The Book of Joe, part 2

Continued from part 1.

The Problem of Consciousness

Consciousness can be problematic. Joe discusses the importance of being in tune with the signals in our lives — signals not just about what’s going on around us, but what’s going on inside us. Signals of thought, will, and desire. Signals of emotion and spirituality. Some folks are more aware of these signals than others — and some folks are sensitive not just to the occurrence of these signals, but to what they “mean about who we are and how we should be seeing and responding to our lives” (5). The problematic part is remaining fully conscious even when the signals are unpleasant.

In Genesis, we read about Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, realizing and becoming ashamed of their nakedness, and hiding from God. They sewed clothes for themselves from fig leaves: “They hid from their horror by doing something that busied and distracted them and, at least symbolically, seemed to take care of the problem” (5). They weren’t just hiding from God, either; they were hiding from exactly the same things that Joe listed earlier in The Problem of Man and Woman: the truth of being alone, needy, vulnerable, dependent, and longing for God.

Joe closes this section with Kierkegaard’s “five ways we chase after self control and delusion instead of the truth”:

• Pleasure
• Power
• Knowledge (mind knowledge, not heart knowledge)
• Good human works (instead of love)
• Religiosity (instead of true spirituality) (6)

For those of us who may not immediately feel convicted in at least one of these areas, Joe prays that we may become more conscious, and seek and desire truth in all things. Though we are distracted like Martha (with things good, bad, and neutral), may we, like Mary, find the one thing that is necessary.

The Book of Joe

I recently got a copy of something my late therapist, Joe Bauserman, wrote — he called it The Book of Joe. I think I’ll read through it and make comments here as I read. One of the problems with being a fast reader is that stuff doesn’t stick as well as I’d like it to. I’ll read a book and tell someone how great it is, but be completely unable to discuss the content articulately.

The Prologue begins: “The great, poetic Book of Job challenges us all to face the tragedies of life and hold onto the love and ultimate purposes of God.” Joe then explains that he’s going to write this book to face his own crisis and try to hold onto those things.

The Crisis

Next, he defines his crisis — just before a family beach vacation, he discovers five tumors — two in the brain, three in the lungs. He says that this crisis is his opportunity to share important things with folks, despite having been a very private person for many years. It was a single draft, written in just a couple of weeks in the summer of 2008.

Considering the allusion to Job, Joe points out that he’s not saying that he’s especially righteous, nor that the cancer asked God’s permission to test him, nor that such calamities are always “just deserts” for particular sin.

“[Calamities] come in a million different forms and degrees, but they usually reveal many similar things about us all, things we need to know to live in this sick and deadly world, and it is these shared revelations that I want to explore in my limited quest to explore what Aquinas called “the truth of things”, the deep knowledge of the heart that keeps us standing when falling makes all of the emotional and intellectual sense in the world, and keeps us looking for the light when the darkness seems endless and impenetrable” (p3).

The next section, The Problem of Man and Woman, gives Joe’s beliefs about the nature of humanity and its shared core issues. He lists five basic problems all people inherently have:

• We are needy
• Vulnerable
• Alone
• Dependent
• Longing for satisfaction of these needs — satisfaction Joe believes is ultimately and only found in fellowship with God.

What strikes me, looking at this list, is the juxtaposition of “Alone” and “Dependent.” Yikes. Dependent wouldn’t be so bad in a solid community. And alone wouldn’t be so bad if there were no need of others.

Joe insists that this package of needs is not arbitrary, but designed to foster what we most need: intimacy with and utter reliance upon God. I agree with him that intimacy with God is a great good, and that utter reliance upon him is reality (whether we fight it or not); I think I would cast it less as design and more as redemption, but that may be because my understanding and appreciation of God’s sovereignty is lacking.

This short statement about the good side of these five needs is followed by many more sentences about the painful side.

