Eugenides' The Marriage Plot - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About First Love

First Love. Like a parental relationship, it can haunt the rest of our lives. There is nothing so sweet as loving and/or being loved - deeply appreciating and/or appreciating another perhaps for the first time, but certainly for the first time with someone who does not "have" to love you - a parent, a sibling - but someone who chooses to do so - not because you're their's but because they want you to be their own. Jeffrey Eugenides' Novel is about such a love - but with the advantage of hindsight - and, I think, as an attempt, and I hope a satisfying one, to put that first love to bed. It seemed helpful to me, as a reader, in any case.

The novel focuses on a triangle, but really a conga line, of lovers - all students at Brown in the late seventies and early 80s. Leonard is the brilliant but unstable bipolar child of absent parents who evokes sympathy and care from a string of women but ultimately from Madeleine. Maddy is a good girl from a solid home who is smart but not brilliant - a romantic who loves Austen, Eliot and James and others who write in the marriage plot genre - a genre that requires society to be structured in a rigid, traditional manner and for women to be in subservient, chattel based roles where their marriages will define them. Maddy dabbles in semiotics and through that rediscovers her favorite authors from a feminist perspective. Mitchell, the author's alter ego, a child of Greek immigrants from Detroit, deeply interested in religion and spirituality, is a person who has trouble hearing God's voice - and sparking Maddy's interest. He pines for her - she knows and enjoys him, but he is not wild and unpredictable the way that Leonard is.

The tale is told, alternately, in the three voices of each of the main characters in overlapping chronology, so that, Rashomon fashion, many events are told from two or three perspectives. More broadly, this book gets, pitch perfect, the stumbling, inchoate voices of the cohort that makes up the tail end of the boomer generation. The cohort that watched the 60s from the sidelines - as younger siblings - or saw the events on TV. The cohort that romanticized the idealism of free love, racial equality, and power to the people without living through the grit and grime of the lived reality of fighting for those ideals, including against the internal enemies. This cohort inherited, relatively unscathed, the haven of liberal arts colleges and Universities as a place to explore who they were in relation to each other without the mores and tropes of the 50s, and without some of the authority that the University wielded before the 60s but also without a clear new vision of how to navigate the new sexual and relational landscape. From Madeleine's perspective: "Madeleine...realized that her [older] sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way. You were supposed to feel bad about missing the sixties, but Madeleine didn't. She felt as if she'd been spared a lot of nonsense, that her generation, while inheriting much that was good from that decade, had a healthy distance from it as well, saving them from the whiplash that resulted from being a Maoist one minute and a suburban mother, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the next."

So this coming of age novel is of a particular age - the post Aquarian age - when the Graduate's message - don't marry him - had been delivered - but the new marriage, the new society with its new norms was not yet developed. This group, this generation, would have to figure out its own marriage plot, its own way of engaging in the dance, and they would have to do that while the rules of the dance were evolving around them. This generation could fashion their own identity, but they would have to do that, seemingly, out of whole cloth.

The role of parents in this novel, then, is interesting, if for no other reason than that the children in this novel will become the helicopter parents of the present generation. The parents in this novel have provided and continue to provide a base - solid or shaky - but they are - even when present - peripheral players. They do not guide so much as turn a blind eye or, when they look, offer advice or attempts at control that are completely out of step with what the children need. Leonard's parents fail to provide him with adequate nourishment - his mother all but abandoning he and his sister after his father runs off with another woman to England. They show up for graduations and weddings but are not engaged. Madeleine's parents, much more involved, warn her to get a prenup, fly to her aid when she is stranded, and ultimately board all three of the protagonists (two at a time) when they are not capable of taking care of themselves. About Mitchell's parents we know very little. Traditional lines of initiation and passing on of wisdom have been severed, and the sense that there is wisdom to be had is in question.

Mitchell seeks wisdom in books and in mysticism. He reads Salinger's Franny and Zooey and takes up the Jesus prayer as Franny did. He goes to India to volunteer for Mother Theresa and to get the lay of the land. And throughout this, almost against his will, he is held in the orbit of Madeleine. She is his ideal. The basis for this is pretty slender: there is something about her handwriting - small and cramped - that reveals her inner life to be more complicated than her external, conventional demeanor would lead him to believe. He constructs her, then, not based on who she is but on who he needs her to be - she is his Beatrice, his imagined spiritual guide - not an actual, living breathing partner.

Madeleine, for her part, cannot imagine the interiority of Mitchell, and finds his exterior to be plain and therefore of little interest. Mitchell, himself, is searching for his own interior, imagining it in Madeleine, and, despite not finding it, is able to have the fortitude to resolve his relationship with Madeleine. My guess is that this is revisionist history. I think that Eugenides, an incredibly successful author - he won the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex (a much more ambitious, sweeping book) may have returned later in life to the unrequited love - and achieved resolution. And, after having struggled with Madeleine throughout his life, I think he may finally have been able to own - not her - not the old marriage plot chattel ending - but the part of himself that he imagined she could provide him.

This novel then, as humble as it is when compared to the complex, ambitiousness that Middlesex provided, speaks to something very true and satisfying. It is about the ability of the post-60s generation to own themselves; to become that which they had hoped they could be, even though they were a lost generation, stripped of direction by the questioning that the 60s provided, deluded into romanticism but without a roadmap of how to get from here to there, Eugenides maintains (and perhaps proves?) that there is hope of integrating a cogent sense of one's self. Do we need to earn a Pulitzer to do it? God, I hope not.

I think that Eugenides has been able to come to a psychological resolve about this period of his life as a result of writing about it. Part of the telling of this tale that is off putting is that the characters have, what is to me, an unrealistic level of self awareness. They are cognizant of their intentions and of the likely impact of their actions that is well beyond their years. I believe this to be an anachronism borne of the author's having imagined these events - having let them ripen and become real in his belly over time. And as that happens, he knows the characters better than they could have known themselves - and he writes from the perspective of who they are beyond what they could reasonably have been conscious of being- he writes from the perspective of the integrated, whole person that they are working to become rather than the fragmented, developing person that they are at the moment that is being described. The maturation that has taken place is the processing, the coming of age, that ripening, of the author, and it is a maturation that each of us can engage in as we ruminate about the past.

