Why I Ran Away

In my last post I related how I ran away from what I believed the Lord was calling me to do and ended up in a spiritual desert (my own ‘dark night of the soul’) for about twenty years. The question I have had to face has been: “Why did I do this?” At the time I was very committed to the Lord and experienced an intimate relationship with him; so what made me run away?

In a previous post I looked at the fact that Jonah was a prophet who had an intimate relationship with the Lord, and was able to dialogue with him. He ran away from what God was calling him to do because he had been formed by his society to take on attitudes of suspicion, hatred and fear with regard to the Assyrians he was being sent to. His mission was to bring them to repentance and thereby save them from being destroyed. Jonah wanted them to be destroyed, not spared.

It has become clear that my own reasons for running away are both similar, but also different from those that Jonah had. Like Jonah I had taken on negative, destructive attitudes that stood in the way of following through with what I believed the Lord was calling me to do. In my case however, these poisonous attitudes were not directed at those I was being called to reach out to. They were directed at myself. Be that as it may, they had the same effect of preventing me from fulfilling what the Lord wanted to happen. In the Jonah story his trip to Tarshish took a lot less time than my sojourn in the spiritual desert I found myself in. His time in the belly of the fish was also only three days, as opposed to the five year ‘Jonah experience’ I went through. It did in the end have a similar effect on me as it had on Jonah; it moved me from resistance to compliance.

Jonah had taken on his destructive attitudes firstly during childhood from his father Amittai, who mediated the truth of the Hebrew society they were embedded in; and then later from the society itself as he moved out into it as a man. In like manner I had taken on my toxic attitudes firstly from my father; and then from my wider social group; and society at large. To recap from previous posts, we take on our attitudes unconsciously, without realising that we have them. We are therefore most often blind to recognise them within us. Something external usually has to impact on us to bring us to awareness of them. Even though we are unaware of them they still affect us very powerfully and predispose the way we think, feel and act.

I was therefore initially blind to see my distorted attitudes, which gave me a distorted perception of reality. What first opened my eyes to begin to recognise them was the experience I had on an eight day silent Ignatian retreat that I made whilst I was working as a field worker in CLC (see my previous blog post).  During this retreat I found myself in a figurative cave in darkness for the first five days.  My ability to pray and commune with God was stifled; in a way I had not known for many years. I felt that I was in a place of inner darkness; trapped inside this cave. As I prayed into what this was about I was given to understand that this cave was a tomb, but also a womb. It was a place of both death and new life. Something within me had to die in order for me to realise new life. The more I prayed into the nature of this cave the clearer it became that this was a cave of self rejection, self pity and fear. These three powerful attitudes had me in their grip. I was trapped and imprisoned by them. On the retreat during a time of prayer on the sixth day I then experienced release; and was enabled to leave the cave and walk out into the light; significantly freer.

One of my spiritual mentors had taught me that a retreat experience is like a chapter heading for the next phase of our life. What happens on the retreat has to be integrated into the lived reality of our day to day life; or else it has no relevance. Little did I know at the time that the five days of darkness inside the cave on the retreat would translate into twenty years of dark, desert experience in my everyday life. Neither would I have imagined that the breakthrough I was looking for would come in the form of a heart attack. Our God is truly a God of mystery and surprises.

After the retreat I had a very strong awareness that I was trapped in attitudes of self rejection, self pity and fear. I had stuttered from an early age and the response I received from my social group was rejection, derision, mockery and exclusion. The way I saw myself mirrored the way my social group treated me. I felt that I was worthless and useless; so I adopted an attitude of self rejection. I had a very deep sense of shame. Following on from this I had taken on an attitude of self pity. I had a victim mentality and felt that society had wronged me and therefore owed me (an attitude of entitlement). Because of my history of rejection and victimisation I lived with the fear that this was always going to happen in the future and so became trapped in fear. I withdrew deep within myself, and it became a type of prison (dark dungeon).

 Having my eyes opened to see this reality was one thing. Letting go of these toxic attitudes was another. I was well and truly bound and imprisoned by them. They effectively prevented me from freely carrying out the role of doing field work. They also precluded me from being able to see my God –given giftedness and True Self that my True Father had created me to be.  Jonah needed to be swallowed by a fish in order to move towards embracing a new reality. I ended up in the belly of a hospital ICU, waiting for my broken heart to be revived. This was the start of a process that would entail not only physical, but also mental, emotional and spiritual healing.

Having said this I need to point out that I had been a committed Christian since the age of nineteen. I had come a long way from the extreme brokenness of my youth. The Lord had already worked great transformation in my life. There had been significant movement within me towards inner healing and wholeness; but the attitudes I was imprisoned by went very deep indeed. They needed drastic action to bring about deep transformation. The Holy Spirit had to act as a surgeon and use a sharp scalpel to cut away the putrid, cancerous wound within my soul.

Questions for reflection:

·         Are you deeply wounded?

·         Can you recognize destructive attitudes within yourself?

·         Are you open to change and transformation?