My conservative uncle called me this week wanting to say hi and let me know he cares about me. I let it go to voice mail because I wasn’t sure how I was going to respond; I unfriended him during the pandemic after his posts where causing me so much stress that it took hours to come down from the nerve jangling caused by his sappy, anti-intellectual, religious, conspiracy-theory laced Facebook posts, and trying to come up with a reply that he’d listen to. I took on too much. I have been insufferable before, why can’t I afford others the same grace? Part of it is that I know what his definition of “care” entails. For example, he cared enough about his gay son to not attend his wedding because he wanted him to change his sexuality. I think about that wedding every time I think about my uncle.
When we’re insufferable, we don’t know that we are, we’re just acting out our egoic need to reinforce our identity back to ourselves. I didn’t always find him insufferable either- when I was a Christian, he was my favorite uncle, but especially once the pandemic hit, the veneer of his sparkly wisdom washed off and behind it, I saw that his religion was just a spiritually-adorned container for his inner critic, a justification for his bigotry and a culturally-approved vehicle for his escapist sentimentalization. He might be an Enneagram type 1w9 or 9w1, I don’t know, but I know he’s into self-flagellation.
In my mind, I keep going back to this Facebook post I saw of Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach. I respect what Tara does, but this clip (which, because it was a video short, didn’t allow for the context I know she probably provided) angered me. She was telling the camps on each side of the political divide to have compassion on each other. It took me a while to understand why that bugged me so much, and it was because I have never gotten compassion from the right that didn’t feel like an insult. Compassion from the right is either religiously/colonially-tinged pity (“you’re so bad, your poor soul is going to hell, and I love you, so you should change”) or an impersonal spiritual bypassing (“I had this beautiful vision that we’re all one, and that’s as close as I can get to you”). Not that I’m actively seeking this, but I have never felt truly loved by anyone on the right for who I am- a woman, an astrologer, an intellectual, an agnostic, and an emotion-attuned type four, (or an INFJ, or whatever I am). By their very definition, how can a Christian love those qualities without getting itchy fingers that need to change and adjust me (“control disguised as love”)? I guess my uncle would be the closest I had to love from the right, but back then, what we shared in common was our projection, and when I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore, we lost that common ground. We both projected our bigness onto an imaginary god in order to feel small – and in wonder- together. As Riso and Hudson say, it was resignation disguised as wisdom. Or in this context, maybe it was abdication of personal responsibility to fate/ god … disguised as wisdom.
What does compassion from the left feel like? To me it involves policy so people can afford their homes and get quality higher education without sacrificing their future. Does that sting to the right? If so, I don’t understand, but if someone accused me of being a snob while fighting for it, I’d understand that.
What do my conservative relatives want from me? My uncle is just another relative added to the list of people I’m ghosting, and I don’t want to be in this position because I don’t want to be lonely. My family values pleasantness over personal slights, and I’m not sticking to the script- my conservative family members want me to play the family game. So what is a “compassionate” response that doesn’t sell me out? How can I respond to his declaration of “care” by not being obnoxious about calling out his BS?
My version of control is retreat. I try to get people who hurt me to see my point of view by retreating, and I know that’s not helpful either. Not only is it manipulative, but it never gets me the intellectual contriteness that I want from others. So if I’m in a safe enough place to reject retreat as a response, which I may be, what do I say? I’m not saying there is a difference between us, but if there is one, it would be that I hated myself and wanted to change; whereas he hates himself and thinks self-criticism, projection and colonialism balance out his accounts (“grace” and “sharing the gospel”).
I know what he’d respond to that- he’d say that accepting grace isn’t easy, and I can concede that. It’s humbling to realize that we’re not perfect and then to have someone say, “I gotchu, you don’t need to pay your own way with your goodness, I already paid the bill at the counter”. I get what grace is, and I know how sparkly it sounds to Christians because grace is Christians’ beautiful and efficient tie of the bow on the gift to humanity- it’s the elegant irony that bridges the human condition with unattainable perfection. But that bridge leads away from personal integration and responsibility. It’s remaining a perpetually psychologically-undeveloped person so an imagined god can be the adult for us, outside of us. It’s foisting the sack of our unexamined shadow contents onto a vision of perfection so we can mentally separate ourselves from it. Separation as redemption- the metabolization happens in a socially-constructed vessel outside of ourselves. Christian grace is a bridge that leads away from the self for relief from our shadow, the shadow that haunts us in every relationship and hunts us in our sleep. I prefer the elegant irony of the bridge toward the self that invites the shadow in with curiosity. Buddha’s elegance was recogizing the medium in which we’re trying to create the duality of god vs the devil, observing our reactions to the duality showing up in our everyday lives, and staying with the reactions to get a hold of a thread to follow down to our initial wound at our core, to get insight and clarity and eventually integration and freedom.
Back to the question what does my uncle want from me? It probably wasn’t easy for him to call me. What about what I want? I want that depth, I want to be heard, which I know I’m not going to get because that’s the second part of the family contract- I should be pleasant, but also know that I’m not worth listening to. My conspiracy-theory relatives are lavish with affection, but have never let me be right about anything, but especially my dad never allowed me to be right. Even today, I still attract men into my life who feel an instinctual response to contradict me, or who can never let me land a point. I entertain deep friendships with some men who compete with me and contain me so they can feel a measure of control, and I work my muscles by pushing back. I tell myself that I don’t like to surround myself with yes-men so I can refine my thoughts, and part of that is true, but I’m getting tired of being contradicted or ignored just because it’s me talking. When I know I’m right, it would be cool to be acknowledged. Gah- I don’t want to play into that family script with my uncle any more than I want to change the comfortable script with these friends.
If my intellect was respected by family and friends, would I finally sit down to write my book? Or would I feel so uncomfortable not being contradicted that I seek outside discpline to fill the void of inward pressure? How do I get the intellectual respect I want out of a Christmas exchange with my uncle in a way that also acknowleges of the high side of his idealization? I could just write my book and wish him a Merry Christmas. But I’d need more words- he called to talk. What can we both be small and in awe of that is safe for both of us? The obvious answer is nature. If I sent him a picture of two people looking up at the stars saying Merry Christmas, he’d immediately slap his bow on it and say, “yes, the intelligence of the Creator.” Can I not cede even that? Do I have to control how he interprets my attempt at finding common ground again? What kind of churlish person am I? Or am I allowed to ask for some ground? As someone whose flights of fancy from reality are really lonely, I can maybe afford to meet him on his, I don’t know. And now that sounded like an insult wrapped in a Christmas wish, but I’ll just go with it and see where it leads.
