policeman John McClane.  Estranged from his wife Holly, who has moved to California with their two kids, John flies to Los Angeles in an attempt to reconcile with her.  However, while visiting her at Nakatomi Plaza during her office Christmas party on December 24, the building is taken over by terrorists, led by Hans Gruber, who’s played by Rickman.  McClane escapes the party and tries to defeat the twelve terroists, who’ve taken everyone else in the building hostage.

Of course, the police get involved, and then the FBI.  For the sake of comic relief, filling 131 minutes of screen time, and advancing Bruce Willis’s career, law enforcement are complete idiots and only exacerbate the hostage problem.  So, the job of saving the day rests solely on John McClane’s shoulders.

Some say the movie is the first in a line of the modern cop movies.  Some say it’s a cliché-ridden popcorn flick full of plot holes and over-the-top theatrics that only serve to propagate the antiquated idea of the urban cowboy as it lines the pockets of film studio executives.  For me, it’s probably the greatest allegory of the coming of Christ I have seen put to film.  (To the myriad of online bloggers who insist “Die Hard” is not a Christmas movie, take note!)

We became alienated from our true love.  In the meantime, we put ourselves on a collision course with a powerful enemy, one with an intricate plan to take from us what wasn’t his and destroy us in the process.

Our true love came to reclaim us as His own, but we resisted.  For a moment we forget what it was like to be in relationship with Him, and in that moment, the enemy struck.  However, as the full force of the love we left behind and its consequences hit, so did the full force of the jealousy He had for us.

True love sprung into action, and so began redemption’s great work.  He worked and lived among us, in our confines of terror and confusion that are often the hallmarks of human existence.  For the time being, He had to do the job of preparing our rescue in anonymous and clandestine fashion, and though it didn’t seem so at the time, His surreptitiousness was for our safety and benefit.

As we trembled in terror, the Word-Become-Flesh worked in the background, robbing the enemy of his weapons and his henchmen, quickly reminding the enemy of his shortcomings, which worked him into a stupefying rage.  However, each successive blow to the enemy came at great personal expense to the Pursuer of our souls.  He was forced to experience pain and peril previously unknown to Him.  He knew full well the blood He would have to shed.  But for Him, there would be no retreat.  Those on the outside had failed, and miserably so.  He had to succeed, because the apple of His eye was at stake.

Every great story has a pinnacle showdown between good and evil, and this one is no different.  The enemy was almost completely disarmed, but we the beloved didn’t know that.  All we knew was that we had death at our heads, and the sky was falling.

But then He appeared-bloodied, limping, and with singular purpose in His eyes.  He moved towards us as the enemy sneered.  Being the coward he is, the enemy put us between true love and himself.  He demanded He put down what appeared to be His only weapon, which He did, for love’s sake.

Then began that heart-stopping, breath-taking moment when the enemy rocked with laughter.  Strength fled from our spirits as we watched in disbelief what couldn’t possibly be the end.

But it wasn’t the end.  IT WASN’T THE END!!!!!  Love had a plan.  He always had a plan, and until that moment, no one could see it but Him.  Armed with the Life and the Promises of God, He not only bought us back for Himself, but He stole the keys to Hell and Death back from the epitome of evil himself.

As the enemy fell to his defeat, the Lion of Judah proclaimed, “Happy trails, Hans!”

No, not really.  He said, “Death has been defeated.  Hopelessness has been vanquished.  Sin has been conquered.  Addiction has been disarmed.  Abandonment has been given notice.  The thief of hearts has been subdued and can steal from the lives of the Beloved of God no longer!”

Friends, we are the ones who have been rescued in a tale so hyperrealistic it can’t be true.  Ah, but it is!  And because it pushes the confines of credibility that we can cry out, “Glory to God in the highest!”, even if we are an acrophobic cop from New York.  *wink*

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

On Woodchips and Wilderness by Sharon Lurie

--> © 2012 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Wild

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional, so I don’t want to hear any complaints from podiatrists claiming I am so endorsing walking around with wood chips in one’s shoes regularly. Although, I must say they work much better than those expensive food deodorants, not to mention that they leave a smaller carbon footprint.  (Ha!!!)

