Underworld
Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2:9 NASB
In the midst – (This article was first published on 10 April 2016)
There is a Jewish rabbinic legend that everyone is taught Torah in the womb, but the moment the person is born, all God’s instruction is forgotten. It takes the rest of our life to recover what we once knew before birth.
It’s a very nice legend. It makes me feel as if I didn’t arrive abandoned to the chaos of the broken world. I arrived just after being perfectly content with my physical and spiritual realms. It makes me feel as though God’s instruction for living is somehow latent in my consciousness. Forgotten, yes, but not lost. I must remember, not acquire. The struggle is less formidable, and perhaps less confusing. Each part I remember fits, as if the rediscovery illuminates what was already there.
Of course, I arrive with something else as well. I arrive with the bags my parents packed for me—and their parents before them—and their parents before them—and on and on. I don’t come into this world thrown, as Heidegger suggested. Rather, I arrive stumbling—stumbling from the weight of those bags I did not choose to carry but nevertheless still do. And until I unpack them, sort through the contents, accept what was given me, take what I need, and remove what I don’t need, I will be stuck in Canal Street Station no matter where I go.
When I finally realize that I have to unpack those bags, I discover upon opening them that they are generally filled with emotions. Emotions that I did not bring with me when I left the side of the angel who provided Torah instruction in the raḥam (Hebrew “womb”) of secure and safe existence. Of course, it isn’t always secure and safe, even in reflection after the fact (consider Jeremiah 20:17), but that’s quite a different story. For most of us, the trauma begins upon arrival at Canal Street, not when the train first began to move many months before. All the prior Torah instruction is of no use to me at that point. An angel might still be watching over my arrival, but I am powerless to prevent the distress and upheaval that these bags cause in my state of forgetfulness. There’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to understand how or why these bags belong to me for a very long time. I just know that somehow they are mine to deal with. And every time I open one of them, it hurts.
Pain-avoidance is one of the protective mechanisms of all living things. When we find living organisms that willingly embrace pain in order to promote the welfare of another, we are always in awe. It is not what we expect. Even in the animal world we are amazed to discover that a mother octopus will stay with her eggs, bringing them to hatching, without once leaving to sustain herself. She simply starves herself to death in order that her offspring may live. Our instinct for self-preservation almost always takes over, especially when we begin to unpack those emotional messages stuffed into the bags we have been carrying since birth. The more painful they are, the more likely we are to keep the lid on them, and to find ways to numb ourselves to their impact. Virtually all addictive behavior is about pain-avoidance, even when the addictive behavior causes other kinds of pain. What we cannot live with is what’s in the bags. The tragedy of life is that we cannot live without those bags either. They make us who we are, who we have become as we wrestle with the dusty memories in those bags. As long as they remain closed, they control us. They are the leaves of the Tree that is suddenly in the middle of the Garden. No matter what we do, no matter how we try, those bags are right in the center of our being, whether it is well-being or not so well-being. Until they are opened, examined, embraced, and evaluated, they are the weight of being alive. And the weight grows heavier with each passing year.
What we probably don’t realize is that there is a wonderful present buried deep inside each bag of Tree leaves. The leaves are not very nice. They are the reminders of guilt, shame, disobedience, pain, trauma, and broken relationships. Once, a long time ago, someone even tried to use them to cover up all this identity crisis. If you look closely you might even see the pinholes in the leaves as they were strung together, one crisis added to the next, all handed off to you when they were stuffed into the bag. But under all this is something quite amazing. The problem is finding it. In order to discover the gift, you literally have to unpack everything else. The gift only emerges when the rest of the bag is empty. There are no shortcuts to reaching the gift. Every covering-up-leaf must be removed first.
Initially this doesn’t seem like such a terrible task. You open the bag and immediately some of the leaves pop out. These are the surface traumas you easily recognize. They are things you are comfortable admitting, things that are socially acceptable. Things like losing your temper once in awhile. Or having a bias toward Argentinian women. Or being disgusted with the repetitious refrains of contemporary Christian worship music. Or not liking people who drive Volkswagens. Or drink red wine. Or whatever. We all have our lists of “unlikeables.” Boxer shorts. Snow shovels. The IRS. Purple hair.
Most of these “pop-up” leaves are just simple personal character flaws, things we inherited or absorbed through the osmosis of our culture. Most of them are instantly (almost) cured by actually doing something simple, like meeting an Argentinian woman, playing in a church band, driving a Volkswagen, having a glass of red wine, or wearing boxer shorts. None of this guarantees that you will change your views but it does ensure that your views will not be based on what you inherited or absorbed. For example, think about attitudes toward other ethnic groups. Most of the time these racial prejudices are inherited. They are hardly ever formed from actually knowing people in that group. In fact, most people are just like most other people. The differences between them are usually the result of maintaining the differences, not investigating the similarities. This level of emptying the bag can usually be overcome by employing the motto: “I never met a single person I couldn’t learn something from.”
