But I have stripped Esau bare, I have uncovered his hiding places so that he will not be able to conceal himself. Jeremiah 49:10

Because of the stigma attached to being a Christian brought on by the behaviors of people who say they are Christian but behave otherwise, I usually hesitate before mentioning my faith. I am admittedly not a very good Christian, regardless of how sincere I am. Among my many shortcomings are what my husband calls my “spicy temperament,” which is his kind way of saying I’m passionate and hot-tempered. I also have the very non-Christian tendency to blurt out exactly what’s on my mind or to show it by body language and facial expression, which demonstrates a decided lack of self-control. Regardless of the effects of this sort of self-serving honesty on others, I no longer make many attempts to conceal my true self.

In spite of not being a very good Christian, I am a sincere one who keeps trying to improve. My spirit finds comfort in the bosom of God, Jesus, Mary, and all the saints. If I had only one book I could read for the rest of my life, it would be the Bible. When I think ahead to the afterlife, I smile. I can’t wait to be one with God then, and I struggle to divest myself of the hindrances that keep me from oneness with him today. As Saint Paul said, “I die daily.” I feel my faith very keenly and can almost always be appealed to by Biblical principles, the chief among them being love. This is not to suggest that I always, 100% of the time, walk in love; I don’t. But in theory I would like to.

Love is no doubt the most difficult of the virtues, for it seems to inevitably require self-sacrifice and putting oneself in the other person’s shoes. I don’t want to do that sometimes, preferring my own rights, needs, feelings, and judgments to those of my neighbor. Surely if they were as enlightened as I, they would see things my way! Though this selfish habit is entirely predictable and human, as a person of faith I’d like to be more like Jesus and less like my lower self much of the time.

the spirit of Esau

Given my faith, it was inevitable that once I was fully alive to the fact that we were being cheated by people to whom we had given our trust, I would turn to God in prayer. I turned, too, to the book that tells about God and his ways, the Bible. I prayed and read the Bible a lot after realizing that we were being cheated. I fretted, chewed, and mulled things over. Finally, after a few months of this, things began to settle inside and I began to feel very still and quiet about my predicament. Then some event would occur with our partners to stir me up again, I’d get to see where my disquiet came from, and I would have yet another opportunity to work on myself, all of which I considered to be good things.

Seven months passed in this manner and, though from time to time I had feelings about being cheated or about the people who had cheated us, for the most part in my deepest and dearest self, I was very sure that God had me in his hands and I needed no other champion. When I happened to think of our partners, I shuddered for them because of the perilous positions into which they’d put themselves by violating their covenant. For the most part, though, I began to accept the truth. Then one day as I went about my household tasks, thinking about other things, a voice or thought spoke from that deep well inside of me and said that the principal in our covenant had “the spirit of Esau.” Like the fool I often am when such bits information are given me, I immediately challenged the voice with a sort of “who goes there?!” upon which the spirit fell entirely silent.

Though I have read the Bible from cover to cover more than once and can quote whole passages and nearly an entire chapter of the book of Proverbs by memory, there are many parts and characters with which I’m mostly unfamiliar, Esau being among them. I’ve never been a big fan of the Esau and Jacob story for various reasons. I did, though, have some rudimentary knowledge about them. I knew, of course, that Esau was the twin brother of the Jewish patriarch, Jacob, whose name was later changed to Israel. I recalled that Esau, being born first and thus the elder twin, had received the “birthright” of the firstborn son, which was no small thing among the ancient Hebrews. Jacob, however, whose name means “supplanter,” had his brother by the heel at birth, a sign of things to come; from birth, Jacob’s every intention was to obtain the covenant blessing of the firstborn son.

symbolic language

The incomprehensible, holy, creative, eternal life-giving Spirit many of us know as “God” has a language, and that language is symbolic. It is a language of words, which ground us in reality and give us a means of communicating what is—the stuff of this world–and it is also a language of symbols, pictures, and images that communicate the eternal things of the spirit realm. Jung believed that normal people without symbols “to act as an outlet for their libido” inevitably “feel restricted and discontented” (Symbols of Transformation, CW Vol. 5, 342). Whether they are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Taoist, humanist, religious or otherwise, people need their symbols. The most irreligious but conscious person will be a person of reality and words, and also a person of intuition and symbols. The symbols need not be religious, but religious and classical symbols (such as those found in mythology) have the weight of history and common knowledge that other symbols do not. In addition, religious symbols communicate the things of the spirit to spiritual beings. I am therefore a big believer in symbolic religion which has great potential for communicating the things of God to mortals.

