Category Archives: Sex
up jumped the devil! but when there is love……….
can’t type caps much right now….last week i was carrying some laundry down the hall and managed to trip over a ladder back chair and throw myself full force, right shoulder cap first into a door jam! surgery scheduled for 2/22/16. need a what? reverse shoulder replacement? i picture me with my right arm on backward! 🙂 a nightmare week reminiscent of several levels of Dante’s Inferno……..another week still to go….then six more weeks with Dante…six months to almost full recovery. doctor sadly warned me i would never be able to reach the top kitchen cabinets again. i laughed! i was sitting in a wheel chair, so he didn’t realize at five foot tall, i’ve never been able to reach them. frankly, i’d be scared to see in them!
and though this has been one of the most physically painful weeks of my life, i have never felt so tenderly and totally loved. i know there are many many unsung heroes care giving elderly or ill spouses and i believe they, like my seventy-nine year old husband, are right up there with mother Theresa in deserving a nobel prize.
After all she got a face to face encounter with God to lure her into caregiving….not having had that i can’t claim to be able to compare that to what lured my husband into this situation. hmmmm…..on a scale of one to ten…..face to face with God or 50+ years of good nooky, but not so hot cooking? I won’t push my luck by putting that question to my husband, until i can manage the bathroom on my own. 🙂
Inch Worms on the Plateau of Realism
I feel very sure just about everyone has blind spots or crazy spots in their personality. They come with the territory of being a human. I think they come with everyone’s DNA, but often, if not always, are intensified by experiences or lack of experiences in our impressionable youth.
One of my particular personality type’s blind spots is idealism, which is not bad if balanced with enough common sense. But unfortunately that seems to come to some of us very late in life. So, we develop survival mechanisms to minimize the pain of constant disappointment and frustration with the world, including with ourselves.
Some of us pick an idealistic goal in a particular area and simply focus on it with total tunnel vision while pouring all our energies into it. Unfortunately, eventually most of us either burn out or catch on that we can only inch toward ideals in this flawed and very unfinished world.
Others of us latch on pretty early to the pleasure principle….pleasures block pain…..so we eat, drink and make out with Mary or Harry. Eventually this either kills us, destroys our relationships or gets us run out of town, so we too are challenged to face the pitiful little realities of human existence.
So down deep many of us fear that what is actually driving us is congenital insanity. Naturally, we’d rather cling to an addiction, which we assure ourselves is either a virtue or else something that we could always get over, than face our fear that we are crazy. Because being crazy might not be something we are able to do anything about. Maybe all the world’s pills and all the world’s doctors couldn’t put our tiny cracked selves together again.
If we are lucky enough (or blessed) to find a source of love – just as we are, we can become able to bear the pain of disillusionment about ourselves and thus the rest of the world. Then most of us, after settling only temporarily in the valley of cynicism, will find our way to a reasonably satisfying existence as inch worms on the plateau of realism.
Abortion: Do We Choose Law or Love?
Expecting others, who are very different from ourselves and our families and who may live in much harsher environments without the emotional and physical support we have, to make the same hard choices we might make is not even just, never-the-less loving.
This week I voted against Amendment 1 which was to allow Tennessee to write its own stricter laws on abortion.
The following paragraph is from my daughter-in-law who chose to give birth to a wonderful child that she and our son and all our family have loved and nurtured and delighted in for over a decade, even though an ultra sound early in her pregnancy showed that the baby had a serious disability. These are not the words of a woman who chose abortion when she could have.
“Imagine you have a 13 year old daughter. Now imagine that she has been raped or molested and that act of violence resulted in pregnancy. Now imagine sitting in a clinic with her while she is made to watch videos on embryonic growth that are filled with anti-abortion propaganda. All of it intended to make her feel guilt over her decision and change her mind. Just think of how she is being violated all over again because at 13 she cannot bear to carry a child, because at 13 her life would be doomed due to no fault of her own. Imagine it. That’s what Tennesseans voted for last night: victimizing victims.”