Perhaps the most poignant example of this ripening, of this imagining, is the explicit sexual interactions between Leonard and Madeleine - wonderful, glorious, mania fired interactions that Mitchell (Eugenides) will never be able to compete with. Eugenides engages in this - what appears like a masochistic exercise - as part, I believe, of the process of knowing the enemy. Knowing that he cannot provide his lover what she wants and fears, at the time of the interaction nor now, in the present - he will never be the lover his competitor was, but also of knowing, perhaps through allowing himself to imagine it in all of its detail, that this is not what determines that he is not Madeleine's lover. What will allow Mitchell to become who he is is the process of hearing the voice within him - the spiritual voice he has been pursuing. This voice, imagined in the book as coming at the perfect moment in the relationship with Madeleine, but perhaps coming later in life, allows the marriage plot to have a new twist- one that Austen didn't have available - that the eligible young person might move towards becoming who they are not through a marital relationship alone - but along a variety of paths with a variety of people - the right people at the right moments - and not with a person who is forced to fit because of the urgency of the need of the lover.

My friend Dan, who spent the first year of his second marriage writing a book about the end of his first marriage, and my own experience, of dreaming about my first love and talking about that with my current lover, are both examples of being haunted by former loves. It has taken both Dan and I, and I believe Eugenides, considerable work to put these earlier lovers to bed. And, at least for me, she sleeps uneasily - she can re-emerge, particularly during moments when I am questioning myself and longing for something that I cannot provide at the moment.

This book was embarrassing to read. It aptly describes how awkward and clumsy I felt during the time he is describing. For all the erudition, for all the reading, for all the knowledge of love and self actualization that the world has produced, it remains for each age, and each member of each age, to grope through what is new - both to the individual but also to the species - how to navigate this particular coming of age. If we accomplish that in a lifetime, as Eugenides appears to have done, or even make significant progress on that process, I think we should count it a life well lived.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Nat Johnson's Pym - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Race

Last year there was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded. This award, usually given annually, recognizes the best writing published during the year that captures some central aspect of the American experience. Over the years, the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to exceptional books that have become part of our shared experience - To Kill a Mockingbird is an example of this category - and they have been awarded to authors who should have had a Pulitzer for their earlier work and the current book is good and somewhat related to the American experience - Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea falls in this category. But the committee could not come to a consensus about either. The New York Times asked authors to nominate books, and Maud Newton nominated Nat Johnson's Pym as a modern look at race with a Vonnegut-like wry humor.

As a fan of the Pulitzer, Vonnegut, and a person who is curious about race, especially about the subjectivity of cross racial experiences, I bit. Initially I was quite disappointed. This book is NOT about the subjectivity of cross racial experience. It is marginally about subjectivity at all - except in a very broad, very romanticized sense of subjectivity - which is to say, to my mind, not a very accurate articulation of subjectivity, though one that can be compelling. On reflection, Vonnegut's rather arch and wry renditions of consciousness can be quite glib and romantic and therefore were quite appealing to my adolescent and idealistic self, but might be less satisfying were I to chew on them today. Like Vonnegut, Johnson takes on a big topic and approaches it with humor and more than a little irreverence.

The original Pym is Edgar Allen Poe's sole novel. Written in serial form to make a buck when Poe was dying of advanced alcoholism and out of money, it is the story of a trip to Antarctica in the company of an African American that includes a stop at an island with people who are blacker than black on the way to arriving on the shores of Antarctica to be greeted by white yeti like creatures in a weird, unclear ending. Nat Johnson retells this tale from a modern perspective - apparently something that others have done. In Johnson's tale, Chris Jaynes, an African American Poe scholar is denied tenure at his small, white liberal arts college, purchases the memoirs of Dirk Peters, Poe's African American sidekick on his Antarctic adventure, and Jaynes assembles a crew of African Americans with a variety of interests to sail to Antarctica. There they improbably discover the yeti-like creatures and the two hundred year old Pym, preserved by the Yetis' alcoholic beverage which Pym drinks in copious quantities. The African Americans briefly enslave and then are enslaved by the Yetis - or snow monkeys as they refer to them in a reverse stereotypical manner.

The plot of the book is preposterous, and the characters amusing but two dimensional - the central and striking images are of ice caves on the one hand - carved out of the glaciers, they are austere but beautiful spaces with thin ice roofs that let in the 24 hour sun of summer - and a bio sphere constructed by a painter named Karvel, who is clearly a representation of Thomas Kinkade - the kitschy painter who created imaginary cottages and landscapes that people many American's homes. The biodome becomes a haven of sorts two of the escaped slaves.

The biodome is not just a device, but something that exists, as in the link, in the world, as well as in movies . Dependent on massive quantities of petrochemicals to maintain its temperature, Johnson's Biodome's exhaust is melting the ice caves; and it is the home of Karvel and his wife, and their entire enterprise is to make the internal landscape reflect one of Karvel's paintings exactly. Jaynes's sidekick, a bloated Little Debbie loving African American, is a huge fan of Karvel/Kinkade. And, if I understand the intent, he symbolizes the African American community's investment in acculturation. The American dream that is painted across the ceiling and included in the palm trees and blue tinted water running through streams in a dome in Antarctica is a picture of the delusional quality of the desired goal. It is not real, organic or true in its own right, much less as a vision to be aspired to by a people that were enslaved in order to bring it to fruition (Marvel/Kinkade's wife serves the slave function in the dome, as do, briefly, the two escaped African Americans).

From Johnson's perspective, then, the process of acculturation - from eating Little Debbie's, to enslaving others, to being enslaved - perhaps at one's job - is a false dream. The real dream that he ends his version of Pym with is sailing, as the racist Pym dies in his boat, to an island peopled not by the blackest blacks of Poe's work, but by brown people, people who are the color of most people on the planet.