This is the easy stuff. Correcting family-of-origin prejudices by taking direct action. Got it! However, the next layer is more complicated. The next layer is about what you did to yourself as a result of the bags you have been carrying. This layer isn’t so obvious. Because it’s about your own view of who you are, you are more or less blind to it. It takes enormous personal scrutiny or incredible personal crisis to shake loose the spectacles that seduced you into thinking there’s nothing wrong here. Most of us can’t deal with the “enormous personal scrutiny” method until we have encountered the “incredible personal crisis” motivator. Even then, denial is far more friendly. After all, we have been training ourselves to be familiar with the weight and shape of these bags for a very long time. Imagining who you are without them is, frankly, unimaginable. But some of us are lucky enough to actually have incredible personal crises (although we hardly ever consider it lucky). We are forced to unpack. That’s a good thing, even if it hurts.
What we find is how much our own view of the world, God, and ourselves has been shaped by the trauma packed in the bags of our parents or caregivers (or, in some cases, our not-caregivers, the ones who were supposed to give us care but didn’t). This follows a biblical principle. The iniquities of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. But don’t think it’s about generational curses. It’s not! It’s about the impact of past trauma, including past sinful actions. It’s not a curse. It’s just a fact. What happened to your parents is passed on to you. Perhaps not directly but certainly through emotional messages, weltanschauung, and a priori assumptions about very important things. Like who God is and what He wants, who you are, and why you are that way and what your purpose is in life. [There are some big words in that sentence so look them up]. The effort it takes to thoroughly examine this layer is usually pretty intense. We begin to wake up. We realize that many behaviors we have automatically assumed to be necessary and/or needed are really products of prior brokenness. Originally they weren’t ours, although they now belong to us through emotional inheritance. The amazing thing about emotional inheritance is this: everyone gets some. It’s not just for the wealthy or trust-fund babies. It’s not even exclusively for those of us blessed with our natural parents. Everyone gets emotional inheritance. Since Adam, we all get bags to carry. We simply cannot avoid it.
How you unpack this layer is really up to you. You can even choose to delay it indefinitely, until death do us part, of course. That is, you and the emotional “stuff” you packed away in the bags finally do get separated in this life. I’m not sure about unpacking in the next life, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Moshe Luzzatto even suggests that whatever you left unexamined and unresolved here you will get to work on for eternity in the ‘olam ha’ba. Should you choose the final (albeit temporary) alternative—not to deal with any of this—you still get a consolation prize. You get to pass the bag, unopened, to your children. In fact, if any of your illustrious ancestry already made this choice, then your bag is all that more heavy. Isn’t that comforting?
Back to unpacking. So you determine that the buck stops here. You start digging. Pretty soon you discover more than you wanted to know about yourself. How your choices about partners have been affected by patterns from your past. How you repeat what happened to you in spite of the fact that you swore you wouldn’t. How your self-awareness (that’s a cool psychological term for “hot buttons”) is really sensitivity to unresolved painful trauma. How your confidence, or lack thereof, is really a function of the kind of caregiving you received. How your self-worth was determined long before you knew what the word meant. How much you are dependent on the approval of others. How desperately you want to belong. How addicted you are to special ways of numbing all this. How much you really don’t understand why God would even like you. How long it’s taken to realize where you really are. How little time is left to do anything about it.
The closer you get to the bottom of your bag, the more difficult it gets. Sometimes the uglier leaves are also sticker—even though you try to evaluate, take out, and embrace them, the emotions entangled in them are so intense and hurt so much that it feels as if it physically tears you apart. It hits you where it hurts the most. And it feels as if it is part of you. It won’t let go of you just like at Jacob at Jabbok. At that period of time it is actually still part of you.
This is usually the loneliest time in your journey of unpacking. The place where you are so vulnerable with only a few ugly leaves to cover you. You can look for reasons and motivations why these leaves should stay. You’re afraid to see what lies beneath.
Leaf after leaf, you sort through the cover-ups. Pride. Arrogance. Conceit. Or maybe the less odious forms of protection. Success. Authority. Plastic surgery (you didn’t expect that one, did you?).
Only you can complete the unpacking. The temptation is so great to just close the lid and sit on it to keep it inside and hidden again. To try to forget. To distract yourself and ask someone to do it for you. Or just pretend that you are someone else. To hide yourself forever. But then you will never know if that still voice inside was right. Someone (maybe that angel) is whispering that you have to push through. It could be a long forgotten hope/wish that you might be worth it after all?
Finally, and not all at once, you wrestle with what you’re made of, and what you made of yourself. Finally you come to terms with one single paramount word: Enough.
Not “Enough of all this crap!” No, rather, “I am enough.” I am who I am, all of me, all my past now laid bare. All of what I did to keep from seeing me in it. All of where I am right now, seeing it. I am me. Imperfect. Fuzzy. Messy. Hopeful. Striving. Noble. Helpful. Caring. I am enough for me! We need to add that last little prepositional phrase (“for me”) because there are only two persons in the whole universe who need to recognize that you are enough, and One already has. The present at the bottom of the pile is you.
May I have the honor of introducing you to yourself?
Topical Index: baggage, enough, uncover, self, Genesis 2:9