Having been in high school and college during the nineteen-fifties, I’ve lived through one cultural extreme to the other: the first being absolutely no abortion, social/religious rejection of unmarried pregnant women, and strongly recommended institutionalization of children born with defects.
To be honest, fear of pregnancy and all that would come with it were the deterrents for me not having sexual relations before marriage, not morality. I simply wasn’t pure or mature enough to be spiritually motivated. I also lived a very protected life and wasn’t aware of women being raped. Being a devout coward, the cultural taboos were a protection for me.
But in the intervening years, I have learned that a surprising number of my many women friends gave up babies in those times. Now, some are reuniting with their “lost” children. I have also had the shock of knowing Christian women who have been raped through absolutely no fault of their own. And I have been the confidant of way too many Christian middle-class women who were molested or violently raped as children by authority figures, some of them close family and supposedly Christian. And I assume this wouldn’t even approximate the number of young girls raped among the economically underprivileged.
However, I find the reality, that society now considers sex just a physical experience on the same moral level as bowel movements and that abortion is used as another form of birth control, totally unacceptable.
This is not as simple an issue as both sides want to make it.
The slippery slope of when an embryo becomes a human being has no clear cut answer. The question of whether defective human beings are of such value that others must sacrifice the quality of their lives to nurture and protect them is also a serious and difficult issue, including the question of who is capable of taking that challenge on. The problem is that those having to make these choices are not all the same. They were not all protected, they are not all intelligent, they are not even all adults, or emotionally stable, they may or may not have been taught the spiritual value of sacrifice, never-the-less the finer points of theology, and their financial situations vary drastically.
This is not an even playing field.
If we want to see the issue as black and white and applicable to all Americans, regardless of whether they believe in a particular religious moral code that calls abortion murder, we are going to have to be consistent about killing as a moral option. Is killing ever moral? When? Why?
Is it moral to send our children by the thousands to kill and be killed fighting in places we have no legal and a very doubtful moral right to invade? Our current response to fear of others in the world is simply to bomb them, killing the innocent along with those we judge as guilty. Is a Syrian child of less value than an American embryo? In a democracy the government represents the people. You and I are as responsible as our leaders and those that aim the bombs.
Can we risk killing those found guilty of killing others within our own society, knowing the statistics on the innocent people that have been sent to their death by our system of justice? Is the jury morally responsible in those cases?
Is it moral to kill in self-defense? Can we morally kill in defense of our property? Are jewels and computers and televisions worth killing a human being who is possibly capable of repentance?
Can we allow people to take their own lives? Can we allow dying people to choose how they die?
Regardless of how we believe we personally would choose, we need to look deep within ourselves, imagining those vulnerable ones we love being the child or person facing these decisions. It’s not just an impersonal theological issue. Do we have the right to make these kinds of decisions for people we know nothing about and that we take no responsibility for the consequences we are insisting on forcing on them?
A Buddhist Christmas
I found this quote on the blog, Make Believe Boutique. It’s Buddhist, but the only difference I can see between this and Christianity is our recognizing that we personally fall short of the glory of God and need the saving grace of Jesus. Otherwise it beautifully describes our human experience, hopes and spirituality.
