Paradise Cafe Discussions - A Place For Bible Research And Christian Encouragement

Tuesday, January 16, 2001
1:32 AM

I think I made a huge mistake. How could I entrust so much to people who haven’t a clue what I am all about and yet not trust those who at least want to know me. I somehow thought that trust could be engendered in others by showing trust to others. Not so. Perhaps I am unfathomable after all. Perhaps there are some things that are better kept to myself.

No one but me knows exactly where I am coming from, nor do they really care. Even if they did there is precious little they could ever do to make it any easier for me if they wanted to. I am too deep for any I know but me, but not so deep that professional help cannot help me if I let it ... if I can just trust opening up to therapy honestly instead of rationing only that which within my own self-worth permits me. Maybe from this point on I should simply keep to myself. After all, this is going to be a long and painful, and very lonely journey.

Today’s session with Fabian and Grace was finally getting somewhere. Finally addressed my steel plate of trust. Locked up tight ... so tight that every muscle in my body was about to rupture and every vein about to hemorrhage all over the office. Now Fabian cuts to the chase. Asks me about each hesitant statement I make, compelling me back home to where I don’t want to stay. Now I am beginning to understand the pain ... terrible, emotional anxiety, as if I was betraying my best friend’s most closely guarded secrets.

Embarrassment. Terrifying myself just thinking of talking out loud. Surely these ones who know me so little will judge me worse than I, I who is trying to be so much more forgiving and for this, forgiving others so I might not be so judged so harshly from within?

Is this a joke? Me? Forgive myself? No ... more like, if I condemn myself, then how much more can I expect from those who are hearing it for the first time? Now, you can sit there all day long with that look of concern on your face and say all those non-judgmental clichés, but will I believe you? Not until I can see the results of your lie-detector test! Yet these two have nothing to gain by judging me. In fact they resist any judgment, and do so because they are not working with their own values but mine, and I must start to believe I am innocent within myself for the guilt I have imposed, the origins of which I have yet to discover.

Yet right now there is so much resistance against me digging any deeper that I know I cannot do it alone, and I can’t do it with someone who ‘knows’ me but doesn’t know ALL of me, or should I say this dark side, or who might become emotionally entangled. So this is the time to do it with a stranger, yet specially trained in therapy, one whom I can trust, will trust me, and trust themselves to become closer than anyone else has ever been, to enter my most vulnerable place, and yet have the strength to remain with the resources not to be enticed.

Grace was very frank about this. It would be like traveling to a wilderness retreat with her ... to trust all of my demons into her hands. And I know I will need her hand to hold onto when I’m there in complete vulnerability.

So then she asks me this pointed, yet thoughtfully rhetorical question, “Don’t you find it unusual that you picked on women who have such little trust?” Why? Why not pick on those who might be more easily fooled? If I were an enraged man, simply out to ruin the lives of every woman in my path, I would have targeted easier prey. I could have been such a man. I have seen such men. In fact I lived with such men.

John Roman Shelton. I’ll never forget him. Not because there is any love lost between us. He’s gone now anyway ... downed in a gunfight at the not-so-OK corral. Sociopath may be the kinder description, but I prefer psychopath ... it fits these guys much better.

During our residence together I guess John became my mentor of sorts, my guide into a world estranged of morality. I became stimulated by the idea of questioning the ‘establishment’ to excess. Let’s face it, I was searching for answers, and I was naive enough to believe those that search will find them.

But all the while he was overlaying his own persona upon me, and I suppose scrutinizing me as well, maybe to satisfy some idle curiousity, or perhaps to even find in me his alter-ego to help justify his conscienceless existence. While in this quagmire, I also thought there might be something missing in me that I could never match his seemingly great emotional strength that defied every gravity of guilt, the mental dexterity with which he could do with such ease the things I thought at the time were the ultimate in charismatic behaviour.

In fact, as I think back, just about all the ‘friends’ I ever had before I broke free from my worldly ways were psychopathic ... John Desjardins, Buddy Malt, Ian McDougal ... the list goes on and on. I attracted them like flies to dead meat. The Truth changed all that. Hit me like an avalanche. I cut them all off. My transformation was immediate and complete ... or so I thought.

What lurked beneath it all was much more than simply a state of inate sin. I have even thought, had it not in my former years that allowed me to experience such depraved behaviour, I might have been prevented from this happening to me now. Yet whether what is happening to me now is a result of that or something deeper still awaits my therapy into the unknown I’m sure ... if I can only trust the therapist knows what she’s doing. She says she is experienced and the psychiatrist confirms that belief, but deep down inside I have this reluctance, perhaps simply the reluctance to find something I will then have to decide to change. The need to change is one thing. The will to change ... that’s the eternal question.