“Every child needs to be known and loved across time. No child gets what is needed. Most parents love their children, but I will tell you strongly, after more than sixty thousand hours as a psychotherapist, that the vast majority of people have not felt well known even if they give their parents credit for loving them very much. Love that loves but does not know how to love does not accomplish the mission” (p4).

And who knows how to love? How does anyone learn to really know and understand anyone else, navigating through the dark waters of projecting our own experience, internalizing negative voices from our own history, not to mention the myriads of parenting and relationship and other self-help books and articles and videos and lectures, not to mention our work, our time, our energy, the state of our digestion and the weather?

How terrifying to be a parent, a wife, a friend, any relationship. I know for a fact that I daily, hourly, fail to love well enough, fail to know and understand others, even those others I am closest to. Sometimes I’m so afraid of the consequences of such failure that I can hardly continue to try. And how many of these people will my behavior send to therapy?

Next, Joe lists some of the consequences of this “foundational failure of knowing love” (p4).

• “We don’t know ourselves.”
• “We don’t know what love should be for us, even if someone wants to love us well.”
• “We look for counterfeit love in many wrong places.”
• We live with a deep and chronic fear that we’ll never have what we most need: such a strong relational life that “we can love well because we have been loved well” (p4).

Joe argues that while pride is a big problem, it’s not the core of humanity’s problems. He says it is one of the offspring of the bigger problem of this fear. It is one of the many ways we try to avoid the awareness of those five basic needs listed earlier. We don’t always, or often, fight that awareness consciously. We might not even be consciously aware of that deep fear that drives so much of what we think, feel, and do. Few of us would deliberately choose to shut our eyes on reality, but, consciously or unconsciously, we are often willing to be less conscious, to live under delusion, rather than face those five basic needs and the fear of never finding their satisfaction.

This section ends with Joe’s long-time goal for people — “that they would come to know the truth, in all of its painful, frightening, confusing, exhilarating, and ultimately gratifying faces” (p5).

Faithfulness and Rest

The other night I was thinking about how often Joe, in his cancer blog, talks about rest. He did that in therapy, too.

Most churchy people go in the other direction — we need to serve more, we need to do more, we need to work harder, we need to virtually ignore our own needs and wants, or attend to them only minimally, and only in order to keep serving and doing and working.

It’s not that Joe encourages laziness or morbid wallowing brooding or unlimited selfishness and self-centeredness.

No — but when Jesus says the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, Joe says loving yourself is implied by the command, and that it’s a high standard, not a low one.

Be still, and know that I am God — or, alternately, cease striving (Psalm 46:10).

It makes sense that the first greatest commandment — to love God with everything we have and are — comes first. The relationship between the individual and God really does precede, inform, feed the relationship between the individual and others. Worship before service. Yes, service can be — is — a form of worship, but in order for that to be so, worship must be considered higher, a greater priority, than service. The lesser is considered a form of the greater.

I think about the part of Jeremiah 2 where God says that we have first abandoned him, the spring of living water, and hewn our own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. Hewing speaks of work — and it’s done apart from relationship. God as living water implies relationship — and no work. Lounging by a spring is good rest. Living water nourishes good works better than hewing broken cisterns — thirsty work — does.

I think about Luke 16:10, the verse about being faithful in little things. This verse has usually condemned me and provoked me to more perfectionism — after all, if I skimp on how well I sew on a button or write a post or anything else, doesn’t that betray that at my core I am slovenly and unfaithful?

But what if being faithful in little things is subversive of the work ethic, the performance mentality; what if it’s more like Psalm 46:10 and Jeremiah 2 — what if it’s more like Mary and Martha?

In Luke 10, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, among the men, listening to him. Martha does the culturally expected thing — she works in the kitchen to prepare food for Jesus and the men. Which sister was faithful?

A note for parents, on refuge

Psalm 91 — my refuge

A post from Joe about providing refuge for our children — and about considering what refuge and lack of refuge we too have experienced.