As I reflected on this work, I was reminded of the two Jesuit visions of God - as a God of Affection or one of Disaffection. The God of Affection creates a world that is filled with elements that are in tension with each other, and he loves the whole creation - and is pulling for us to work to make it a little less messy. The God of Disaffection creates a perfect world - a Kinkadian world - that is corrupted by evil forces that should be vanquished. The latter God supports banishing those who are corrupted/corrupting and bonding with those who, like us, are good.

From a more analytic perspective, the person worshipping a God of Affection is interested in the entire range of her or his reactions to the world - good, bad, and indifferent. The person worshipping the God of disaffection banishes from consciousness thoughts that are unacceptable; bad thoughts that they shouldn't have. Oedipal thoughts, for instance, can be viewed as dangerous, incestuous thoughts that should be banished at all costs, or they can be treated as thoughts - and approached with curiosity about why they are emerging at this moment and what it is that they might signify. I think it is easier to worship a God of Affection, to entertain forbidden thoughts, when the intensity of those thoughts, significant though it may be, has not been realized in actions that overwhelm the ability to get psychological distance from them. Slavery - and having enslaved others - makes it very hard for us to dispassionately entertain thoughts about slavery, just as having been an incest survivor or perpetrator makes it hard for us to dispassionately entertain thoughts about incest.

This book, Pym, is disappointing then, not because it is not entertaining but because it, like the movie The Graduate, points to the problems of the generations before, but both works end on the cusp of whatever new thing it is that would be created. But neither presents a new template, and, without a new template, I fear that the new will end up taking on the mantle of the old very quickly. We will slide back into the sado masochistic relational patterns and the idealistic romantic vision of a perfect world and be totally unaware that the byproducts of our visions are toxic to the world's organic inhabitants.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Anne Sexton - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads about Poetry and Psychotherapy

Dawn Skorczewski has written a marvelous book, An Accident of Hope, about Anne Sexton's poetry and her psychotherapy with Milton Orne in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Skorczewski listened to all of the extant tapes of the psychotherapy sessions Sexton had with Orne and chose to focus on the recorded sessions that have survived from the last nine months or so of Sexton's treatment. Dawn is a friend of mine, and I must admit that I was not looking forward to reading the book. I thought,"Oh, OK, I'll propose it to the analytic book club and, if they are interested, that will give me a chance to say that I have read it." Dawn is a vibrant person, a good writer and editor who has taught me a lot about writing - and teaching, but I'm not a big fan of poetry, it's just not my genre, and visiting a poet I did not know from around the time of my (and Dawn's) birth and thinking about the antiquated therapy she had undergone just didn't sound exciting.

Well, surprise, surprise. This is a lively and very current book. I was moved and frustrated by the treatment and enjoyed the poetry. Anne Sexton is a woman who had published no poetry before her therapy; she essentially started a poetry genre of self revelation that was a significant cultural step towards the Oprah openness we experience today; and she ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also a woman who was seriously ill, was treated by Orne for seven years before being treated by another psychiatrist. The second psychiatrist had a sexual affair with her and Sexton subsequently committed suicide. Dawn elucidates how Anne's engagement in the treatment anticipated the developments that psychoanalytic theory was to discover over the next thirty or forty years. On the other hand, she is a bit critical of Orne who was from her perspective, slow on the uptake and didn't always appreciate what Sexton was laying out for him. This case, for Dawn, illustrated Freud's remark that "Every time I make a great discovery, I find that the artists have been there before me," though in this case the artist got there in the context of therapy as well as in her art.

From my perspective, the interplay of a modern feminist listening to and commenting on the therapeutic interaction between two people engaged in a dialogue that was very much of their moment in history- on the cusp of a feminist revolution - was fascinating. I also appreciated, as a guy with a bit of a poetic tin ear, Dawn's careful but evocative reading of the poetry, and her laying out the therapeutic and personal context of the poems, which brought them to life for me. Delightful. But I also found myself entering the dyad of Sexton and Orne from a very different perspective than Skorczewski. While I empathized with and appreciated Skorczewski's reading of Sexton's subjectivity, I found myself wondering about Orne's. More than Dawn reported herself feeling, I found myself identifying with Orne and feeling that, despite a familiarity with the modern literature that Dawn was citing as a corrective to Orne's technical failings and shortcomings; I might not have been able to make as good use of them as Dawn seemed to imply that I might, and I feared that I might fail in ways, and have failed with my patients, in ways that mirror Orne's failings. That is, I think that some - perhaps not all - of Orne's blind spots might have existed - and the dilemmas he faced might still exist, even though we have a much better understanding of what he was confronting than he did.

Skorczewski, I think rightly, takes Orne to task for two major blunders. Each comes to the fore in a specific period in this last part of the treatment and each is related to a particular part of Sexton's psychology. The first of these blunders, I will call it the error of paralysis, occurs when Orne is first becoming aware that he may leave town (ultimately he does) some nine months hence. Orne becomes particularly inept in his interactions with Sexton, and they talk together about a parallel period of time when Orne withdrew from her during the time when he was afraid to tell Sexton, a woman who had been desperately and at times erotically (in her fantasy life) close to him, that he was going to be marrying. On that occasion, he cut down the number of times that they met per week, quit holding Sexton's hand when she was having difficulty, and asked her to set a termination date, essentially wishing that she would get better so that his news would not upset her.

This time, Martin, a smart, driven man, drawn by his research and ambition to move to another city, refuses to acknowledge how important he has been to Anne - and she to him - and how difficult it is going to be to say goodbye. When she notes that it was he who encouraged her to write, and that the writing has often been directed at him and their work together, he demurs, and rather clumsily - if with apparent good intention - insists that it is she - not her poetry - that is of value. Imagining myself into Orne's experience, I wonder whether he is frightened by how important he has become to her. More than that, he fears, in this woman who has survived multiple traumas at the hands of family members, including her father, mother, and favorite aunt, that he is now becoming a perpetrator himself. By marrying - by leaving - by withdrawing from her, he will injure her, taking away the person she depends on to hold herself together. While we know, as observers, that talking about his leaving, processing the impending ending, is what is most desperately needed, he may fear that to discuss this is to reify it, to make it true and to instigate the very thing that he is desperately trying to stave off - Anne's descent into madness at the hands of a caregiver who withdraws. Because his paralysis creates the very withdrawal he is trying to stave off, an impasse in the treatment develops.