One thing I have learned in the last 18 months is that revelation comes when I least expect it, and when I feel least deserving.  Today was no exception.

I went hiking with a friend of mine whom I shall refer to as my Semitic Soul Sister, because we are both Jewish in some form or fashion.  We went to a place here in Nashville called Radnor Lake.  This body of water seems like a bit of an anomaly because the 85-acre lake and surrounding woodlands are smack dab in the middle of a residential area.  It seems odd that something so big and so wild could be so contained.

Semitic Soul Sister and I bounded down the trail taking in the glorious sight of multi-colored falling leaves.  The trail was lined with wood chips before we began our journey, but not afterwards, because most of them ended up in my sneakers.  About half way down the trail, we had to stop at an intersection closed due to the crossing of a rafter of wild turkeys.  The happy little birds waddled slowly and leisurely to their destination, and those of us on the trail just stood in awe of them.  The delightful little eye candy was short-lived, however, when a power walker decided to barrel through the crossing, spooking the birds and sending them on their way.

Right around where the birds scattered, I saw three different deer feeding on some flowers and sprouts.  Some of us moved a little closer to the deer to get a better look at them.  I was very cautious, because in the past, deer I had encountered were easily startled.  One of the other hikers along the trail said, “Don’t worry.  You can get really close to them and they won’t run off because they’re so used to humans around here.”  Learning that made me…sad.

I couldn’t have told you at the moment why I was sad.  Who wouldn’t like a close-up, unobstructed view of nature?  A little more reflection, however, revealed the cause.

There are so few avenues for adventure left.  To see what was once frontier become so domesticated and so tame pierced something in my heart.  The lavish beauty I witnessed along those trails that day was so striking -- not in its refinement, but in its wildness.  Nowadays, beauty is a costly commodity.  It is highly processed, developed, and expensive.  Women will pay all sorts of money to replicate a certain look.  Yet the loveliness of an autumn day, with a million scattered crunchy leaves, a myriad of wildlife, and a cacophony of sounds and intricate rhythms, still trumps anything that man can reproduce simply because it cannot be quantified.  So many different colors and seemingly opposing elements, scattered across that landscape, yet somehow woven together for a feast for the eyes in a gorgeous orderly chaos.  It’s a beauty man can try to copy but can never manufacture.  The alluring wildness, whose power over us lies in that we can appreciate it, but never own it.

I have been thinking a lot about what real beauty is.  It’s not something I can conjure up.  It is something God-given, God-made, and -- dare I say -- a little bit ferocious.  I still haven’t cleaned out the wood chips from my sneakers, because when I wear them, I am reminded of the importance of taking a walk on the wild side.

“Life consists with wildness.  The most alive is the wildest.  Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.  One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.”  Henry David Thoreau

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

Awake by Sharon Lurie

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© 2012 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Sleepy (Very, Very Sleepy)

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional, so I don’t want to get any complaints from concerned parents that I am advocating the watching of scary movies as a spiritual discipline.  Are you listening, Morbid Redhead?

God speaks to me in many different ways.  Sometimes he speaks through the still small voice of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes he speaks through his word.  Sometimes he speaks through my Christian brothers and sisters.  Occasionally, he speaks to me through my dog.  Then, there are those rare and special times when God speaks to me through a B horror movie from the 60s.

* SPOILER ALERT *  The Hypnotic Eye is about a string of beautiful women who mutilate themselves for seemingly no reason.  It is also about a man whose failure as a police detective is rivaled only by his failure as a boyfriend.