———

And then I read the next one, in which he says he wanted to delete the one I linked above, because he thought he did such a bad job with it. Read on for the rest.

God and earthly things

I have been reading in Joe’s blog again, a few of the posts from early October.

A recurring theme is the desire or the call to wait in silence for God only — in other words, to have all the trust and dependence and hope and desire aimed at God, not at earthly things.

This sounds good and feels right in crisis — when earthly things are failing rapidly and miserably, when disappointment is keen and ever-present. When earthly things are obviously in opposition to trust in God, well, it’s easy to see the opposition. It’s not always easy to choose God, but it’s at least clear that a choice needs making.

On the surface, it sounds like a total rejection of the world and earthly things, as if matter and flesh and bodies and pleasures and pains were evil. As if one should never go to or trust a doctor or any other professional, or a friend or family member. As if the only possible spiritual life is a desert mystic hermit’s life of isolation and separation.*

I don’t think Joe means it quite in that way. I think he’s talking about ultimate trust, ultimate desire, and so on — the creature, created things, are good when they are in their right place in our hearts — not first, as replacing or displacing God, but second, as his good gifts.

At times, there are real goods in earthly things — sometimes friends show real kindness and love, sometimes strawberries taste fantastic, sometimes doctors diagnose correctly and treat effectively and sickness yields to medicine.

At times, earthly things fail or disappoint — all creation is affected by the fall and the subsequent curse.

Somehow, the key seems to be to accept the good and the bad among earthly things as reality, as provided by and presided over by God, whose purposes cannot be thwarted, and whose goodness and love are trustworthy.

That’s not to say that good and bad are meaningless categories. Call the pleasure pleasurable and thoroughly enjoy it (but don’t pin your hopes on it or demand that it last forever or think that it’s the ultimate good or the fountain of life). Call the pain painful and don’t try to escape or transcend or deny the suffering (and don’t pin your despair on it or believe it will last forever or think that it’s your ultimate doom).

Over and over again, God is revealing to me lately how skeptical and afraid I am about him — how much I fear that perhaps he isn’t good and loving after all. I fear that I only believe in his goodness and love because I want to. I fear that the evidence for his goodness and love is not actually there, or is ambiguous, or is contradicted by evidence that seems to suggest his injustice, hatred, or non-existence. Or that his goodness and love are no goodness or love I would recognize as such, but the “goodness” and “love” offered by an abuser.

*Often, when I consider a deeper commitment or surrender or relationship with God, I fear that I’ll become uninteresting to or uninterested in my friends and other earthly things. I think the truth is that I would become more interesting to and more interested in them — provided the commitment, surrender, relationship, was real and not just religiosity. How is it done? Wait in silence for God only, I suppose.

———

I read one more post, and once I finish this comment I’m off to bed.

Joe writes about needing authorization to come through so that he could get his chemo pills, and how he had visions of kicking down doors to demand justice, while his wife was trusting God instead.

How do you know when kicking down a door might not be exactly the provision God is offering? Waiting on the Lord doesn’t always (ever?) mean simply sitting on your hands and doing nothing — when does waiting on and trusting God include action, and when not — and how does one know what action to take — how does one discern whether the urge to act in a certain way is the voice of God, or the voice of a demon, or the internalized voice of a negative relationship, or the internalized voice of a positive one, or the voice of indigestion or hormones or brain chemistry?

I remember asking Joe similar questions in my therapy — and at least on one occasion he pointed out how very often in Acts the apostles said “it seemed good to us” when they made a decision.

Just because I have an impulse doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. The thing to do is pay attention to the impulse, reflect and pray, and then decide as best one can in the circumstances — it’s another occasion to trust God, that he can and will provide even if I decide badly or wrongly.

One of my best antidotes for my fears is to face them squarely — and see that even the worst possible outcome won’t destroy me. This works only when I am trusting God. Otherwise the worst possible outcome might be “God doesn’t exist.” But when I trust God, even death, even life in the psych ward, even losing all my friends and family, even not sleeping tonight, even being afraid, cannot destroy me.