From Waylon Lewis:
I love Christmas: I love simple, personal presents. I love coziness, and world-quieting white snow, which slows us all down and makes even bustling cities feel like they were Norman Rockwell 1940s landscapes. I love fires, and dinners, and parties with old and new friends and children and elders, people I wouldn’t ordinarily get to talk with much. I don’t see my family, these days, they’re all spread about the US, and money is tight, and that always tinges this time with emptiness. But I love sadness, as my mom’s Buddhist teacher said it’s the most genuine of human emotions though we’re not to covet it. I love, at this darkest time of the year, remembering that life is short, and it progresses quickly, and memory fades and all that really matters is being a good person, and making the better of two iffy choices every step along the way. It’s a wonderful life, after all. So let’s put the ‘holy‘ back in the Holidays. Let’s buy gifts that better the world, and support good people doing good things. Let’s put away our phones and laptops and TVs—if only briefly—and make some eye contact, and say the obvious: ‘I love you, and this is why.’ Or, ‘I’m sorry things have been funny between us. Let’s be genuine, and have a good talk.’ Because, before you know it, one third of your friends will have divorced moved away lost their hair become old people or even died of accidents or dis-ease or, you know, life. I’m still only 35, but I lose a friend a year, whether in China to an avalanche or right here at home, just a month ago, an only-recently-perfectly lovely healthy powerful friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage IV. In Buddhism we say: this precious human birth is fragile. Make good use of it. Think about others as much as you do yourself and you yourself will find that elusive happiness. Meditate a few minutes, at least, each morning, before the ephemeral to-do lists that seem so important, the lusts and the anxieties, clutter up your snowy peaceful dozy mind. Don’t chase after the fast food of life: sex, bad food, money, big houses, cool cars. They don’t make you happy, the only thing that makes you happy is you sorting yourself out…
Sex is Highly Underrated. Part Four of Law And Pleasure
That may seem like a funny thing to say in a world obsessed with sex. However, when an Adult Sunday School Class was asked the question, “What’s a way you have experienced the presence of God?” and I answered “Sex,” it went over like a lead balloon. There was a profound silence. I think the pastor just finally moved on to another question.
Evidently this is not the number one response.
For me growing up in the fifties and being a newly wed in the sixties created a sexual conundrum. It meant coming into marriage with all sorts of taboos drummed into your conscious and unconscious, but suddenly hearing the feminists claiming equal fun for everyone. This led to being rather self-centered about sex. I did finally get the impression that men need the enjoyment of sex to feel good about themselves, but women need to feel good about themselves to enjoy sex.
After my encounter with the reality of God’s love expressed in Jesus, feeling loved became a given, so my enjoyment of sex improved exponentially. I was curious whether this was a usual perk for Christians.
After a women’s ecumenical prayer group one day, our older mentor ended up staying and chatting with me. She was a lovely Baptist woman, grey-haired, probably in her fifties. She was an old fashioned lady in the best sense of the word. She was gentle, soft spoken, kind, and polite. She wore skirts to mid-calf and high necked blouses with lace ruffs and a cameo at her throat. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but I mentioned that to me a somewhat surprising blessing of becoming a Christian was how much it improved our sexual relationship. Her eyes lit up and she responded with great enthusiasm, “Oh yes! Sometimes I just want to shout, “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!”
Though this experience obviously brings an overwhelming sense of gratitude, it is not what I actually mean when I say that I have experienced God through sex. Sex is infinitely varied even in the same relationship. Often it’s just plain fun, other times it’s tender, it’s consoling, it’s ecstatic, stress relieving, lighthearted, joyous, healing, loving, powerful. All gifts from God, no doubt about it, but not what I meant.
My experience of God in sex came about one time, when I made a conscious choice out of love and affection, not duty, guilt, or need, to put my husband’s experience of joy first. Somehow, that focus off myself freed me of my self, of the limits of self, and the experience was not only of oneness with my husband, but oneness with all creation and its creator both. It was a loss of borders that seems impossible to describe effectively. To me it was a powerful experience of God.
It is definitely different than an experience of the presence of Jesus and even different from the experience of God’s love and its mind blowing joy. It’s simply a oneness with everything. A loss of the limits of self.
I am not good at contemplation. But several times, in other ways than the sexual expression of love, I have also experienced that oneness. Once was toward the end of a night of staying awake on a scout camp-out, keeping the fire going and scooting children in their sleeping bags back from the fire when they wiggled too close in their sleep. Just before dawn, there’s a moment of quiet when the night sounds stop and the day ones haven’t started. It’s like the earth holds its breath. As I experienced that moment, it seemed to me that might have been like the earth holding its breath at the moment when Christ was born. Suddenly, I had no borders, I was one with everything. There was an Eileen awareness of everything, but no Eileen. Again, that sense of oneness with all, with God. A pure peace. A silence. No self to protect, so absolutely no fear of anything.