I think part of the problem is that there is a developmental lag for Orne. Sexton is healthier than she was earlier in the treatment (when he tried too quickly to force her to get well). Now that she is better, he still has in mind the danger of pushing her too quickly - and thus does not trust her to be able to tolerate more material now than she, in fact, can.  I think another part of the problem is that Sexton is a trauma survivor and the transference/countertransference interaction is sadomasochistic - and Orne, well intentioned, well meaning Orne, has trouble recognizing himself (and Sexton may too) as the instigator of potentially unmanageable distress. This leads him to become defensive - to demonstrate how the treatment has been useful - without casting himself as the hero - trying to avoid overinflating himself, but in the process frustrating Sexton because she can neither love nor hate him - and she wants desperately to do both, and to be able to do both.

I do think that trauma challenges our ability to love and hate the same person. We are called, especially through trauma with caregivers, to try to strain to hold together a positive and a negative view of them, and we end up splitting - seeing others as all good or all bad - rather than integrating them. This is partially, I think, because the psychological space in ourselves that we inhabit to hold our ambivalent feelings together gets pulled apart repeatedly, and we end up with scar tissue there - so we have real trouble standing on that spot and getting purchase, and it is easier to slide to one side or the other. Orne, I am imagining, feels uncomfortable being idealized and devalued and so he tries to make himself into nothing to Sexton, which he most definitely is not, and things crawl to a stop.

The second difficulty for Skorczewski is Orne's reaction to Sexton's narcissism. Skorczewski would have Orne embrace and support it - and she sees evidence of Sexton begging him to do this. She cites theories that Orne does not yet have access to that would help him be able to appreciate the importance of Sexton's narcissism to her maintenance of her self and to her functioning as an artist. I think, though, that Skorczewski loses track of Orne's role as a treater in this moment. Later in the book, Skorczewski is critical of the impact of Sexton's mother's narcissism on Sexton's functioning. Even though Orne overemphasizes Sexton's role as a mother, her maternal role is one that is important to her, and as a treater he may have felt an obligation to her children to try to help her be more considerate - less focused on herself and, without a theory that supports increasing the regard of the treater towards her as a way through the thicket of narcissism, Orne is indeed loathe to follow that route. To further complicate things, Orne's mother, a psychiatrist, originally treated Sexton and Skorczewski provides evidence that she - Orne's mother - is quite narcissistic. Poor Orne - he is treating a woman who has the issues that are unresolved in his relationship with his own mother. This complicates the task tremendously.

I offer the criticisms above not as a critique of the book, but to broaden the perspectives that the reader might take in regard to this unique, powerful therapeutic relationship that we are lucky to have access to via the tapes, but even more through Skorczewski's close and empathic reading of Sexton's experience. The tapes exist because Orne made them to help Sexton have access to the sessions - she would frequently forget material they had talked about and she was tasked with transcribing them as a means of better understanding and remembering them. Apparently Orne used this technique with at least some of his other patients. Unfortunately the tapes between the sessions where an impasse is apparent and later work that is more spontaneous and that demonstrates the real affection that each of these participants had for the other is missing - it would be really helpful to have a roadmap out of the morass of an impasse and back onto the highway of collaborative work.

I also must admit that there were moments when I questioned along with Skorczewski, Orne's treatment, especially when Sexton's husband is choking her and Orne does not intervene more directly. Further, Orne functions as a co-therapist during the time that Sexton is primarily seeing Duhl, her subsequent therapist, and Orne is aware of the sexual affair they have and the difficulties that it poses for Sexton.  Even if we didn't know then how disruptive this can be (see a post about Andrea Celenza's work on this); even if our ethical principles and laws did not yet condemn this behavior, it is hard to believe that Orne could not anticipate the difficulties this would cause Sexton and, again, more actively intervene.  There is a tragedy here - that someone who could be so helpful ultimately could not provide the kind of help that Sexton really did need.

Despite my misgivings, the book ends up being a very interesting entrance into history, but also, surprisingly, brings up issues about contemporary treatment that are well worth considering. While Orne did not hear Sexton as we can, others were hearing other patients so that we can now hear her, just as we can now hear one of Freud's failed treatments, his treatment of Dora, in ways that his work ultimately helps us achieve, but that were not yet available to him. That said, and despite the tragic conclusion to Sexton's treatment and life, it is also apparent that a less than optimal - perhaps good enough? - treatment helped this woman articulate her experience both in the consulting room and on the page in ways that enriched all of our lives.  Tragically, it did not save her life,

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Week/Day Four - Completion and Integration - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Returns from Retreat

At the end of this week, I have come to believe that Ignatian Spirituality and Psychoanalysis intersect in an important spot, the isolation of the individual - and provide divergent explanations for that experience. Because the explanations are different, this leads to different, but I think, surprisingly parallel means of dealing with this fundamental human state. From an Ignatian or Christian perspective, the source of the isolation is original sin - a moment when men and women were separated from God and from each other. The nature of original sin is complex, but certainly includes the assertion of the self, and the resolution of that separation is complex as well, but a reconnection with God through Jesus Christ is the promise of the Spiritual Exercises. From a Psychoanalytic perspective, the realization of our separateness, the experience of aloneness, is perhaps the basic state of human experience that we have to come to grips with; it is simply an existential fact. That we are never experiencing the other directly, but always as a representation - an internal experience - not an external one - is a psychoanalytic realization that pervades such concepts as transference and our awkwardly termed "Object Relations".