Now I must decide the next step. As if within someone else’s experiment I feel I am just another guinea pig to find the level of drug needed to bring me to a state of normalcy. Never mind that I am going back to all those side effects that make me a zombie, perhaps it is this way I get punished for all my sins ... I wish. We will see what 3x dose actually does in the next few days.

Wednesday, January 17, 2001
11:44 AM

Being kicked in the head by a Belgian horse pulling a beer wagon would at least numbed me back to sleep. Now I must remain awake and numb at the same time. Somehow the expression “medication must take its course” has a real unsympathetic sound..

Obsessing about Grace’s remark. Why did I pick on women who have such little trust? If it was for the express purpose to ruin them, or even satisfy some weird fetish or sexual need, I could’ve had any of those by choosing a more trusting and naive victim. Still, I chose those with a need, and now I cannot imagine other than my own search for trust that I seek those women that are likewise distrusting, that I try to explore my own lack of trust which was seemingly violated by a woman ... but this now draws a blank.

Grace is smart. Never tells me too much. Lets me arrive there by myself, but never too far off not to retrieve me, while reassuring me that I am not being judged for revealing too much. Too bad she is retiring in November. Damn, the one person I have finally found that I could trust thus far, and she has to disappear on me. Something tells me this journey is going to be longer than 10 months, so the dilemma is, do I carry on with Grace? Or do I find another who will be there when I REALLY need someone to lean on. Cannot afford to build all over again, but if Grace keeps good notes, what the heck, should I chance it? She’s mature enough not to let herself get too entangled with me, and this alone is a comfort. If I must continue with someone else, can I count on the same? Is the risk too great?

Thursday, January 18, 2001
1:32 AM

Up again till the wee hours. Medication doing its deed. Side effects ... feeling of strangulation, tightening of throat and difficulty in swallowing. Need to drink lots of water or I’ll dehydrate. Head still feels like a basketball too big for the hoop. What a day. Tried to take it off, but ended up distracting myself with whatever I could.

Yeah, I have feelings. Is guilt a feeling? I suppose it might even suppress what I should feel naturally. All I know is that there must be far more feelings than guilt and the joy of non-guilt. I am sure most people have feelings more specific to the emotional setting of the moment, especially when they insist I must have feelings, that I seem to demonstrate so well. Am I that good a performer? Do I have that much dissimulation? If so, then I am a greater hypocrite than this which drives guilt so deeply within me. Really, it is my even greater fear that I should follow any empathetic feeling to its end, without going cold. What takes over then may only be a fake, a sham.

Friday, January 19, 2001
11:00 AM

Pouring rain most of the morning. But now a little clearing between the clouds in the south. Dark overcast with light, white patches turning blue. Rain starting to ease off. Now that I have given this more thought ... I DO have feelings. I DO feel love, compassion and empathy ... but they are so limited, so short-lived, and so quick to rush away when faced with any commitment.

Talked to my sister first thing. After reading my journal, she expressed worry and apprehension over choices in my experimental journey I had taken. Maybe a little too far past the pin. Maybe I overshot into the bushes and I’ll be stuck there forever searching for my ball. Has my early warning system become too well suppressed? is starting to fail? and have I become man too willing to wander into his dark side? Maybe I have become suicidal.

I feel like a canary, singing its most beautify melodies before death. Perhaps this would explain how I could ever devise the poetry I write. There is this need to live so close to death ... a part of my most wounded persona deep within my heart. If I write about love, then it is what I would know me to be with all the passions of a lover. If I write about adventure and danger, then it is what I know me to be as a pirate or a buccaneer. If I write about the dreadful torments from within, then it is the reality of what I feel within, what I know I must endure as a prisoner of my tortured soul. These are the many facets of a refractive heart which now misleads me with displaced light. Maybe mercy might mercifully sound ‘all-clear’ siren calling me home.

As clouds of billowed, shrouded ice
That drift through air so still,
Like airships they will draw me near
Your lonely window sill,
Where in this drop of dew so clear
That magnifies the day,
You feared for me that I would fly
Within your heart to stay,
For deep within your eyes there yearns
A love you loath to share,
Yet in your dreams that are surreal,
You hold my secret there;
Be I the one that you should trust
To give affection to,
That you should fear I’ll come too near,
And make it all untrue?
Though now I sail upon the winds,
And crave no empty thing,
To you I am enduring hope,
Of new days bearing spring,
That rise above this tender heart
Extending into yours,
To quell its cry of bitterness
From where its sorrow pours,
That there might be the dew of dawn,
For all I wish for you,
Fear not to cling to what I bring
Upon a heart so true.