The movie, released in 1960, begins with a gorgeous blonde who walks into her kitchen to wash her hair.  However, instead of putting her hair into the kitchen sink under the faucet, she puts her hair into an open flame on her stove.  She subsequently dies from third degree burns.  Dave, the detective who arrives at the scene, talks to the woman before she dies, but she claims she was alone and merely confused the stove for the sink.  She is the 11^th in a string of self-mutilations, and all the women have the same story:  they were alone at the time, and they confused something harmful for something harmless.

The next night, Dave takes his beautiful girlfriend Marcia and her beautiful friend Dodi to see Desmond, a charming and handsome hypnotist and magician performing at a local theater.  Desmond, with the help of his drop-dead gorgeous assistant, Justine, performs mostly hypnotic tricks with a little bit of magic in the mix.  For the last segment of the performance, Desmond, under the direction of Justine, picks a beautiful woman from the audience to perform the levitation trick.  Dodi had commented to Dave and Marcia how amazing it was how Desmond seemed to completely dominate his subjects.  Dave makes a smart aleck remark about Desmond being a fake, which prompts Dodi to raise her hand to volunteer for the levitation trick.  As is normal magician procedure, Desmond hypnotizes Dodi before levitating her.  After the show, Dodi begins to act strangely.  Next thing we see, poor Dodi is washing her face and hands with sulfuric acid, which burns her terribly.

The next day, Dave and Marcia visit Dodi at the hospital.  Like the other self-mutilation victims, Dodi doesn’t remember anything, nor did she feel anything while she was washing with the acid.  Marcia begins to suspect that perhaps Desmond was involved.  However, Dave scoffs at her.  Wanting to prove her theory, Marcia goes back to the theater that night and volunteers for the levitation trick.  She pretends to be hypnotized, and while pretending to be under Desmond’s spell, he whispers to her to come to his dressing room at midnight.  Marcia shares all this with Dave and Phil, Dave’s best friend and the police psychiatrist who is also trained in hypnosis.  She also tells them Desmond used a device, resembling an eye, which emitted a strange, flickering light, hidden in his hand as he tried to hypnotize her. So, the three of them decide that Desmond is up to no good and that Marcia should go back to Desmond’s dressing room and see what happens.

Marcia gets to Desmond’s dressing room, but he has a trap for her, and ends up hypnotizing her for real.  He then takes her out, while she’s in a trance, for a night on the town of dinner and dancing before taking her back to her apartment.  When they arrive, they start to make moosh-a-moosh until Justine, who had been hiding out in Marcia’s apartment, stops them.  Justine then puts Marcia completely out in hypnotic sleep.  Desmond looks at Justine and asks, “How many more?”

As Justine puts her hand on Marcia’s face, she answers, “As long as there are faces like this.”

Desmond then leaves Justine and Marcia alone, and Marcia is at Justine’s mercy.  She leads Marcia, still in a trance, to the bathroom and turns the shower on to boiling hot.  She tells Marcia to step into the “cool, cool shower,” which she almost does, until Dave shows up banging on the door, saving Marcia from a fate similar to Dodi and the other women who mutilated themselves.

Fast forward to the end of the movie.  Marcia has once again fallen into the clutches of evil Desmond and evil(er) Justine (chicks in horror flicks aren’t the brightest and are known for always getting into trouble, but in this instance, the fault clearly lies with Dave.)  There is a standoff between Dave and Phil and Desmond and Justine.  Justine leads Marcia, still in a trance, to the scaffolding above the theater stage and threatens to push Marcia to her death.  As Phil tries to talk Justine, she pulls the beautiful mask off her face to reveal that she is horribly disfigured.  It is the then audience learns that the reason she had been having Desmond hypnotize all those beautiful women and then giving them post-hypnotic suggestions to mutilate themselves was because Justine was jealous of their beauty, beauty she had lost and could never recover, and so she wouldn’t rest until she could destroy all the beauty that crossed her path.