I think that’s what Joe was getting at — his door-kicking urge was born of fear — not just fear that God wouldn’t provide for his chemo pills (death can’t destroy him), but perhaps fear that God isn’t trustworthy even in death.

Some thoughts on Thursday morning

1. As I mentioned on a friend’s blog, I am learning to distinguish between depression, anxiety, and so on at a base level, and at a meta level. In other words, I am learning that often what becomes really paralyzing, debilitating, devastating, is not the base level emotions and moods, but how I feel and think ABOUT those emotions and moods. It’s the despair ABOUT the depression, the fear OF the fear: I’ll never get away from this, I’m going to ruin everyone’s life, God isn’t going to deliver me in any sense that I can actually feel as deliverance, etc.

2. Yesterday I was just starting to feel better after the stomach bug hit us all really hard Monday afternoon. I was scheduled to play some background music with my friend Beth at her church, so I needed to tune. My energy was rather low, so I tried to tune as quickly as I could, but was vacillating between “excellence” and “good enough.” After I finished and shoved the dulcimer in the case, I was thoroughly grumpy, half wanting to get it out and try again, striving for more excellence this time, and half knowing that a second attempt would likely not result in better tuning and would certainly result in a more tired and grumpy and anxious me.

Beth says, generally, “Just try to get a B.” Joe urged adopting a “good enough” standard. Anne Lamott suggests treating one’s self like a beloved relative — giving the same grace, the same leeway, the same benefit of the doubt. Almost everyone says “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I keep trying to figure out how to integrate this repudiation of perfectionism with the doctrine of sin, which all three of the people I mentioned would fully affirm.

For one thing, when God reveals sin to us, it is not with condemnation, if we’re in Christ, but with compassion, and with reconciliation in view. That’s beloved relative treatment.

For another, excellence is not in the Ten Commandments, or even the two greatest commandments. Except excellence in loving. Faithfulness in small things is perhaps not the same thing as perfectionism. Perfectionism is about the task — excellence in loving is more about relationships, and takes into account one’s own and others’ limitations, boundaries, priorities, and so on.

(Of course, one could get perfectionistic about excellence in loving, too.)

(No dirty jokes, please.)

3. Speaking of dirty jokes, I started reading Leviticus the other day. I don’t know — I was just in the mood. Seriously? I don’t think I’ve ever just been “in the mood” for Leviticus before, but there it is.

I noticed that the two passages that forbid homosexual practice, which also forbid incest and bestiality, also forbid intercourse during menstruation.

If one of those four things is okay, are all four okay? If one of them is obviously wrong, are all four wrong?

Is the last one wrong because conception is impossible during menstruation (which the text does not say), or just because the menstrual blood was considered impure (as the text says)?

4. I got home in time to watch Lie to Me last night. I am enjoying this show. Two things stuck with me after this episode.

First, that disgust, not anger, is the language of hatred. Something to chew on in addition to my thoughts on God’s wrath, from yesterday.

And, the scene near the end where the reformed murderer gives grace to the widow of the man he killed. She is holding the gun she bought a month ago, saying she doesn’t care how much he’s changed, he took her husband and can’t take that away — he’s telling her if she has to shoot him, he understands, and validates and affirms over and over what she says, and tells her he is sorry. Was it unbelievable? Maybe. But still a powerful image.

Reading Joe, mid-August to mid-September

A good many of Joe’s posts were about the fear of the Lord, translated to the fear of the self — fear of self-government, self-reliance, self-trust. Fear of letting go of God, fear of separation from him.

Abstract like that, it sounds reasonable.

I know that I am wayward, and I have learned that when I am discontent or anxious or feeling empty, it’s a sign that I’ve strayed, and I should turn back, and I am being called back and that’s how I recognize my waywardness.

