We Can Be More than a "Class 5 Full Roaming Vapor"

Being in Yellowknife for a month has been enlightening. (And after writing that I can’t resist telling you I’m writing this blog on the longest night of the year where sunrise today is 10:07am and sunset is 3:04pm).

Yes, it’s been mind-numbing cold at times (-50 Celsius with windchill) and hard to get around by foot. But it’s also true that thirty thousand international tourists will pass through here in the next months to see the Aurora Borealis against the northern night sky.

As strange as this place may sound, I meet people well-settled here, some raising children and grandchildren, building careers, planning retirement, and celebrating their life. Most came from somewhere else “for a few years” and ended up staying-for decades. They feel at home here.

But I have been on countdown, thinly veiled as a Christmas countdown of “how many more sleeps.” This is new for me. Today (Saturday)  I measured out four more breakfasts and four more sleeps. I will fly home Christmas morning. Usually I come and go without any clock ticking away to when I can get back home. What’s going on, and why?

My work has been good and a true pleasure to offer it to the fine congregation working hard to keep things going in their clergy vacancy. I’m connecting well with folks who just need a few pastoral moments to be seen and heard and loved before they launch off to work through their next challenges. And I’m really thrilled deep into my bones to preach these familiar seasonal texts with unbridled enthusiasm, brand new angles, and a depth that resonates with the journey you and I have been on to save our lives.

I have not minded the idea of being away from Calgary. I knew I would miss my dear Marc, my old doggie, Katie, and my grown sons. But I did not hesitate to leave. I have felt untethered for so long now that nothing ever seems to compel me to not fly away to the north, south, east, or west. Being away, however, has revealed more than I expected this time.  And being here with love, respect, and awe in Canada’s “true north strong and free,” has left an imprint. I want to explore that a little with you today. It may be something that matters.

Let’s talk first about being untethered, which makes me think of this line from Ghostbusters:

“Sir, what you had there was what we refer to as a focused non-terminal repeating phantasm,

or a Class 5 Full Roaming Vapor.”

Is it quite that extreme?  Maybe not. But for those of us whose frame for reality blew up and took everything that meant anything with it, then realized they had been abandoned by their life partner long ago and were now shunned by the treatment industry, family, friends and colleagues, it’s certainly not that far off. Am I just a Class 5 full roaming vapor? Or, am I real? How about you?

Not being real isn’t just a feeling. It’s being left out. It’s having correspondence ignored. It’s being overlooked to provide leadership in the areas where you are trained and qualified. It’s being disappeared from the loop. It’s being discounted without ever being invited into the discussion. And it’s being gossiped about as if you don’t have a story to tell, or that story couldn’t be true, isn’t relevant, and never mattered anyway. It’s about people tiptoeing around you so your pain doesn’t infect them. It’s about being rationalized into the wilderness with words like “bitter, angry, and unforgiving.”

After living like that, being untethered becomes not just the trauma, but the survival strategy. The “Class 5 Full Roaming Vapor” may never do more than an occasional haunt of the husband or boyfriend, the treatment industry, family, friends and colleagues, but we learn to walk around that way, as if we are really dead. We never have a Christmas moment, becoming incarnate to anybody.

But there’s been something about being here and the extreme wrapping myself up I do before I go out, steadily walking on in an aching cold so I don’t fall down and die in a snowbank; remoteness of northern location, sketchy internet, and the daily dark that has revealed all my connections, including my own connection to my body. And as it turns out, I’m tethered once again.

Those of us who identify with some of what I’m describing can get used to haunting life, instead of really being in it. We get tired of knocking at the door and being turned away or, in the case of the treatment industry, called names (some words literally made up) or considered a subset of one of the two main players in the recovery work—the compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man being number one, and “the marriage” being number two.

Reality check for some of you, perhaps. But from where I sit, the industry has little interest in us being real people, and happily slides into treating the marriage instead of us. Women don’t get to be real unless they are in a marriage. And then they get absorbed by it, except when there’s risk, sacrifice, harm, and a lot of work—then suddenly the marriage is actually “you!” And “you” have a lot of work to do while he reflects on whether he will tell you the truth and how he will downshift its cruelty and sometimes, criminality, so that your upset will appear to be an overreaction. Other than that, you are vapor in the whole story. Good grief—why else would people pretending to treat your trauma avoid addressing the 12 systems of your body and  how trauma affects them and manifests through them with devastating and even life-threatening consequences?

The thing is, in this life we are not meant to be hauntings. Perhaps that comes after death, but in life we are meant to be part of the created order, grounded in our being, and in relationship with others and all creation. At least that’s what I believe and celebrate in the season of Christmas that begins December 25th. Our flesh and blood presence is the means of connection. We are tethered by incarnation—by being real in creation’s materiality.