Now, before I get to the main point of this blog, I would like to teach a little lesson to all of my male readers entitled, “How to Stay Celibate for the Rest of Your Life.”  (If any of my male readers sense this to be misandrist, I promise equal time by composing a similar lesson to my female readers in a future blog.)

1.     When going out on the town with your girlfriend and her friend, make sure you tell them their ideas are dumb.

2.     If your girlfriend has a theory about someone being a dangerous person, and you don’t believe her, by all means let her test her theory on her own without any protection.

3.     If the aforementioned possibly dangerous person is a hypnotist, and your girlfriend, while unprotected and in his clutches starts to act weird, your first assumption should be she is just a flake and cheating on you, especially if your best friend, who is trained in hypnosis, has just told you that hypnosis is real and dangerous if in the wrong hands.

4.     By all means, let your girlfriend go alone with possibly dangerous hypnotist to her apartment.

5.     After you save her from being badly scalded at the hands of the villain who, for the record, knows where your girlfriend lives and most likely has hypnotic power over her, leave her alone at her apartment for the villains to come back and finish what they started.

However, if you then decide your girlfriend is really cute, and you don’t want to be celibate for the rest of your life, after you’ve unwittingly done everything in the preceding list, save your girlfriend from the villain and certain death in dramatic fashion and at great risk to your own life, because a well-executed daring rescue covers a multitude of male-pattern cluelessness.  (I’m just joking.  No man in real life would ever be this careless.)

So finally, the spiritual lesson (first presented to me in Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge):  we find ourselves in the pain and distress we are in because we have a powerful yet very crafty enemy.  Our enemy used to be God’s right hand and he was beautiful and dazzling by all accounts.  However, he got puffed up with pride, and was, therefore, stripped of his beauty, position, and power and cast out of Heaven.  Then, when God made man and woman in his own image and gave them authority over creation, Satan went into a frenzy.  He hated that he had lost so much, and so, like Justine, he decided if he couldn’t have those things back, no one else would get to enjoy them, either.  So he targeted the woman, the beautiful woman, the final act of creation and the image-bearer of the lovely, relational part of God, and he got into her head and planted the idea that God was holding out on her.  And he got into her head through a serpent, the most cunning, crafty, and slick of all God’s creatures, sort of like how Justine got to the women in the film through enchanting Desmond.  So what does she do?  She partakes of the only tree in the Garden of Eden forbidden by God, thinking it is an innocent piece of fruit, when in reality, she is digesting death, and mutilating her beauty, namely her innocence, eternal life, and relationship with God, her husband, and every other human she will meet.

Watching the movie, which I stumbled upon by accident, really helped drive some of this spiritual truth home and recognize how Satan still tries to rob us, and me as a woman of God in particular, of our beauty.  I needed to see a good analogy of how spiritual warfare plays out in every day life, because the only thing more confusing to me over the years than my relationship with God has been my relationship with Satan.  What I mean is that I’ve not always had a good grasp of who Satan is, how he operates, and what he wants from me.  The church I grew up in taught that Satan was the one who tempted us and made people in the Pentecostal church speak in tongues, but other than that, he was pretty much in permanent retirement.  Then the church I went to as a teenager believed that Satan was responsible for everything, and he has a demon for every occasion, like the spirit of fear, the spirit of infirmity, the spirit of talking too much, the spirit of always locking one’s keys in one’s car, etc.

1 Peter 5:8-9 says, “ Be well balanced (temperate, sober of mind), be vigilant and cautious at all times; for that enemy of yours, the devil, roams around like a lion roaring [in fierce hunger], seeking someone to seize upon and devour.  Withstand him; be firm in faith [against his onset—rooted, established, strong, immovable, and determined], knowing that the same (identical) sufferings are appointed to your brotherhood (the whole body of Christians) throughout the world.”