But some of his posts seem so strident, like he couldn’t rest in or enjoy any little thing because of his fear, his confidence, that there is sin in it.

I think I must be missing something, because that doesn’t really sound like the Joe who was my therapist. Joe so often counseled me to know and trust myself — to have a more internal locus of control — to listen to my intuition.

It reminds me of my little theory of health — that what looks like holy behavior and holy words can come from either sub-healthy or super-healthy places — the sub-healthy is no self, but a doormat, a robot, an empty vessel. The super-healthy is so secure in Christ that he or she no longer needs to protect and defend self.

You can’t get to super-healthy without going through healthy first, which looks a lot like what secular psychology tells us — good boundaries, self-awareness, reflection, all that sort of thing. Not a lot of cheek-turning yet, because a developing self must learn to protect and defend itself before learning how a greater Protector and Defender bests its own efforts.

It is so difficult to discern anything.

I want something — is it something God wants? Is it something I am allowed to want? Just because I want it, does that mean God is against me having it?

I fear something — is it something that should be feared? Is it something God wants me to flee or to face? Is the solution I imagine God’s plan of deliverance that he is revealing to me, or my own attempt?

I suppose the main point is to stay with God — not to fear leaving him so much as to hope, intend, and desire not to leave him, and to trust him to bring me back when I do stray. Perhaps someone who, like me, struggles so much with general fear and anxiety, does not need more encouragement to be fearful, but more encouragement to trust — and to fear the right things.

But again! Discernment! How does one trust God and fear waywardness, and still live in this world, making use of all the resources that have been provided, such as food and therapists and friends and computers, but not making idols of them?

Not a map, but a navigator — not a checklist, but a guide — “not a religion, but a relationship” — I need to more and more be relating to, interacting with, talking to, listening to, following God, and not just thinking and talking and writing about him.

Lord, teach me to listen, and to hear you. Please answer my questions. Please guide me. Please give me faith and wisdom. Because it would sure be a lot easier to trust you, and to obey, if I could know for sure where you are, what you look like, what you want me to do, and all that sort of thing.

PS — It’s funny how much I fear becoming so “holy” or “close to God” that no one wants to be around me, or that I don’t want to be around anyone, or can’t enjoy anything. Again, I’m pretty sure there’s some deep misunderstanding involved in that fear. I have been around people who are annoyingly “holy,” but I have also been around people who are restfully, beautifully, welcomingly, inclusively “holy.”

This is just a test

I’m going to talk about menstruation. Just so you know, in case you want to skip this one.

The other day I noticed pink on my toilet paper. Put on a pad (cloth of course!), but saw nothing else for — a whole day? two days?

I’ve never had that experience before.

I can’t remember when my last period was — January, but when?

Could I be… (gasp, shudder, freak) …pregnant?

Maybe it was some weird early pregnancy spotting. Or a really early miscarriage. I have no idea.

What would happen if we’re pregnant?

PPD is likely again — if you’ve had it once, you’re more likely to have it again, and especially if you already have a history of depression and anxiety.

Sleep deprivation is absolutely certain again. And that was the catalyst that tipped my anxiety into full panic and sent me back to the hospital and made me barely able to share the same space as my baby for more than an hour or two at a time.

Mark doesn’t have the kind of job where he could just take a month off to help again.

And my therapist — the only one I’ve ever been able to really talk to and be helped by — is dead.

Yeah, maybe it would be completely different this time. Maybe I would be fine.

Or maybe it would be different but worse. Amy was actually a pretty easy baby.

So, as you can imagine, last night I had a hard time settling into sleep. I was too busy freaking out about possibly being pregnant.

I did eventually sleep. And in the wee hours, when I woke still anxious, I went ahead and peed on the stick.

Whew. Negative.

And this morning? Real menstruation.

Whew.

This is yet another reason to ask Mark to go for the vasectomy, and yet I still worry that it’s lack of faith (in general) and not wisdom that is driving that idea.