Another time in the silence of fallen snow, on the top of a hill in darkness that seemed to make every star visible, I stood alone, simply listening to the silence and feeling the vastness of the starfilled sky, and once more I lost my self into that vast silence, but gained the world and God.
It would seem that both love and awe can free us from the lonely walls of self.
Accidental Sex Education Field Trip
I’ve written about my adventures teaching in a four room rural parish school, but not about the adventures of the young new parish priest there. Father Joe was an enthusiastic new priest, full of energy and wonderful ideas for our school and parish. Some of which turned out well, and others, not so much.
He and our principal, an elderly dumpling-shaped, cheerful little nun, took a busload of seventh and eighth graders to tour the Huntsville Alabama Space Museum. The day went well and on the return trip Father scouted out a restaurant for his hungry students. They stopped at one that had the innocuous name The Family Restaurant on a large sign over the building. Father went in ahead to check out the food and how they were set up for a crowd. It turned out to be a busy buffet, but the manager assured Father Joe that the students could all sit at tables pulled together and if they waited just a few moments, the line at the buffet would be clear for them.
Of course, as soon as everyone got settled in, there were numerous bathroom requests. It was decided that the boys would go downstairs to the bathrooms first. Then, when they returned, the girls could go. Eventually, some of the girls began to complain when the boys never returned, so one of them was sent to check on what was holding up the boys.
Very quickly the girl raced back breathless and saucer eyed, yelling loudly, “There are women with no shirts on down there, carrying trays back and forth across the hall that goes to the bathrooms.”
Father Joe gasped, Sister turned pale, and the manager came running over to explain that there was a topless bar downstairs. Father Joe, turned to Sister in panic, pleading, ” I can’t go down there. You’ll have to go get the boys.”
Sister set off, her small plump body quivering with righteous indignation. As she marched with head held high past the bar, she spotted her students peeking out from the bathroom. Pouncing on the closest, she pulled him out by the ear shouting fiercely, “All of you, get upstairs right now.”
As she prodded the sheepish boys hurriedly past the bar, she heard a waitress yelling excitedly, “There’s a nun out there. There’s a nun out there.”
Quickly, they shepherded their snickering troops back out to the bus stopping only at a MacDonalds for take out and a bathroom.
Knowing that word would spread like wildfire throughout the parish before Sunday services the next day, Father Joe bravely diffused parental indignation by preaching on the misuses of the word, family.
Fibromyalgia: Intensifier and Prolonger of Pain with Flare-Ups Severe Enough to Make You Pray to Die
I discover more people struggling with Fibro every week. I am in remission and have only had a few relatively mild flare-ups for over four and a half years. Unfortunately most people who do not have fibromyalgia really haven’t got a clue about how crippling it can become.
I started having just mild and brief attacks of pain in my hands, when I was in my thirties. I assumed it was arthritis. In my late sixties I had a couple of week long flare-ups with wide spread pain so severe, that I could not sleep or find anyway to get out of pain. I got slight relief from hot baths, but spent days and nights huddled in a recliner, wrapped in quilts, sobbing. If someone just touched me gently on certain spots, I cringed in pain. I am allergic to most pain medicines, including even aspirin, but steroid shots helped. I am a devout coward about many things, but I have come through five Caesarian Sections, a hysterectomy, gall stones attacks, and gall bladder surgery, always recouping quickly without much drama or whining. So, I was pretty sure the pain was really bad and not just me being a wus.
Finally about seven years ago, I ended up bedridden for two months.The pain in my wrists was so severe that I couldn’t lift a cup of coffee without wearing wrist braces, my back and hip pain not only kept me from walking, but awake night and day. My ankles hurt too much to put pressure on the gas or brake pedal in the car, so I couldn’t drive. My husband decided to net-work our home computers to his office computer, so he could work from home and take care of me. The then only marketed medicine did not help the pain and made me feel drugged.My doctor had run out of suggestions.