Matthew 26:41 says, “All of you must keep awake (give strict attention, be cautious and active) and watch and pray, that you may not come into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Satan messes with our minds, and like the women in the movie who destroyed themselves at the command of the villains, we let him into our heads when we let our guard down, when we miss Satan because he’s wearing a handsome or clever disguise that lulls us into his confidence.  He can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do, and we are also tempted by the world and our own sinful desires.  Make no mistake, though, that his mission is clear and his tactics are underhanded, and he preys on the weak, the hurting, and the spiritually sleepy.  He looks at us and sees the Beauty of God, the reflection of his image, which he can never get back, and he wants to destroy it by any means necessary.

I suffer from chronic sleep problems, so I know very well how susceptible I am to temptation when I am not well rested physically or mentally.  Keeping vigilance over my spiritual well-being is paramount, more so when I am feeling fatigued or hurt or whatever.  I have let Satan into my head and into my heart for too long, so much so that I have lost sight of who I am and in whose image I was made.  No more.  I won’t let Satan steal from me through deception what he pridefully and willingly discarded.  From this point forward, I shall remain alert, attentive, and awake.

 

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

The Sinister Side of Christmas by Sharon Lurie

© 2011 David's Harp and Pen

Mood: Somber
 
DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional, so I don’t want to hear from any greeting card companies, candy makers, electronics manufacturers, or toy stores accusing me of ruining the Christmas spirit and cutting into their Yuletide profits.  Just because I am being slightly grouchy calling for greater introspection doesn’t mean I don’t still wholeheartedly endorse the giving and receiving of big, extravagant Christmas gifts.

Hello.  My name is Sharon Lurie, and I’m a grinchaholic.  (And the entire blogosphere responded with a hearty, “Hi, Sharon.”)  In all seriousness, I don’t have a lot of happy memories of holidays past.  I don’t normally talk about it, because I don’t always get the most helpful of responses, especially when I say how little I have enjoyed the mother of all holidays: Christmas.

My Christian friends tell me that Christmas is all about light, love, joy, family, gift-giving, yada-yada-ya and I need to change my attitude and be all jingle-bellish.  My Jewish friends, Messianic and non-Messianic alike, tell me I shouldn’t celebrate Christmas because it has pagan origins, tree worship is punishable by stoning, etc.  My atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, and religiously-disgruntled friends tell me that Christmas is a secret plot of capitalists and right-wing conspirators to wipe out the middle class by saddling them with unnecessary debt in the name of celebrating the birth of a person who may not have existed.  So, I have avoided the subject, and done everything I could to fight the Christmas funk, from travelling for the holidays to therapy to cooking dinner for the homeless.  In recent days, however, I have witnessed a level of hopelessness among friends and strangers towards the approaching holiday I have never seen before.  Many people I have talked to are ashamed to admit how much they hate this time of year because of the rebukes they receive from Christians who tell them to “stop being a Scrooge.”  I know how deep it runs for some, having worked the prayer phone hotlines on the holidays in the past, when the suicide calls are at their highest, and hearing the despair the holiday causes.  Therefore, for the sake of all of those who feel more alone this time of year than any other, I share my story.

I have for many years associated Christmas with tension and loss.  Romantic relationships going terribly wrong.  Having to deal with people who may or may not be related to me by blood or marriage who, for whatever reason, enjoy ruining Christmas, holidays, birthdays, and any kind of special events by starting fights or staging international incidents.  People I love dying.  Or just having to be alone at a time when community and family are celebrated.  For example:  Christmas 1996.  I was in a car wreck three days before Christmas that totaled my car and left me with a busted knee and a concussion.  My boyfriend at the time took care of me and we spent Christmas Day together.  The next day, he dumped me with no explanation.  Unfortunately, this was one of my more enjoyable Christmases.  So, over the years, I have just stopped talking about how unhappy Christmas has been for me, because talking about it seldom brought comfort but rather ridicule from those who, nine times out of ten, never had any tragedy or loneliness associated with the holidays.  This year, I have lost five friends and loved ones—including my mom—and so as Christmas has approached, I have felt both the sadness of the losses leading up to the holiday season, and the isolation from feeling that I was wrong for feeling so grief-stricken at a time of year that is such an emotional high for most Christians.  Then I read something that showed me my melancholy wasn’t as inappropriate as I thought.