Wisdom. Yeah, wisdom.

Right?

———

And then I read this, from Joe.

Emotions and interpretations

I’ve been reading Joe’s blog, the one he and his wife kept while he was going through cancer treatments, up until he died several weeks ago. I just started at the beginning and am slowly making my way through. In his near-daily reflections there’s a lot that I remember hearing in therapy, and it’s good to be reminded.

One post I read today tells a story from Joe’s past when he was feeling burnt out as a therapist and went to complain to a friend. The friend told him he needed to remember who he is in Christ, and assured him of his confidence that the Lord would help him.

My mind has been chewing on the story today, in the background as I play with Amy, make the bed, do the dishes, contemplate how sleepy I am, wonder why I keep getting fraudulent calls purportedly from American Express.

One of the things I learned from Joe is that emotions themselves have no moral value. Whatever you feel, it’s valid — it’s true — it’s real — that is, the feeling is valid, true, and real.

And so, if you’re feeling burnt out, frazzled, in the pit, surrounded by rotten turnips, you can acknowledge those feelings and experience them in their full reality.

At first glance, Joe’s story seems to be contradicting that — you might be tempted to think his friend was telling him to buck up and deal, stop feeling sorry for himself, stop complaining — telling him he was wrong to feel the way he was feeling.

But that’s not quite it. The correction isn’t directed at Joe’s feelings, but at the way he was interpreting them and thus the way he was interpreting reality.

And that totally meshes with what I learned through DBT, particularly the prompting event worksheet. That worksheet has you name your emotion(s), describe your physical and mental state during the emotion(s), list the interpretations you apply to the emotion(s), and then challenge those interpretations as needed.

Most of us resent being told to stop feeling a certain way. My hunch is that most people who give such advice might be confusing feelings with their interpretations.

Another thing. Part of my response to this post of Joe’s was / is to be annoyed with God, and a little dismayed. Isn’t there ever a time when I’m allowed to complain, allowed to acknowledge that not everything bad in my life is my own fault? WITHOUT having to also acknowledge my participation in the bad, my need of repentance, my waywardness? And I have to remember that it isn’t that God is out to make me grovel, to keep me down, to take all possible joy away from me — and that it is exactly his goodness and mercy that allow me to see my sin without despair and excessive grief. Humph. Sort of.

Goodbye, Joe Bauserman

My friend called last night to let us know that Joe Bauserman had died.

He had a brain tumor. He was able to spend his last days at home.

He was my therapist, for a few years when we lived in Virginia, and again when I was going through PPD.

When we moved from Virginia, first in NY with the PPD, and again last year with another major depressive episode, I looked around for a decent local therapist. I didn’t look very hard, because I knew Joe was there — and that it would be more cost-effective to stay with someone with whom I already had a solid therapeutic relationship, than to keep searching and have to work through all the beginning stages again with each new therapist. I tried two folks in NY before returning to Joe by phone. Here in IN, I tried one person who lasted a few months — at the time it would have been a burdensome financial stretch to go back to Joe — when I decided that therapist just wasn’t working well for me, I was stable enough to just quit instead of looking for another.

Now Joe is gone. If I ever have another major episode — not unlikely given the nature of depression and my history — I will have to look harder to find someone new.

Theoretically, I know there are other good therapists out there — people who have integrated faith and psychology in a solid, cohesive, thorough, sensitive, reflective way, and not just pasting one on top of the other — people who can think and listen and relate and talk in paths that I think and listen and relate and talk in, so that we’re really hearing each other — people who understand and respect the subconscious and the emotions and don’t just tell patients to try harder or stop thinking that way.

I hope I will, if it becomes necessary, find one of those people.

Meanwhile, I remember Joe — with deep gratitude for his service to me, with grief for his family, and with prayers for his clients that they would likewise find new therapists who will serve them as well.

Obituary from the Richmond Times-Dispatch