Brave Little Gerda Knows More Now

[Rita]

Elbereth, so great to hear from you and reflect on your reflections on my reflections! I think many of us here came to these boards thinking we had to wait out a MLC and discovering that in fact there was something there all along that we hadn't seen or that was lurking til the MLC pulled the cover off the dark box. In my case I am kind of glad it went that way because my journey brought me to faith. I am not sure that would have happened if I understood earlier. And thank you for the very kind words; I think I keep coming to the boards with the hope that I can help someone else avoid my path.

DnJ -- thank you for the treatise! I always love to have a convo with you over a good cuppa and a namomeemoonainoo bar.

I think we have gone down this path on a past thread, and I don't know which of us is not fully undestanding the other's full world view or how to get there -- but I see this differently. And I don't know if that's because of the difference in our MLCer or the difference in us or the difference in our actual world view. I often think the latter is quite similar but maybe not. And this can get complicated philosophically for an anonymous support forum, but, in short, I think that the end point of this subjectivity you describe is dangerous. Unless you only mean that this is how you are able to make sense of your W changing so radically and being so unreachable in her new reality. But if you mean, literally, that there are many truths, then no, I must leave you at the crossroads and make my way alone on the One Truth path many miles before I sleep, many miles before I sleep. Because I think that the end point of that idea is, for example, Hitler. And I am sorry if I am repeating something I said on a previous thread, I don't have time to hunt it down, but Hitler had a truth about how to save Germany and he really believed in it and wanted to do something "good" for his country. There was another truth, which saw his truth as pure evil. And only by seeing that as pure evil can we be clear on what we have to do -- e.g., go to war even though war is also evil.

It took me a long time to realize how dangerous my H was. I made many excuses for him in the service of standing for the marriage. Now I know how you can do both, but at that time I was not clear on it. And as a result, I allowed abuse and I allowed my children to witness that. That caused many other problems for my children that I am still trying to mitigate. I do not believe my children are safe around that man, and I do not know how far the abuse can go. I don't want to get into specifics here, but there can be no "your side of the street" or "they will one day figure it out" with some abuse.

There is also the issue of values. When they talk about friends or other people we know who are conducting themselves or their marriages or their parenting in a horrifying way, I am not going to be silent about that. I am also not going to be judgemental and holier-than-thou -- I often tell my daughter, for example, that we can pray for a friend who seems to be in trouble and that that person has her own story to work out in life. But I am not going to just "let them figure out" that stealing is wrong, or that a wild life sexually or using drugs is just another truth. I am going to find a way to show them how to have empathy and compassion for someone who is lost but make it clear that that person is lost. I actually see myself, among my friends and others, as one of the most hands-off parents, but also as one of the few who is very active about teaching values. One of my values is that evil is a real force in this world and that there are many ways to fight it. Forgiveness is the first way to fight it, but there are other ways too, some include physical battle against someone like Hitler -- and some ways allow a vulnerable child to protect him/herself. I want to equip my kids to do that, to make sure they know what it means to walk in the light and what it means to walk in the darkness and how it is possible for any of us, no matter what we have done or how we have hurt someone or destroyed something, to feel remorse and walk a new path. I don't know if Hitler was capable of that, on the extreme end, and I don't know if my H is capable of that. My mistake was equating that hope with our marital finances! I thought I couldn't protect one without protecting the other -- I thought I could preserve my hope that he could still be who I thought he was and that that meant I had to sacrifice protecting my home, my bank account, my credit cards, all that we shared on every level -- and we all know how that went.

There is an article called, "Beyond Narcissism – To Behold the Face of God," that offers a path through that mess for me. I don't think it's an easy question. There is a huge mosaic at my church that shows Christ descending into h$ll, and all these people suffering there. One of them looks exactly like H, so much so that I often can't look at that part of the artwork, but I pray there all the time, thinking about what it means to be in h$ll -- here on earth or after our time here. We know that to be the absence of God, or if you are not a person of faith, the absence of love, and we can all say our MLCer is in that way in h$ll already. I want my children to have compassion for that miserable state but I don't want them to be confused about it either. I don't think we should ever trash talk the MLCer or anyone else, but that we have to find a balance that is based on compassion.

And I will also leave you with a Chesterton quote --

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays, the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert–himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt–the Divine Reason…

We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

―G.K. Chesterton