The Jesuits', and perhaps Christianity's solution more broadly, is to come to the realization that the source of our experience is God. To offer a somewhat irreverent metaphor, it is a solution perhaps like that of the movie the Matrix, a movie I have never seen, so I will have to explain what I think that movie proposes. In that movie, as I understand it, we are deluded into believing that we are autonomous functioning human beings when in fact we are entities that are connected to a large machine and we are all in a virtual game together - believing that we are smelling, seeing, and feeling, when, in fact, that is based not on actual experience, but on the input from some central computer system organizing and synchronizing everyone's experience. For Christians, this central system is God. And the conduit, the means to access the central system, is Christ. He bridged the gap and explained the connection - one that we can necessarily never see because that would violate the rules of the system.

For the Analysts, the analogous organizing system is our mind. And our unconscious mind is the repository for the connecting programs that integrate our current experiences with our past experiences so that we have a seamless sense of our functioning. As we get more access to this functioning, we are able to decrease the number of distortions we introduce in order to make things hang together and we become more and more able to directly experience reality - and most importantly those around us, in closer to real time and with fewer distortions. We can more deeply appreciate others, and be moved and upset by them, and therefore engage more and more authentically, messily, but also productively. We are more genuinely engaged - though necessarily always at some remove - the more we analyze as a means of cleaning the system. We continue to be alone, but we rely less on delusional relationships - memories of idealized and denigrated childhoods, and distorted visions of those with whom we currently live - to assuage that loneliness, and we use real connection to achieve friendship and love - relating to others in a more and more aligned fashion - never overcoming our separateness, but building bridges across it.

I think that Jesuit spirituality is consistent with the psychoanalytic position because it points towards relationships with others as the means of expressing God's love - the connection that comes through this pipeline from God as central matrix computer connecting us all together. This is in contrast to the spirituality that I overheard this morning at breakfast - our retreat is at a seminary and the seminarian at the next table was asking whether good works are done to help others, but concluded that they were really done to express faith. That is (as I heard it), I help others - not because I love them - but because I love God and God will approve of me for having helped them. The relationship with God becomes primary in a way that I find delusional - or at least not useful. I think that, for the Jesuits, what we have access to - the point of contact with God - is not internal, but through connecting with other human beings. It is by closing that loop that we experience, in this world, what might be experienced more directly in another world - connection with God - but we don't get to do that directly here. Seeing God in all things means that God is not directly observable - he and she are only to be seen in what's around us. We can use that to draw into ourselves - and what I would term an imagined relationship with God - not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that - or we can turn outward into a more and more attuned relationship with people - and the world around us. Though some might argue that the withdrawing into the self is a psychoanalytic approach, I would propose that it would be a psychoanalytic means to ultimately achieve more spontaneous connections with others, and that this is paralleled by the spiritual exercises as inward focused experiences that fuel the solidarity that the Jesuits experience in their engagement with others.

I think that the Roman Catholic Church has been overwhelmed by the level of responsibility that it has borne for 2000 years, and I think that it has taken short cuts - functioned itself as the matrix. It has created a God - for some people - that is an accountant, keeping track of good and bad, and creating a ledger sheet. It has pointed towards that God - or whatever God it has created, as the end rather than as a means towards an end - of appreciating St. Anselm's God - who is bigger than that which can be conceived. Meanwhile, the people in the church, the congregants, have been engaged with each other. When I proposed the dilemma of birth control as an issue of justice to one of the irreverent Jesuits here, he dismissed the concern, taking the position that only in the US do we, because our dominant culture is puritanical, hold the church accountable. In the rest of the world, he maintains, the practicing Catholics largely disregard the teachings of the church and, though they are devout Catholics, they are also engaged and modernly moral individuals who are individually accountable.

I follow this argument - and it is consistent with my experience. In Nicaragua it was common for people, whether a potter or a business person, to casually but therefore emphatically say "Thanks be to God" whenever referring to their good fortune. God is a present, real, and communally agreed to entity in that culture in a way that only football players seem to express here. And, while I admire both the immediacy and the freedom of this experience, I also think there is something to the system of holding our religious institutions, but I think also our governmental ones, accountable. We expect - or maybe more precisely - I expect that institutions, while not immune to corruption - will have mechanisms in place to cleanse that corruption or to work towards functioning with greater integrity.

Ironically, then, individuals from cultures that focus less on the integrity of the institution may be more directly focused on each other and on a more direct experience of God. I know that our students return from service learning trips to third world countries feeling somewhat disoriented by having gone as representatives of the richest country on earth to find that the poor are frequently richer in interpersonal connection and happiness than they themselves are.

The fourth week of the exercises is intended to be a meditation on the gift of immortality that the resurrection affords. While that is a leap of faith that I am not yet able to take, I can report, after a week - or weeks - of living more fully and in a more engaged fashion - less fear of death. I started my trip to Nicaragua by writing a will. I was anxious about many things. As I return from this retreat, I feel more at peace. I feel able to engage in my work and life as something that I get to do, rather than something that I have to do, I feel joy, and I feel like my spiritual life is something that I can explore. I don't know how long these feelings will last, but they feel like gifts and I am grateful for them.

I think the gifts spring from connecting with others. The silent part of this retreat allowed me to be present with and to others in ways that I was surprised by. I was reminded of the experience of being with my son when he was preverbal. I imagined him to be experiencing profound thoughts - for us to be engaged on a profound and deeply meaningful level. I was somewhat disappointed, then, when he began to speak and his words were about prosaic things - wanting food, or needing to go to the bathroom. It was as if I had imagined the process - but this retreat helped me realize that I probably did not - there was a profound process going on - one that our words frequently clutter or mask unless we learn to be very intentional about how we use them. Psychoanalysis and Religion may both be conduits for using both silence and words as bridges that help us achieve a more genuine sense of connection in a world where our basic experience is, indeed, one of isolation.