In the book Waking the Dead, author John Eldredge talks about the spiritual battle every believer faces.  He emphasizes that believers are often painted an incorrect picture of the Christian life; we are told that all will be smooth sailing if we follow God.  In regards to Christmas, he says we are too often presented with the Gospel accounts of a sleepy Jewish town and a quaint, picture-perfect birth of the Savior, when in fact, what actually happened was more along the lines of what we read in Revelation 12:

“AND A great sign (wonder)--[warning of future events of ominous significance] appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with a crownlike garland (tiara) of twelve stars on her head.  She was pregnant and she cried out in her birth pangs, in the anguish of her delivery.  Then another ominous sign (wonder) was seen in heaven: Behold, a huge, fiery-red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven kingly crowns (diadems) upon his heads.  His tail swept [across the sky] and dragged down a third of the stars and flung them to the earth. And the dragon stationed himself in front of the woman who was about to be delivered, so that he might devour her child as soon as she brought it forth.  And she brought forth a male Child, One Who is destined to shepherd (rule) all the nations with an iron staff (scepter), and her Child was caught up to God and to His throne.  And the woman [herself] fled into the desert (wilderness), where she has a retreat prepared [for her] by God, in which she is to be fed and kept safe for 1,260 days (42 months; three and one-half years).

Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels went forth to battle with the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought.”

Not the kind of imagery one finds on a Christmas card or in the yearly church Christmas cantata.  On the off chance the aforementioned tale doesn’t jump off the page to you, the reader, let me paraphrase:

“A young woman, full of promise and loved by God, is expecting a child.  She is all alone, except for the hope she has carried inside her for nine long months.  The time to deliver has come, the time of expectation that everyone says to her should be the happiest time of her life.  But it’s not, because the Enemy, that Thief of Hearts and Destroyer of Dreams is standing by, ready to snatch the object of her hope and all she holds dear before she even has the chance to hold it in her arms.  As the birth pangs overtake her, she watches helplessly as the Dragon polishes his fangs and licks his chops.  The merciful thing to do would be to devour her first, and spare her the anguish of having to watch her only child’s life be so cruelly snuffed out.  However, the Dragon cares little for mercy.  He not only wants to destroy the girl and her child, he wants it to hurt in the worst way possible.”

The first Christmas was bloody, full of strife, anguish, loss, and uncertainty.  While most of us have never faced a literal fire-breathing dragon for the holidays, some of us can relate to the emotions behind the story.  Losing everything precious to us suddenly and without warning.  Having grief stacked upon grief until it all topples down, crushing the bereaved in its suffocating wake.  Feeling inconsolable during what should be a time of joy and expectation.  Bracing ourselves for a fight that could break out at any moment.  This is the backdrop of Christmas.  This is how the Savior of all mankind entered the world.

Jesus wasn’t qualified to be our High Priest, the One Who could sympathize with us in our weaknesses, sorrows, and struggles, until He lived a human life.  It’s comforting to think that He was willing to and did experience everything I have, including crappy holidays.

For the first time since I became a Christian, I am looking forward to Christmas, even though I have lost more this year than in all the previous 25 years combined.  And for those who have shared my lack of Yuletide sentiment, I offer this:  all that advice to be happy for Christmas because it’s all about twinkling stars, gracefully falling snow, so on and so forth, is hogwash.  On the contrary, the reason to have joy in this season is because that first Christmas was so awful.  We talk about all Jesus bore on the cross for us, but the truth is He bore our sins, sorrows, brokenness, and disappointments from the moment He entered this world as one of us.  That, beloved ones, is the sinister side of Christmas, and that is the view of the season we should choose to embrace.

The End

MILK!!!!!!!