So, it is time for me to stop haunting my own life. I need to be in it. Fully. The deep freeze made me painfully away of my body frailties and wonders both. It made me long to be in my big chair at home and reach down and pat my old puppy and hear her moan her response of happy company. It made me smile to think of my 7.5 year relationship with my dear Marc whose love helped heal me, and affirmed I can love and be loved with joy, pleasure, intimacy, loyalty and honesty. I finally understand that while the economy may be about making do, love isn’t about that at all. It’s a banquet every day, not the scraps someone deigns to throw your way. I miss being with Marc. And I miss my sons who treat me now with love and respect. The 19 year old cat died this week. We sobbed long distance. And two of us comforted and praised the third one who had to care for the cat and finally make the decision that it was time for old Jasper to be out of pain. I expect old Jasper to haunt us though! What this all means is not that I have a perfect life now. It means that I actually want to be in it all the time.

I suspect my untethering began before the final threads of my marriage were cut with discovery ten years ago and the start of treatment industry “recovery.” Let’s remember that misogyny had its way with me for 53 years before that. “Showing up” in my life wasn’t always a safe default setting. And the steady chiseling away of my simplest expectations for the human intimacy of shared joy and pleasure with my ex-husband all set me adrift, tethered only by my vows at baptism, marriage, friendship and ordination and the vows made to me in each of those covenants. And then, when his marriage vows were revealed to be fake vows, I was shaken down to the bare minimum—only my vows hung in the air on a line made of his lies. From then on I no longer counted on any vows made to me by anybody. There was no satisfaction in being proven wise about that.

But it turns out that my vows are enough. My vows and your vows in whatever context you make them (not necessarily religious context) will keep us tethered even when it feels like we aren’t. What remains for us to do is find the accompanying connections that will hold us incarnate—grounded in our lives. But what do I mean by that?

It’s like asking what are the senses—smell, touch, sight, hearing, tasting that will strengthen your tethering or help you to see it is there at all? In trauma care the senses are important. We know that being in a natural setting even of the simplest and common treasures of creation helps people to re-ground and harness inner calm. We know that pets and animals achieve the same goals for many people. We are comforted by bumping into their sleeping bodies on the bed in the night and running our hands over their softness during the day. Listening to beautiful music and the sounds of nature also connect us and hold us in our bodies safely. Anyone who has ever lived in a city knows how wonderful it is to walk its streets after a snowfall when it sounds like the city has a newly installed muffler! The taste of comfort food or a fresh cup of coffee or herbal tea helps to put us back in our body and be present in the world after all the things that invite us to choose our version of a spacewalk here on earth. And the smell after a spring rain is something very consoling and inspiring in its earthiness. The senses will strengthen the tethering using the truth of our incarnate nature.

So, here in Yellowknife, it was the freezing air wrapping up my whole body (after I’d insulated myself from it as best I could), that helped me to see that I could not live any longer loosely tethered to my own life. I could not live anymore insulated from too much invested and too much to lose. I missed the spot on Marc’s shoulder that belongs only to me, I missed my dog telling me when it’s time to get in bed to cuddle and have some girl talk, I missed our grown up boys’ gathered giggles as they make each other laugh with jokes Marc and I don’t even understand, I missed my fireplace crackling bright flames to warm my soul, I missed my old Hyundai taking me down the side road past the deer by the pond, I missed my spaghetti sauce sitting hot on gluten-free pasta, I missed my daily prattle about this and that to anyone who wanted to listen, I missed the fabric downstairs cut and ready to become a quilt, I missed my sons’ tree decorations made when they were young, I missed my bed and my pillows and the picture I see when I open my eyes in the morning, I missed the giant pileated woodpecker at the feeder and the chickadee in the bushes waiting for a turn, I missed thinking about my little stone hermitage back in Ontario and the trees frozen there in a confident waiting, and I missed singing my favorite Carol that ends with the line “And the whole world give back the song that now the angels sing.”

It is the season to celebrate incarnation. Not without pain, risk, and trouble. Not without joy, peace, and love. In the Mystery of this sacred time, may it also become your own celebration of incarnation, born of your vows kept true and good that kept you alive; vows grown and deepened to explore the immeasurable worth of your incarnate life lived abundantly on this earth—with pain, joy, risk, peace, trouble, and love.

This is my hope for all of us. We move from tethering to groundedness, from haunting our own lives to being fully present in our own flesh and blood, to see, taste, touch, smell and hear all the connections that celebrate our incarnation. And from this will emerge even more greatness, in good time.

So, now you may more fully perceive why the treatment industry and those who pretend they are “different” from it, rattle around making lots of noise and lots of money in a hollow vessel of misogyny, terrified you will get well.

I’m not terrified. I’m sure of it.

With you in the blessing of your season’s stories and grounding truths.

Diane.