To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

The Interlude between Day/Week 3 and Day/Week 4 - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues on Retreat

In a five day retreat that is to cover a 4 day program, there is a little room in the middle. Last night, the retreat director announced that we would not start the didactic programs for week 4 of the spiritual exercises until this afternoon, giving us this morning as a break period. In the full month long exercises, apparently there is a day off in the middle. In a compressed version of the exercises, like the one we are undertaking, this afforded me an opportunity to catch up with myself. It also offered a chance to meet with my director at our usual time and to talk about my concerns about facing the fourth day/week of the exercises, the day when faith itself becomes most prominent because it is the period of time set aside to meditate on the resurrection - to imagine the period of time after the crucifixion when Jesus appeared to the disciples in his resurrected form.

I approached the conversation this morning, then, with caution. In our first meeting, my spiritual director, herself a psychologist, had talked about her work with clients before and after working from a spiritual perspective, stating that the work improved after working from a more spiritual point of view. I feared that I heard in that an evangelical voice - the call to join the team of believers. I am leery of this call. It always carries for me overtones of my mother's voice - and her mother's voice. Each of them, early in my life, encouraged my becoming a believer, and my response was a powerful, visceral "No." Even when I was interested in religion, I could not worship their God. I could not imagine being connected to them through my faith. That felt too close, too personal, too vulnerable.

As I understand that now, faith is just that - it is a belief system. I don't think that I was mature enough to articulate and defend my own belief system, and I wasn't trusting enough to take on someone else's. My mother's and my grandmother's loves for me were very powerful, sustaining, and I, if not needed, wanted them desperately. I think that I may have sensed - I certainly couldn't have articulated it - but may have sensed - that I would bend myself into a pretzel to achieve that love - and that bending - or more precisely the fear of that distorting of myself, of that losing myself, was perhaps the only thing more powerful than my desire to feel their love. The result of the clashing of those two (unconscious) forces (I am hypothesizing) was the simple declarative, "No."

So, my spiritual director, someone that I have just met - someone whom I have entrusted in a very brief period of time with important aspects of myself - is someone that I have to confess to - to tell her that faith is not something that I am able to profess. I am, on the surface, comfortable with this statement. It is true. But I am also afraid. Will I be rejected? Can I be accepted as I am? Her response, that faith is not an issue for me, brings considerable relief. Do I know completely what she means? In context, yes. We are talking about my approach to analysis, my approach to relationships - an approach characterized by, in its best moments, an openness to surprise, and engagement with the other person where they are. This is the interaction between two people of faith. But her response allows me to articulate more clearly than I have to myself: that to state that I believe something I do not know to be true feels less certain - less integrity based - than to wonder about something that I hope to be the case, and to act as if it were, without needing to believe that it is - and being open to revising it as the spirit (as it were) demands.

What a feeling of relief and appreciation this experience led to. If God turns out to be the God who would send me to hell for sharing communion without believing that the bread and wine I consumed were the flesh and blood of his son, so be it. But I think the God that I would worship, if I had the opportunity, would be a more loving God than that. And so, until proven otherwise, I will dance for the God of my own creation, and deeply appreciate the support of those who have let me do that. And I will share a cup of wine and a bite of bread with them, when they are willing.

This is a personal illustration of the power of an idealizing transference - my experience of my spiritual director as confessor, confidante, maternal figure - to free me to more fully proclaim myself - to articulate my spiritual position - a position of hopeful doubt - a position of positing, and hoping for, a beneficent God - and operating on the premise of one - without needing to believe that my affirmation of him or her is necessary for him or her to appreciate me as one of his or creatures. My God, if he or she exists, is a self confident God. And, fortunately for me, my spiritual director is a self confident spiritual director.

After this interlude, I feel much more ready to take on the task of the fourth week - to appreciate the stories of joyful reunion that occurred after finding that what the disciples thought to be an ending was only a beginning...

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Day/Week Three of the Exercises - The Reluctant Analyst Continues on Retreat -

The first week of the exercises (practiced in this retreat in a day) involves reconnecting with a feeling of being deeply and powerfully loved. The second involves translating that love into a calling - observing how Jesus healed, taught and preached, and how he challenged authority - and determining how we translate the feeling of being loved into generatively engaging with others in our own lives. So far, all sweetness and light. The third week/day is more challenging. In it, we immerse ourselves in the passion of Christ - his experience of knowing that he is going to die a violent death and choosing to retain his integrity in the face of that - to continue to love others despite being betrayed by them, to love others despite intense feelings of anxiety, to love others despite feeling deeply isolated and cut off. How do we, then, face our own adversity with integrity?

The orienting talk today was given by my spiritual director. It was both didactic and deeply personal and revealing. She talked about Christ's journey through the passion - something that is the expected part of this point in the exercises. But she also talked about how she used the passion as a model for her own engagement with cancer. And this was not in the past tense, but very much in the present. She decided, four years into cancer treatment, this past Easter, to forego continuing to take a highly destructive but prophylactic medicine - choosing quality of life - perhaps at the cost of quantity of life. She did this in consultation with her husband and teenage daughter - all of them knowing the risks of discontinuing the medication, but also the costs to her and them of staying on it.

In psychoanalysis this is called self disclosure. It is disclosure of the deepest and most personal sort. There is considerable controversy about this as a technique in analysis. Freud's initial position was that self disclosure is to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, sitting behind the couch is a means, among other things, of limiting even microscopic self disclosures. As we have practiced - and as analyses have lengthened and deepened in intensity - it has become apparent that the avoidance of self disclosure, even with such precautions as the use of the couch - is impossible. Further, it may be counterproductive to try to overly limit self disclosure. The issue is - as it is in the exercises - How can we the analyst/spiritual director best get out of the way of the relationship between the analysand/retreatant and the unconscious/God? Analysts have written about rather dramatic moments of self disclosure - for instance the analyst's pregnancy and the analyst's diagnosis with a terminal illness. In the latter case, the potential for the profound negative impact of not telling is quickly apparent.

