The Haunting

Book title

We are currently reading and responding to the chapter I have most wanted to get to in our book club selection, The Sacred Romance.   It is Chapter 9, “Less-Wild Lovers.”   I wanted to share a significant portion from near the beginning of the chapter to whet your appetite just in case you are finding that despite your “positional” Christianity you are sensing a loss, and trying to quiet your heart and convince it that this is all there is.

“Most of us remember the time of our innocence as the Haunting…innocence not as being sinless, but as that time before our experience with the Arrows crystallized into a way of handling life which is the false self.   The Haunting calls to us unexpectedly in the melody and words of certain songs…the smile of a friend…the laughter of children…the smell of a perfume…a story.   However the Haunting comes, it often brings with it a bittersweet poignancy of ache, the sense that we stood at a crossroads somewhere in the past and chose a turning that left some shining part of ourselves – perhaps the best part – behind, left it behind with the passion of youthful love, or the calling of a heart vocation, or simply in the sigh of coming to terms with the mundane requirements of life.”

Is your heart “seized with palpable waves of longing and regret?”   Are you just living a life of resignation thinking, “This is the way it is, I had better learn to deal with it?” (page 125).

What false comforts and less-wild lovers have you taken?  

Here is a partial list of the things I have used for comfort in the past, a way to feel: work/workaholism, achievement in career, church (yes, church), joining groups or causes or denominations, food, endless hours of TV surfing/zoning out, knowledge, control, busy-ness, outward appearance for the sake of approval, people-pleasing,  independence and isolation, medication, gossip and hatefulness, self-improvement, lust for learning, drivenness…did I mention control?   There are more.   Just wanted to get you started thinking.

How are you anesthetizing yourself?

“Walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.”   Galatians 5.16 NKJV

http://www.jeanierhoades.com/category/sacred-romance

3 thoughts on “The Haunting

  1. If we but stand still in every way, letting time and life rush over us and past us… and away…our end will be burried beneath a mountain of regret and that ache you speak of. After all, even a dead fish snagged against a rock in the stream can continue to experience the sensation of action and life coursing over him- but still he’s dead. We often believe just because we’re in the stream we’re alive. Paul said “redeem the time.” That’s right folks…lift one finger and live!

  2. I love the fish analogy! SO TRUE! Beth Moore calls it “the captivity of activity” and we think it means something, gives us value. It is all a fig-leaf-cover-up, squelching and barracading in the pain.

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