I went on line and joined the Fibromyalgia Association, receiving their monthly newsletters. In these, there were a variety of testimonies about treatments that had helped others. I decided to start with the simplest and cheapest and work through the lists.
The simplest was taking Dextromethorphan, available across the counter. After several weeks this actually stopped the flare-up that seemed to have become chronic. I stayed on this for several months, until my blood pressure began to rise. This is not a good medicine for anyone with high blood pressure. Fortunately, since I stopped taking it, I have not had any totally crippling major flare-ups.
Partly from age related actual physical wear and tear, at seventy-eight when I have to walk long distances, I use a walker. I don’t need it to walk, I need it to sit down just for a couple of minutes to relieve pain and then I can go on. Also, since I both work and play on a computer, I end up with numbness and pain in my right wrist and hand from carpal-tunnel syndrome. I have found that wearing a wrist brace, just when sleeping, actually solves this problem. Most of the time, tylenol extra-strength handles any other type of flare-up.
The problem for me is that at my age I have some wear and tear that would cause some pain anyway, but fibromyalgia not only makes the pain worse, it tends to make it constant. Finding ways to handle stressors
is the key for me. Hating having to do physical chores triples my pain. My best way of managing physical activity is to balance it with frequent breaks. Working consciously to mentally and emotionally accept large and small unpleasant realities and to find grace in them on a daily basis has brought me the most relief.
One woman I met several years ago, who had been bedridden for over two months, got relief with the medicine Plaquenil, though it took almost three months to be pain free.
There are success stories with various natural treatments and there are new medicines on the market. Fibromyalgia has a wide spectrum of symptoms including fatigue and confusion. It seems to be caused by the central nervous system becoming hyper-active and sending out pain signals much more severe than any soreness,injury or emotional response merits and also prolonging the pain way past when the cause has been cured. No one has a clear handle on it yet.
Get a doctor’s diagnosis, which generally will involve tests to rule out arthritis, lupus, and other serious muscle related illnesses. Be proactive. Become knowledgeable through the Association newsletters about options for treatment. Sometimes, doctors have a certain mindset about medicines and treatments, so find one that is willing to work with you to find the best for you.
Though cause and effect aren’t clear, there are some things that seem to make it worse. Again, this can vary greatly from person to person. Become aware of triggers for you. Changes in atmospheric pressure, exhaustion from overdoing physically, particularly when tense, are some I’ve noticed. Depression and resentment are major triggers for me.
If you have a personal relationship with God, surrendering all to God mentally or verbally over and over while in the pain, or praising God even in this time of suffering, and persevering until you mean it wholeheartedly, often can be incredibly healing. I admit that there are times I personally don’t manage this.
When in a flare-up, cut yourself a lot of slack. Mentally treat yourself tenderly, like you would a beloved child in pain. Prioritize and do only what is the most important. Allow yourself to just be. No matter what anyone else thinks, this is the a path to relief.
However, become aware of what is going on in your inner world. There may be something needing healing, resolution, or acceptance. This has the potential to bring more permanent relief than just medicines or rest.
Lately, I have been feeling overwhelmed by a difficult situation and am having some flare-ups again. It has taken over a week, but remembering what God has brought me through before, and working on letting go of my picture perfect expectations of myself, life, and others has given me relief.
I recently made a CD of favorite songs about peace, inner peace, personal peace, and world peace. Playing this when driving in heavy traffic, when needing to relax, and when going to sleep has been a great help.
Anything that relieves stress can help lessen a flare-up and allow you to get needed rest. Sex is actually a good temporary stress reliever, as long as the circumstances don’t cause resentment or anxiety.
Repetitive physical exercise,however, particularly during a flare-up, can make the pain worse.
Don’t despair. There is help. But it may take some trial and error. Persevere.