Because I am a person of faith, the intuitive and spiritual information I need during my quest of personal wholeness often arises through the Christian symbols with which I am most familiar. A devout and awake Jew, Buddhist, or Muslim would most likely receive messages from the spirit or the unconscious through their respective symbols. However, being non-religious does not excuse an individual from being susceptible to symbolic language for, in psychological fact, all humans have innards that speak and are spoken to through images and symbols. There is therefore no sustainable reason for any of us to be put off by the symbols of another person’s faith (or lack of it). There is no need to reject the symbol of the unconscious simply because it arises from a religion, practice, or belief system from which we consciously recoil. Once I was spoken to by a pair of peahens walking in tandem down the middle of the street in my suburban neighborhood, and there was nothing denominationally religious about them. For several months that year, in fact, the symbol of the peacock and the peahen recurred so that I would be sure to understand that some deep magic was at work.

So it was that when the name of Esau rose from my deep well, I understood Esau as more than an historic figure of legendary struggles fought in the world of reality, facts, and reason. I also understood him as a symbol of something, and Jacob as a symbol of something else, and the birthright over which these brothers wrangled to be another thing entirely.

Because of my penchant for analytic psychology, I understood that I had a puzzle to assemble or a code to decipher. I must discover what “spirit of Esau” means. I would have understood this assignment even if the symbol given me had been a peacock, an elephant, or hot air balloons recurring through dreams, conversations, or real-life sightings. I would know by the strength of emotion accompanying the symbol, by its repetition, or by the force or magic with which it presented itself that this symbolic landscape was one I should and must explore and map if I wanted to learn and grow as a human being.

The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality. 
~ Carl Jung 

I’ve been writing about patterns in our lives that lead us away from individuation—becoming who we were meant to be—and bog us down into a quagmire of inheritances, habits, “shoulds” and other types of collective thinking that can never lead us to wholeness.

As an example, I began writing about what I learned this Thanksgiving week, when I realized that I had been re-enacting with my children a pattern that originated in my relationship with my mother. Though I saw what was happening mid-stride, reading it, too, on my daughters’ faces, even in that moment I did not yet have the picture I needed in order to free myself and continue on my individual path.

The picture I needed came later that night, as I dreamed. The dream I dreamed showed my dream ego in conflict with my husband, who represented my male side, or my animus. The action of the dream required me to finally break away from him in the most unlikely of circumstances, so that I could “get home” in the dream. Though I ended up going home by walking for hours in my pajamas and house slippers, I made it there and found myself in surprising surroundings with much work to do at the end. The dream also indicated that, in order to be free, I would have to overcome my inner, nice, obedient, good 13-year-old, and that I would need to do some work on my inner child of around six to eight years old.

Now, that’s a lot of information to get from one dream. But after I woke up and journaled the dream, I found myself weeping for my loss of freedom as a child, and over the fear of my mother I’d felt for so many years, even for years after I’d given up the fantasy that some day I’d be close to her.

Later that day, my brother came to pick up my nephews. As we re-hashed our Thanksgiving with our parents, I made an offhand (but unconsciously fruitful) comment about Mother. He playfully chided me for my little snipe,  turned to my children and said, “Now, kids, don’t let your mom talk bad about Grandma. Grandma is old and we have to be nice to her, so make your mom Be Nice.”

My brother is one of my favorite people in the world, and that moment was no time to discuss family of origin issues, for he was on his way out the door. So I smiled inwardly and remained silent as my children looked at him, wide-eyed, knowing what my real response would have been, had I opened my mouth. And my real response—the one that’s true and that will lead me to the wholeness for which I’m intended—is this:

The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.