The Beautiful Debris by Sharon Lurie

© 2012 David's Harp and Pen

Mood:  Artsy

DISCLAIMERS: This blog is based, in part, upon actual events and people. Certain actions and characters have been dramatized and fictionalized, but are inspired by true events and real people. Certain other characters, events, and names used herein are entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictional characters or events to the name, attributes, or background of any real person, living or dead, or to any actual events is coincidental and unintentional, so I don’t want to hear from any visual artists who think I am in any way poo-pooing their craft.  In fact, if you are able to support yourself from selling murals comprised of torn construction paper or taking black and white photographs of cow patties, then more power to you.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in art galleries and art museums, most of the time against my will.  Even though I come from a long line of culture aficionados, I neither appreciated nor enjoyed being dragged to the latest exhibits by family or school officials.  At the time, I didn’t give it much thought.  However, on a recent whim, I decided to visit The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, and the reasons behind the aversions to the visual arts of my youth became abundantly clear.

The headlining exhibit that day was Creation Story: Gees Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial.  The works of Mr. Dial and the quilters of Gees Bend are classified as “vernacular art,” the definition of which is a genre of art and outdoor constructions made by untrained artists who do not recognize themselves as artists (http://www.TheFreeDictionary.Com/Vernacular+Art).  A word that kept coming up in Mr. Dial’s exhibits that I’d not heard before was “bricolage.”  Once again, according to The Free Dictionary, bricolage is “something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bricolage).  The Gees Bend quilters used scraps of worn out and discarded clothing to make their quilts, whereas Thornton Dial used garbage like discarded furnishings and electronics to make his enchanting abstractions.  I found myself getting lost in display after display of recycling at its finest, and how each artist took things that were jagged, ugly, and repugnant on their own, and weaved them together into something hauntingly beautiful.  My mind suddenly drifted back to museum outings in times past, and the allure of this current excursion began to make sense.

I had always viewed much of the visual arts as an elaborate brand of pretending.  Much of the paintings and sculptures I remember seeing as a kid were of people, places, and things that didn’t exist.  As I grew up and witnessed new movements of artistic expression become popular, I would get annoyed at the things that passed for art and sold for lots of money, things that, in my eyes, required no more talent to create and weren’t any more intricate than a tic-tac-toe board.  Stemming partially from the fact that, though I came from a visually artistic family, all the visually artistic genes had passed me by, it angered me to see some of the things that were called art that, in my mind, were anything but.  As far as I was concerned, most of the modern art was a horrid illusion, a pretending to be something it was not on a grand scale.

My family fought a lot when I was younger.  I got bullied a lot in school by the other kids and sometimes, by the teachers.  On the many trips to the art museum, however, we pretended, just like the portraits and sculptures on display.  We pretended we were a cultured family in which everyone got along.  My classmates pretended they were quiet, well-behaved, and accepting children who treated all the other kids kindly and fairly.  It was nothing more than white-washing, however, and a mode of make believe that evoked all sorts of inner distress for me.  Though I am a writer, and creating fantasy is part of my trade, I prefer those illusions that don’t pretend for a second to be real.

I made several rounds of the Creation Story exhibit.  I started crying a few times and hid in the hallway, not wanting to make a spectacle of myself.   Those quilts and those murals had struck a nerve, a very deep one.  I am like one of the bedspreads from Gees Bend and one of Thornton Dial’s sculptures.  I am comprised of overused and overworked clothing, jagged edges, and other emotional bric-a-brac that, in the eyes of the world, have lost their usefulness.  I desperately need to know that the shattered and discarded shards of my spirit can be reassembled into something winsome, if placed in the right hands.  I have no use for illusions of comeliness that would take the darker hues and cover them up with a bright, yet poorly applied paint job.  I have to believe that every scrap is redeemable, and to the Master Artist and Potter, every broken thing is not only beautiful, but a necessary and indispensable part of the portrait.

The End

MILK!!!!!!!