The immediate impact of my director's self disclosure on me was a series of thoughts about the ways in which I have, in much less dramatic fashion, been hurt by rejection on a chronic and continuing basis across the course of my life - and it was a further revelation that I have not acted with integrity in the face of that, but have chosen to retreat into more and more "safe" ways of interacting with others - unlike she, who has struggled to and frequently remained open in the face of being betrayed by her body. I have not done that in my love life, and I have not done that with my students and others who have rejected what I have to offer - I have said, "OK, then, I will take my ball and go home." I was concerned about my director, I was impacted by her experience and compared my experience to hers, but I was not derailed from the process of staying focused on my own retreat experience.

Had I been in analysis with her, I would have been more powerfully and viscerally impacted. I would have been relying on her for a long term, intimate relationship - a relationship that bears important parallels to parenting. Her survival - her integrity - would have been essential to my analytic functioning - and so a threat to it would have derailed it. I would, necessarily, have become concerned about her - not primarily as I was today - as a person who is in my world about whom I feel concern - but as a person in my world on whom I depend.

Now, while my processing appeared to me to remain in tact, I think that analysts would be concerned about another aspect of the revelation: that offering a way to deal with the situations that my director faced presented a powerful kind of suggestion - in effect saying, this is the right way to do it. And this could have a powerful impact - it could lead to covering up my own experience or to my emulating her without addressing the underlying conflicts that I have about remaining open and vulnerable in the face of rejection. But it is interesting that I characterize it as rejection. She is facing death. She has faced the feeling of being failed by her body - by herself - something much more visceral, immediate, and vital than the rejection that I associate to. By that I mean, in this instance, I think that her self disclosure continues, from this perspective as well, to enhance my experience rather than to occlude it.

Further, when I met with her later in the morning and we talked about this experience, she continued to be present to me and to my concerns - aware of herself and aware of her presentation - but able to process it with me, to wonder with me what its impact had been on me almost as if it had been delivered by someone else - perhaps even in a room that she was not in - as if I were reporting something novel that she had not even witnessed, much less presented - while she was also very much herself and very much the person who is sitting - right here and now - with the ticking dilemma of having chosen to be more alive during the time that she has - even if that may (or may not) cause that time to be shortened.

In other words, I think it is less about the revelation itself, and more about the skill of the person to be a matador - to allow the revelation to become the red cape and then the red thread - the needed message - for the retreatant: to let the retreatant, and the retreatant's use of the material, to remain the focal point for both director and retreatant, despite the material coming from the director. All while not interfering with the retreatant's very real concern and increased connection with the director as a result of the disclosure. In the afternoon's presentation this might be characterized not as a moment when power meets power, which would be called conflict, nor as a moment when power meets vulnerability, which would be called oppression, but as a moment when vulnerability meets vulnerability, which would be called intimacy.

Such intimacy is possible in this setting perhaps in part because of the structure of it. The directors are all past retreatants (as all analysts are past analysands), but there is also a shared assumption of faith. Further there are shared texts - the Bible being chief among them. Though I share a familiarity with the texts, I do not share the belief that Jesus is the son of God (though I am open to the possibility that he - as we all are - is a son of God) and am thus struggling to find my own language, to find the shared basis for this experience.

My director said this morning that I am a good hearted person. I agreed. I do not know the source of that. Like Dora Maria Tellez, the woman who left medical school to fight for the Sandinistas, I was raised by concerned and available parents. I think that people raised in other faith traditions - Jewish for certain, but I think Hindu, Buddhist, and perhaps Muslim as well, would resonate with the basic principles of this retreat, as would people who were raised in no faith tradition.

One of the presenters offered the position that this retreat is about lowering ourselves to the incarnated presence of God - to the humanness of Jesus: she put human together with humus to indicate the earthiness, the clay based elements of our existence. Reading the passion - the last days of Christ's life - as the story of a person - a person who knows that he will die, and is afraid of that - a person who is treated with many grave indignities and yet continues to act with integrity - is a very different way for me to read this story. I have always read it as a story about the resurrection. From this perspective, it is not about eternal life - Oh, I bet that's coming tomorrow - but it is, at least for today, at least for this week, about the dilemma of living here on earth; of surviving and functioning with dignity and integrity.

I think that my director's revelation struck home for me in part because it resonates so closely with my lived experience. I did not have a child until relatively late in life because I did not want to bring someone into a world that I saw as filled with suffering - suffering that would be exacerbated as pollution and depletion of resources killed off the species. When I did have a child, my immediate and powerful attachment took me by complete surprise. How could I feel such intense love for an a barely animate being? And along with that came an immense sense of responsibility. As someone he would rely on, I had to keep myself as safe and available as I reasonably could.

How can God create a world and people it with creatures that he loves knowing that they will necessarily suffer and die? How can the peasants of Nicaragua refer so firmly and unquestioningly - casually really - to God - certain in their knowledge that he exists and should be thanked for whatever small blessing has come their way? This God must be a God of affection. One who can appreciate, love, empathize with the challenges of this world - one who expects great things, but who can also abide terrible things.

I don't think I was prepared, when I did not push to become a father, to be a God of affection. I think I was operating from a position of being a God of disaffection. I still operate from that position more than I would hope. I think that my director, and this retreat in general, is encouraging me to become more of a God of affection (or they would say: to appreciate that God is one of affection). The position of having a particular outcome in mind is, at least on the surface, not an analytic one. It is not being open to whatever it is that God might be for the person, but it is encouraging him or her to connect with the God that I (the spiritual director/directors) know to be out there.

That said, the goals of these exercises are different - again at least on the surface - from the analytic goals. The exercises are intended to help bring someone into a faith community. They are intended to engage someone as a Jesuit - or at least from a Jesuit perspective. I think the analytic goals might be stated as bringing someone into the human community - a community that is based on a rich, multilayered subjective experience that is complex, in constant motion, and filled with tension and conflict. Analysts, then, support the experience of the analysand as he or she wrestles with their own complexity, while also acknowledging that there are universal aspects to that very unique and particular complexity. Spiritual Directors also recognize the variety of experiences of God. I have felt very supported in my questioning position this week. And there is also a fundamental position in the faith of the existence of God, and perhaps of a particular kind of God, that complicates the facilitation of the direct experience of that God for the retreatant. The relational psychoanalysts wrestle with this dilemma in analysis - that each analytic pair is unique. There is no such thing as the perfect or ideal analysis of this analysand because it must always be done by a particular analyst. Perhaps it would be useful to recognize that as a necessary component of the exercises as well.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

Day/Week Two of the Exercises - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Continues on Retreat -

Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises are supposed to be a four week endeavor, give or take. Because we live in the modern world, and because faculty and administrators being trained as Ignatian colleagues are engaged in Jesuit lite, we are doing the exercises in one week, give or take, and condensing or compressing each week into a day, give or take. Yesterday and into today we were to have worked on the first task - the work of being drawn into and appreciating God's love.