This is what Jung wrote. Put another way, King Solomon wrote that “bad company corrupts good morals.” One’s own individual way is easily lost through the influence of the collective, which is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the individual’s psychological health. The way to wholeness comes first from being prepared to live with the collective in healthy ways by having been raised in a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting family. One then launches in a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting way and goes out to live a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting life by individuating—”leaving and cleaving,” as the Bible puts it—by becoming one. I do not speak with regard to marriage, here, but with regard to the Divine Marriage, the hieros gamos, the Holy Marriage. This is how life works at its best, if we have been loved.

If we have not been loved at all, or if we have been loved in part but wounded in part, we enter adulthood confused, believing that our actual marriage to a spouse will cause oneness and wholeness, and spending 20 or 30 years discovering what a bitterly wrong idea that was. We think that having children and houses and all the right clothes, possessions, activities, and friends will get us there, too. But they don’t. Twenty or thirty years in churches, at the job, or anywhere involving other people will reveal just how fallen and fragmented we all are, because we’re designed to become one with the Divine and ourselves before we are able to offer anything to the world; but we confuse our obligation to Spirit and we live our lives in the collective. And one year we wake up—some people do only on their death beds—and ask, “What was I thinking?”

The thing is that we can never become individuated while clinging to collective norms. The collective mind tells us how to live, what we should do for a living, how we should dress, what cars we should drive, what neighborhoods we should live in. Be responsible, do the right thing, do things in order; don’t push, don’t be rude, don’t be mean; respect your elders. “Don’t talk bad about Grandma; she’s old; we have to be nice to her; Be Nice.” When young people launch from the childhood home into a collective that looks as perfectly typecast as actors in a serialized drama or comedy, one can be sure that they are just as trapped as they were in their childhood homes. By the time they are 35 or 40 and have their two children and their so-called dream home that gives them all the right feelings, they will be filled with all the wrong feelings because the collective mind is corrupting and evil in the sense that it numbs people and leads them away from what only they can offer the world: their own selves.

And isn’t that what Mother or Father tried to snuff out in the first place, if they did—the Real Self? Isn’t that the design of public education and collective education and collectives of all other varieties? And yet we most admire the individual who rises above collectives by breaking free of them, and who thinks original thoughts, paints original paintings, writes original songs, pens poems that transport us out of the mire we’re in.

Individuation is a crime against collective values, Jung wrote, because we have to snub our noses at the group and walk away in order to go on the path that arises from the call to adventure and do what only we can do. Every step a person makes to integrate what has been unconsciously denied, therefore, has a healing effect and restores yet another part of the individual. And every step a person makes toward the collective leads him away again, or as Jung wrote “through his contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions which bring him into disharmony with himself” (CW 7:373).

And yet we hesitate to act in harmony with our own selves, for it was our earliest influences who taught most of us that our selves were to be rejected. Whether the collective was the family or the kindergarten class, we had to get in line and cooperate, and all too often “getting in line” meant giving up our true selves.
Lest the non-traditional types among us pat yourselves on the back because you resisted collective living and wear different clothes or refuse to shop at Abercrombie, would never buy Chanel or do not use that sort of education for your children, just stop a moment and consider your social network. We all collectivize. We can hardly stop ourselves. As an example, I had to smile recently when young missionary friends sent us photos of their evangelization team in the country where they live. Everyone on the team was dressed similarly, with similar hair styles, similar piercings, similar lifestyles. If you passed any single one of them in an aisle at the grocery store, you’d think to yourself, “Ah, now there’s someone who’s different!” But in fact, there’s nothing different about our friends at all. They are still part of a collective that is full of “shoulds” and “oughts” and shows them by example how to live. They are beloved, vibrant, self-sacrificing, wonderful human beings, but they are not much individuated, for there is not one person in the group who has anything original or different to say, when compared with their group. And, in fact, if one were to quit that group and become a Banana Republic-wearing financial planner, the rest of the group would say, “Ah, too bad; he sold out.”