Saturday, January 20, 2001
6:53 PM

Now thinking of this pivotal day in my life. Out in service this morning with my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter, all packed nicely in the van.

Suddenly occurred to me the eternal search for my feminine side has actually become a snare, an excuse to fantasize and play a losing game ... perhaps like holding a gun to my head to taunt my heart with as many possible diversions as I could manage.

The spiritual side of me was gone ... escaped as if a horse off to a gallop, and as I was the one who chose to stay behind, allowing my eyes to wander aimlessly about these vacant chambers of my heart, a barren, snowy wasteland that knows no boundary has opened to me.

I became as David, who, after gathering both sides of Israel, sought solace while retreating from a life full of all the adventure and uncertainty into which he finally secured in a kingdom united at last. Perhaps even as Nebuchadnezzar walked through the hanging gardens of Babylon uttering words of self-admiration, David too, became complacent, whiling away the time upon his rooftop balcony where his heart would follow his eyes’ once firm resolve to resist its most carnal desires.

I spent the last ten years trying to resolve why David’s love for Jehovah failed to prevent his sin. In fact, this repetitive entry into my darker side has gradually eroded my keen sense of duty ... finally derailing my spiritual side. There seems to me no halfway point when it comes to the heart. Either we love completely or not.

My once great love for Jehovah had always been so very strong, always preventing me from doing the unconscionable, although lately, this search for what seemed missing in my human side, i.e. the side that seeks the love or the lack of it, and the giving of whatever affection I think to be love, to others has somehow even supplanted my spiritual side.

Perhaps it was best to simply leave well enough alone, to simply love the good and hate the bad, even though I didn’t ... not really. Then again, maybe I have made myself sick by paying too much attention to this dark, incurable side of myself, this sinful nature which will never see light until the new order ... if now I should still make it there.

Did I need to know the heart of David so completely? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps since I see so many similarities in my focus, my desires, and my extreme passion for Jehovah that I have now made myself spiritually sick for my divergent experiment while having nothing better to do, but I stop and ponder this missing part of me.

I can see David so clearly now ... pacing about in the king’s house, on the rooftop courtyard and lookout. Maybe he had a bout of sickness and was recovering at the time. Perhaps he was composing another song with his harp. Whatever the reason, he would’ve probably stood atop his roof while his waning heart was resisting detachment from his fighting men. David was a man full of passion. His thirst for the heroic conquests to vindicate his maligned God’s precious name burned deeply in his heart.

So profound his love, thrust into every fiber of his being, his eyes saw clearly the issues and the meaning of life and death, good and evil, truth and falsehood. He loved those who loved Jehovah and hated the arrogance and hypocrisy of the duplicitous glory-seekers and politicians. He was equally hated by them. How do I know this?

Every fiber of me responds to the songs of his heart. Sometimes feel this as if I were he, in another time and era ... as I even see, smell, taste and feel his days of relentless conflict as if testing every strand of integrity. How often I thought what I would have done had I been David. How often I have thought that I would never have gone as far as he, but now I am not so sure. Maybe under the same circumstances I would.

In my heart, I even have, and I too have drawn the ire and hatred of those who do not understand that the love of Jehovah is a passion that drives me beyond boundaries others may see as a commandment of law not to be violated ... though I see as not. I know this much, Jehovah does not want mindless, bead-counting worshipers who do nothing except for show. Jehovah has a purpose, not of blind action, but it is mission we need to grasp ... every one of us ... a sense of meaning that we desperately need, to survive a world on its own desperate mission.

Jehovah loves those who risk everything for loving him. Nothing says it better than David’s passionate love, second only to the true Messiah. And knowing that the human heart is such a traitor in its present state, with a treachery no better demonstrated than in David’s true life journey into its dark side ...

I now think of how often it was that I became idle in my stress and my sickness, to stay behind while my brothers are passionately fighting the fine fight. I too, stood upon my rooftop, allowing my eyes to drop onto sensual desire, to watch the beauty of the female form and all that it speaks so well of a passion which knows no barriers and yet is still tied integrally to the human spirit.

How unfulfilled I really was in my former years and their constant focus upon my singular spiritual development, my uninterrupted quest to know the One who, by testimony of all what I see and don’t see, stands as a beacon of hope for the great and the small, but only those humble enough to see it. In this I had become a eunuch in heart. Therein at least, is where my love was complete, although in denial of that which was yet to beg completion.