The task of the second week, as outlined in the spiritual exercises, is to contemplate the life of Jesus up to the week when he was crucified. In a talk this morning, the director of the retreat suggested that the purpose of this exercise is to work on helping three things emerge: The various ways that God calls us; The ways we perceive the call; and the way we live out the call. Discernment is used to help distinguish these three - especially the first two. That is, some things that feel like a calling can actually be a siren call - a seduction or a call based not on what we need (that is, what God has in mind for us), but what others would have us do - for whatever purpose that is not ours (and God's).

Now, I have to take a detour at this moment and acknowledge a deep and abiding skepticism about an activist God who is invested in each and every one of us in our own particular ways. I believe that may be a fiction. I also believe that, if it is a fiction, it is potentially a very useful one. Paul Coutinho, the author of How Big is your God, the book recommended by my spiritual director, maintains that he would die for the fiction - even if it were revealed to be a fiction. I would not go that far, but I do believe that believing our lives to have a divine plan can lead us to treat our own lives and the lives of those around us with a reverence that is productive regardless of the truth of the myth. Of course, great crimes have been committed in the name of this myth as well. Discernment really is an important tool.

To return, then, to the second week, the task - concretely stated in the exercises as a review of Christ's life - is a task to determine - to discern - the path that one should take at a given moment in time. The paths that I have set before myself to examine are those of continuing in the academic life versus transitioning into life based on full time clinical practice. I have been living with a foot in each of these worlds for twenty years, and maintaining that divide has been demanding. The third path, it occurs to me as I write, would be to continue in both worlds but to better describe - better circumscribe - those worlds so that I am not so consistently burdened by demands that I have imposed on myself that are beyond what I can reasonably accomplish.

So the task for the day that my director and I have set is to flesh out these two paths. To imagine myself into them and to experience them, as Ignatius - and perhaps God - would have me do. To engage in imagining the form that each of these lives would take - to see how they fit. I have fifteen years or so of professional functioning left, give or take. I can imagine the arc of those years, both from within them, but also looking back on them. What does it feel like to have retired from a full time analytic practice? What does it feel like to retire from an academic career after certain predictable successes and challenges have been navigated? Which feels more genuinely to be consistent with who it is that I am?

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men... I tried to engage in the exercise that we had set for me, but it just wasn't working. The exercises involve deeply imagining - visually, auditorially, even using the senses of touch and smell - the life of Christ. I just had a hard time doing this with my own life. Maybe because it is so familiar? So I backed up and went with a more tried and true psychological method. I broke the two worlds down into functions - teaching, research, therapy/analysis, administration - and looked at my strengths and weaknesses in each area. As I did that, my mind wandered to the two hours that I had spent with my spiritual director. How had I experienced her as therapist/teacher/director? What were her strengths and weaknesses across this very short interaction?

On reflection, I found her interactions with me to have been very helpful, especially as she had gotten to know me better. It was very useful that she had gone the other way, working first in private practice and then coming into the academic sphere. She was able to help me articulate some questions that I needed more information about - not so much because I didn't know they were questions, but because she could state them matter-of-factly and acknowledge their importance. At the same time, her interaction had not been perfect. There were moments when I was put off, especially early on, by a comment or two. And yet, on balance, our brief interaction had been very helpful.

This reflection led to me to think about what it is that I want to accomplish on a more global level. What do I want to help move along during the time that I have? I recalled that my father, a traveling salesman who sold temperature and pressure measuring devices, had, at least according to my mother, seen his role as an important one in helping our country move towards more efficient manufacturing processes. What is the big picture that I want to contribute to? What is my passionate concern?

I would like to engender and facilitate in people an attitude of curiosity and playfulness towards themselves and others. To help them recognize the productive tension between times of being playfully - at times childishly - engaged and times of being engaged in a more focused and directed manner. The intention of this is to help people more confidently and joyfully engage in loving, playing, and working. I remembered the single most powerful transition in my personal functioning that I attributed to my own analysis, the shift from feeling that I have to do something to feeling that I get to do it (a shift that comes and goes, but that is much more accessible than it used to be). I would like to help others make that kind of transition.

Articulating my goal as being to help others realize greater internal freedom helped me to realize that I can do this in either arena. This is not a choice between two competing or diverging paths - I do not have to discern my calling so much as to discern which will provide a more useful/solid base for engaging in this practice. To do this will involve gathering some information - and thinking about the alternatives - OK, eventually I will have to imagine myself in each of the situations and determine which feels like a better fit. And a series of questions will emerge. For instance, is it better to open the eyes of Freshmen to the possibility of an unconscious mind that might contain both scary, but also tremendously helpful elements that can propel them forward into lives of integrity - but to know that for most of them the message will not get through and, for those to whom the message does get through, I will not likely be a direct facilitator of that process nor will I see the fruits of the suggestions that I have made?

OK, dear reader, you may be disappointed. Perhaps I promised a moment of clarity; a watershed moment where an analyst, a person steeped in the tradition of "don't just do something, sit there," might actually come to a conclusion. I think that moment is further down the road, but I think this moment of clarity creates some freedom for that moment. I feel less unbalanced - less like I am comparing apples and oranges - and more like I am determining an optimal direction - which feels more free. I did not accomplish what I set out to, but perhaps accomplished something more useful. It also freed me up to read about the life of Jesus before the crucifixion. And it is now time to move on to day/week three.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...