That’s a collective. A collective is a group mind from which one cannot be free, out of which one cannot possibly become a self. One becomes a self by leaving the collective first, and only afterward by providing his or her own individual part in that great collective. The only way one can provide oneself is by supplying, as Saint Paul wrote, what each individual part supplies. Individual, meaning “each one part.” The “one” there, in the Greek, means one, a primary number.

It means every single one.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the characteristics of troubled and healthy families. Among the characteristics of healthy families were high self-worth of the family members; direct, clear and honest communication; flexible, human, appropriate, and malleable rules; and an open, hopeful link to society and others based on choice.

I thought then that Tolstoy’s idea that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way was true, and I think so today. Because each person’s life experience is unique to them, and the way they receive and interpret these experiences also unique, it seems possible to decipher a person’s patterns only in an intimate, even one-on-one relationship. It can take years, and even then it’s hardly likely that one person can come to understand another. It’s more likely that, after much work, we may be able to understand ourselves. Jung said so and I also tend to agree with him. Lord knows that it seems to be a full time job for me to continue to gain personal insight. I often think that the best gift I can give to anyone else, therefore, is the gift of the possibility of true self consciousness. The only gift we really have to give is ourselves. As Jesus said, “let your light shine.”

kicking the habit

Last time I wrote about what your Thorn or mine said. Today I wonder, what was the Name of that Thorn, or the Wound it made? One of my big thorns was named “Unwanted.” Some people I know and love have told me that the names of theirs were “Alone” and “No Identity” and “Useless.” It’s a spiritual and psychological principle that we have to know there’s a problem before we can heal or cure it. “First remove the log from your own eye,” Jesus said, “and then you’ll see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” If we haven’t removed what distorts our perception of reality and truth, we may still compulsively try to heal our brother’s supposed blindness. Our own disability doesn’t stop us. Scary thought, isn’t it? We are just that compulsively other-oriented.

The thing is that all the knowledge and wisdom in the universe are available to us, even at our fingertips. We are blessed among so many previous generations of people, because we have Google, and YouTube (for starters). Why, you can watch just about anyone’s teaching on YouTube, or read transcripts or even whole books by Googling them. There’s really no excuse for the westerner to continue to be unconscious, a walking wounded refusing to become healed.

And yet, here we are, living in a nation with six percent of the world’s population, producing most of the world’s wealth, and having one of the highest standards of living in the world, and yet with one of the highest crime rates, highest teen pregnancy rates, highest illiteracy rates among post-industrialized countries, and highest depression and anxiety rates. What is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong, I think, is that we like to watch our families and real, whole people on television and in the movies, but we don’t want to do the hard character work of truly being in a family or being a real, whole person. Even when someone else or a circumstance or ten seem to point out a problem we’re having with functioning or reality testing, we resist light and truth and will argue our ways out of it. We are such creatures of habit. We are so set in our ways.

Habits are strong when they have had 20 or more years to develop. It’s impossible to have grown up in a troubled, discombobulated family of origin and then suddenly become a healthy, functioning, loving adult at age 21. Or even by age 31. One must have substantial help navigating through all the developmental phases one missed during the first 20+ years. If you’re lucky, a conscious, healthy spouse can offer re-parenting, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Most loopy people pick mates who will perfectly re-create what their parents gave them. We all say we won’t do it, and that we didn’t do it, and we will argue against it, but the sad fact is that these things don’t just go away by themselves. As Saint Paul wrote, I know that what I want to do is right, but the doing of it isn’t in me, and even when I try to do it, I can’t do it: “Helpless wretch that I am! Who will deliver me?!” In other words, it’s a fantastic, desperate struggle.