And I know that Jehovah feels the same and for this I am one with the one I love above even my own soul ... to the death. Never have I ever considered myself above the life given to me. The one question on my psychoanalytic assessment I could not answer in the affirmative ... that I might take my own life, no matter how bitter it became. Never has the thought ever crossed my mind, if for only a second, to be extricated immediately with some valiant, final thrust into the fray for one last battle for victory or death.

Now I do understand that for all my journeys into this vast labyrinth of tunnels that depress me, my love for the greatest personage of the universe cannot be ignored. Jehovah is, and always will be, my greatest love and his quest will forever be mine, so that in the end, it matters so very little that I find a love this complete in anyone else. So why this preoccupation with women?

How very much I must learn, and may I learn by taking the journey of David, my closest compatriot, as I myself have become distracted, looking upon this beauty in nature, bathing in my passions a naked desire, somehow feeling a little deserved of this excursion of my soul upon the greatest of all human beauty ... that which excites the eyes of any man.

Women, so pleasing to the eye, so idyllic to the heart. Every one a beautiful statue of burning emotion to the pure abandonment of the soul. Yet in this alone I am deprived, because that which I admire and esteem is far too noble and chaste, and now quite unattainable. Not that I should pine away for all this that now surpasses me, for I have not surpassed love for the beloved one of my youth, nor could I be tainted with a passion which could only be incomplete. And as David took Bathsheba into his arms and kissed her so tenderly, even as he did in his heart when inquiring of her identity while looking upon her, knowing that she belonged to another, even then never even considering the full impact of his error upon himself, her and the entire nation.

That moment, when two souls are interwoven in that which only man and woman can know, that intoxicating moment where sheer abandon flows from the heart into an unstoppable, erotic love, it is timeless, as all becomes fused to that which surges from the human spirit, an ethereal, almost celestial experience of all that could ever be humanly complete. I know that David was not wicked in his heart, if for but a moment, he was taken captive by his own spirit in complete denial of his greatest of all conflicts, the one battle he could not win, for deep within he knew that he had violated one of life’s most sacred trusts and was now on a journey that would see no victory.

As much as he loved every fiber of Bathsheba, for every moment thereafter would he look upon her with this regret he now imposed upon her, yet knowing he dare not love her any less for what she allowed him to do, for she had little choice as one so much younger and less powerful than he. Had she lived in the present, her power would have been no greater than that of Maid Monica advanced upon by one, William of Clinton. Both may be responsible, but David knew that his responsibility, both in age and power, was far greater.

Yet I still have compassion for David, if only it be for his conflict, I can fully understand the twisted reasoning that followed Bathsheba’s announcement of pregnancy. Abortion was unthinkable. And a plot to murder her husband would never have crossed his mind. The dignity of the king’s office and the impact adultery would have on the nation’s confidence were the issues that would send a cold chill into his heart. Yet most of all, was the terrible circumstance in which Bathsheba had found herself.

Unlike the so-called parallel Bill/Monica affair, David could not simply distance himself from Bathsheba. He could have, but that too was unthinkable, even though nothing would have tied him to a conviction of guilt. Bathsheba was most at risk, for now she was pregnant without a husband present to confirm anything else but an adulterous affair since Uriah was now off in battle perhaps weeks or months before conception took place.

Timing was crucial. David did the only thing he could think of, but didn’t count on Uriah’s unswerving allegiance and loyalty, which in itself only served to remind David how disloyal he had become. So now David was left with very little choice, actually only one of two. He could confess his sin, but the repercussions were too enormous to imagine. Even if mercy were shown for him, he would jeopardize Bathsheba whom he now had come to feel great responsibility for. His desire to protect her from the backlash of a jealous husband and the law that would bring upon her punishment for a capital offense, became overwhelming. David was stuck with only the better of two evils. One crime needed to be fixed by yet another. Somehow, two wrongs had to make it right. Regret was not sufficient to shield them from the penalty.

Beneath the sweet deep forest tall,
I walk the morning air;
Warmed by a bed of rising mist that drip dawn’s early dew
Upon a path no other man has ever stopped to stare
At ancient sentries posted there,
From whence their shadows flew;
So spacious is the wandering road that winds above the hill,
But enters not beneath the wings
Of one whom I hold true,
For aberrations of the heart, divided in its will,
Cannot be reconciled to one,
Whose sword has run him through.