Find Joy in Your Suffering. I Heard This Six Times. It Made Things Worse.
The priests were not wrong about faith. They were wrong about the Opathian state. These are different problems. Billy and The Priests, Part One
The priests were right about faith. They were wrong regarding the state of Opathian.
These are not the same problems.
I visited six churches in one day. Or something like that. I'm not sure how many there were. I wasn't precisely keeping track of things. I was a man in his mid-twenties with a broken heart and a chest that kept going awry. My body had started taking me to church parking lots without me even thinking about it.
They were all nice. They all stated the same thing very much. When you must deal with a lot of problems, think of them as pure delight. Our faith's traditions keep us going. Come to church. Have communion. Let the church take care of you.
Said plainly.
Find joy in Your suffering. Honestly, no.
And I would leave each one feeling emptier than when I got there.
I want to be careful here. I'm not saying that faith is wrong. The faith was real. I really did feel the want to go to those parking lots. The words "be wise to the gates, pray" that Father Wessal wrote meant a lot to him and turned out to be true. The whisper I heard during the quiet part of the ritual was what finally pushed me over a boundary into a life I could never have imagined. Faith, as a practice of returning to something larger than the controlled self's everyday management, is one of the most useful tools available to the Opathian mind.
What didn't work was faith. The institutional approach to my situation was what didn't work.
Dissociation presents a challenge that most prescribed treatment modalities cannot resolve, as they are primarily intended for the regulated self. It provides frameworks, routines, and rituals that the managed self-absorbs, processes, and uses with great skill. The managed self is quite good at going to church. It knows what to say. It can hold the holy things with the right amount of respect. It can do devotion in a way that fits the form.
It can't reach through the glass wall to the feeling self-waiting behind it and say, "The threat is over," no matter how much communion or prescribed delight it has. You can come back now.
Joy in suffering is a deep and meaningful lesson for someone who is really going through it and needs to see it in a new way. It is an unhelpful and isolated lesson for the individual who is seeing their pain from above and can't feel how hot it is. You can't be happy with something you can't feel. You can't stay alive on rituals that only touch the managed self and never reach the hollow.
Father Thomas was kind in the first cathedral. Father Michael, who worked at the parish centre, had a background in psychology and came the closest to asking the correct questions. I almost heard Father James at the lakeside retreat say, "The spiritual life is not about having all the answers." It's about figuring out how to live with questions that don't have answers. That has a different effect on the Opathian mind. That doesn't mean you have to act out a sentiment. That means you have to be there even when you're not.
Billy, you are the problem, Father Dave said. He backed off before I could say anything. I almost crawled to my car.
I don't know what Father Dave meant. I don't think he knew either. But the fact that the cruelty came from a priest in the language of spiritual authority and was directed at someone who had been told their whole life that being too much was the original sin made all the split's layers come to life at the same time. The shame was real. The separation that happened after that was the most intense I can remember.
I sat in my car with the windows down and the shadows laughing, and I didn't look back. And in the dark of that trip home, something changed. Not on the right path for recovery. Not in the direction of the light that the churches had promised. Going in a completely different direction.
Not: How do I like this? But what is this, really, and why hasn't anything that was meant to assist worked?
Finally, after a day of asking the wrong questions, I asked the right one. It led me to the book, Winona's lunch, the online profile, and the voice on the phone with the Canadian accent.
The priests weren't the way. But it was the day of churches. It was the day I stopped trying to have the right experience and started being honest about the one I was having.
That honesty was the first time in months that I let myself really be there.
And being there, no matter how uncomfortable, is always the first step.
Sincerely,
Bill Bistak
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