So if you’re wounded in some significant way, having facts and information about how to be normal won’t help one bit. Only healing will make you able to benefit from facts and information. The wound cries out, and it will continue to ooze and blood cells and energy rush to it until it is healed, and the body can normalize. This is true for the physical body, and it’s true for the spirit. Put another way, as Jesus taught, “if the eye is dark, the whole body is dark; and oh, how great is that darkness.” Again, in Proverbs, it says “to the crooked, all things appear crooked; but to the straight, all things appear straight.” It’s all about the beholder, not the beheld.

wake up call

How does healing arise? I think we have an Aha! moment. I think that something happens as we go through life numbly, and suddenly for a moment, we’re not numb or asleep or unconscious. Often, another person says something to us. A friend may suggest something. Or the pain finally becomes so great that we ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with me?”

Other times, the ache and pain of a broken soul or heart pulses away in our chests until tears seep out of our eyes, unbidden. We don’t know why, but we want and need to know why. And so we begin to search for answers, for relief for the pain. We want to fix what doesn’t appear right or good. We’re shocked that we are so unconscious, and have been living such a lie.

Many things can happen to wake us up, but when we do wake up, the message is clear and unequivocal: Something is wrong with this picture. We see in incongruency. We catch ourselves in a lie, or are caught lying. We deny reality or indisputable facts. We realize with a shock that others have lied to us, and are still lying to us. We see what we did to relieve our cognitive dissonance. We lied to ourselves, we lied to them, we joined in their lies. We’ve become no better than the very people we accused and even hated, the ones who done us wrong. We feel it in our bodies, that root of wrongness deep inside. And then we know, and our choices are between trying to get back to sleep, or being awake and in pain and being stuck in pain, or of getting relief for the pain.

I notice that most people, once alert to the fact that they have a problem, don’t go back to sleep exactly as they were before. The bigger the pain, the bigger the pain-killer, if a person chooses a pain-killer rather than healing. And so many do. These people throw themselves into all sorts of rationalizing activities and other compulsions to ward off the anxiety produced by insight. Or they blame others and fuss with them until they feel justified in leaving, or otherwise get the fix that leads them back to a state of truce with the Wound. This is why so many addicts fail to recover once they’re released from treatment centers. They take the first opportunity they get as sober people with tools in their hands, and they toss the tools aside and they redouble their efforts at killing the pain through addictions. That wound isn’t healed until it can be looked at squarely. And it’s oh-so-painful to look at, to recall to mind, to have one’s heart broken yet again.

The numbing and fleeing continue until the person gets tired of being a slave to that Wound. But just being tired of the wound guarantees nothing. Really, the idea of going all the way to nothingness, as Buddha suggested, or to dying (metaphorically) as Jesus suggested, is just about right. When one’s whole identity has been wrapped up in the Wound, it will indeed feel like annihilation or death to identify with anything other than Wound.

case study

I have a person named Amanda in my life. She was raised in one of the most violently abusive and unhinged environments I’ve seen outside of my child welfare and advocacy work. She was unwanted, unloved, the child of an abusive alcoholic and a personality-disordered basket case who required her caretaking throughout her childhood. Her early childhood was spent in trailer parks and temporary housing, and she identified herself as a transient, trailer-type person. This became who she was.

Amanda later had numerous opportunities to come into real, loving relationships with others who do like all real, loving people do, which is love others truly, act and speak honestly, be aware of themselves and others, and have boundaries and standards and aims. She saw permanence, reliability, and true love, and she wanted them all.

Amanda desperately wanted realness and love, but after some years of receiving it, it became apparent that she didn’t really want them when they required something of her. She wanted the appearance of realness and love, and all the benefits others would give her, but she didn’t want to change in actuality. To change means to do something different.

After several years of being truly loved, she struck out on her own. She alienated others and bred mistrust, fear, and dislike in everyone who actually loved her. She aligned herself with fake people. She became the worst best facsimile of “Trailer Trash.” When she became a mother, she moved every single year in the name of prosperity, dragging young children with her, continually moving up, up, up. She separated her children from healthy people and continued to value time with people and places where image was the most imporant thing.

What was Amanda’s tipping point, the thing that tipped the scale from “possibility of healing and real love” back to “not love”? I’ll tell you what. It was her Wound. One of her big Wounds was named “Trailer Trash.” The only antidote for “Trailer Trash” is found in what? Externalizing an inner self-concept—a big mistake—and outwardly pursuing whatever was not “Trailer Trash.”

She developed a spending addiction and hid stuff she bought so her husband wouldn’t know about it. She lied, she hid things from everyone. One day, I happened to catch her in a lie and in a rush of remorse, she suddenly told me that she had felt so excited and happy, even giddy, about buying a new dresser at a local furniture store. She thought that she needed and even deserved this dresser. The only problem was that she and her husband didn’t have the money for the dresser. In order to get it, she’d either have to charge it or delay gratification and save for it.

“I know I shouldn’t have done this, but I did it anyway. I charged it. And I lied to my husband about it” she confessed.

“And you knew that was wrong, and would betray more trust?”

“Yes. I knew. I had to have it anyway.”

I pondered a moment, and then I told her that it appeared that she was at a tipping point, and that if she didn’t do something about her error and begin to mend her ways right now, she would be tipped in the direction that would eventually land her exactly where she did not want to be, which was “Trailer Trash.”

And that’s exactly what happened. She’s now so far away from real love and esteem and healthy living that I know of no healthy people with ongoing relationships with her. Her intimates are people who are like her—no surprises there.

The way this worked, to put it in a formulaic way, was that one driving wound was called “Trailer Trash.” The particular pain that came from that particular wound was the pain of not being good enough in her own inner substance. But in her confusion, she mistakenly thought the wound was all about money and stuff—externals. She became confused and stayed that way, even when people like me tried to help. Our help did not help. In fact, eventually she bit the hand that fed her. That’s the way it works.

making a list, checking it twice

She might have had some insight had she made and kept handy a list of “Trailer Trash” words and deeds. What does “Trailer Trash” say? What does “Trailer Trash” do?

• Trailer Trash is transient; a home with wheels.
• Trailer Trash is not respectable.
• Trailer Trash is not safe when high winds, hail, or tornados come along.
• Trailer Trash feels false.
• Trailer Trash is judged by others.
• Trailer Trash is poor.
• Trailer Trash is never as good as a House.
• Trailer Trash is too small.
• Trailer Trash can be uncomfortable in the winter and summer.
• Trailer Trash can be broken into, and doesn’t feel substantial.

These are some of the things that “Trailer Trash” meant to Amanda. Had Amanda been able to make use of her “Trailer Trash” list, whenever she felt her emotion rise, or became bull-headedly attached to an idea, such as the idea of Dresser, she might have been able to connect the dots between Dresser and Not Trailer Trash. How does this look? I’ll show you:

• Dresser is substantial. It’s heavy. It has no wheels.
• Dresser is pretty and expensive, therefore respectable.
• Dresser is safe because it’s heavy and has mass.
• Dresser is true: it is made of solid wood.
• Dresser will be approved of others.
• Dresser happens because I am a success.
• Dresser is good enough, maybe even better!
• Dresser is large.
• Dresser feels good.
• Dresser has good workmanship and is substantial.

Now we see how Dresser has the magical power of making Amanda Not Trailer Trash.

This is how it works. Please, I invite you to make your own list. The next time you feel that feeling in your solar plexus, or wherever you feel it. The next time you are outraged. The next time tears could shoot out of your eyes. The next time you lie to defend yourself. The next time you use another human being. The next time you dishonor your gift or the gift of others, or the sacrifice that was made: make a list. Ask your Wound its name. Find out how it looks. How it acts. How it feels and smells. How you feel when you are in it. How you imagine you’ll feel when you aren’t. What you imagine as the antidote—and make an antidote list, for the antidote is always just the opposite of the Wound.

And then look around you at all the magic talismans you’re using, rather than healing the wound. And please consider really  healing the wound. If you don’t heal the wound, it is a 100% spiritual and psychological certainty that you will pass the wound down to your own children, and perhaps to yet another generation, until someone along the line is brave enough and has a big enough heart and faith to do what you didn’t.

And why wouldn’t we really heal the wound?

If you were a warning sign, what sign would you be?

I’d most definitely be spontaneously combustible. Spontaneous combustion occurs when substances with low ignition temperatures begin to release heat through oxidation, fermentation, or some other means.

(I definitely am at higher risk of combusting when fermentation is involved. Any sort of alcohol will do, for “wine is a mocker and strong drink a brawler,” as it says in Proverbs.)

When a low-ignition temperature substance begins to heat up and the heat can’t escape quickly enough, the temperature continues to rise, eventually reaching the ignition point. If enough oxygen is present, BOOM! Houston, we have liftoff!

Besides spontaneously combusting humans, other materials most likely to spontaneously combust include haystacks, grain dust inside metal silos, coal, boiled linseed oil, and pistachio nuts.

Clearly, giving me pistachio nuts for Christmas would not be a good idea.

I never was combustible when I was younger. My mother said she never saw me lose my temper during childhood or adolescence, and I can clearly remember the first time I felt overcome with passion at age 21 (get your minds out of the gutter, it wasn’t that kind of passion). My roommate and I got into it, and I became so angry that I threw my Bible across the room and flung a wheeled desk chair across the floor after it. She had been raised with a violently drunk father, and I can’t forget the look on her face. Nor can I forget the shock I felt at myself.

Since then, I’ve spontaneously combusted on numerous occasions. My particular brand of combustibility doesn’t always involve anger, but it does involve passion. I combust at the slightest moral provocation, a crusader at heart. This sort of combustibility makes me a good public speaker, an excellent advocate, an above-average writer when I’m feeling ardent, and a mother not to be trifled with. Astrologers have told me that my combustibility has something to do with how Mars, the war-like planet, is placed in my natal chart. One told me that shocking things won’t happen to me; I’ll initiate them or draw them to myself.

In other words, I’m no victim.

My combustibility, my passion about principles, irritates even me sometimes. I’m big on principles until I’m the one violating them, and then I like to look the other way and not notice myself acting so abominably. Like a baby who disappears under a blanket in a game of peek-a-boo, I think that because I can’t see, I cannot be seen.

I’d like to be perfect. Failing that, I’d like to be flawed in an artistic or mystical way, like Van Gogh with his missing ear, or like some saint whose stigmata require constant bandaging. Instead, I’m flawed in a bitchy way and cannot imagine myself being less bitchy as an old woman. At best, when I’m 80 I may be like Grandma in The Waltons, always shooing Grandpa away, never cracking a smile, always standing there with a wooden spoon in my hand and a scowl on my face. This is me, at my worst.

I’ve often asked God, “Why didst thou make me thus?” for I would not create a person as passionate as I unless she had some Great Calling, such as leading France to victory in the Hundred Years’ War, or refusing to stand up and move when told to go sit with the colored folks, or sewing the first American flag. I’ve had no such calling, so find myself pretty useless as a personality. Like one of my favorite bloggers who remonstrates with herself for her relational forgetfulness and lack of interpersonal connectivity, I find myself fatally flawed in the most inconvenient way.

Now that I’m all grown up and have suffered enough to have some perspective, I do see some merit in being myself, though. My personality is one of the best I can imagine for handling the sorts of things I’ve had to handle as a mother and a wife. I’ve done a good job in those roles, although I doubt I’ve endeared myself to anyone as I’ve done them. I’m no Olivia Walton, that’s for sure.

When I see myself at my worst and most inconvenient, I want to apologize to my loved ones for being me. If I were a nicer person, I probably would seem saintly. As it is, I’m a confusing mix of big-hearted and pig-headed, hearth-warmer and arsonist. I wonder what people will say about me at my memorial service? What, in all honesty, could be said?

She was passionate, she was pig-headed, she was a true Taurus, charging her way through life. She did everything she wanted to do but wasn’t proud of it. She was good, but she wasn’t very nice.

She was spontaneously combustible, dangerous around alcohol, haystacks, and pistachio nuts.

I think that would about cover it.