“We are songs to be sung… we are all mountains still asleep” - Damien Jurado, Mountains Still Asleep (Maraqopa)
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about control lately.
Mostly about my own need for it and, increasingly, how the pursuit of it undermines not only my own emotional health but also the health of my relationships.
Gaining some level of control is ultimately a pyrrhic victory - an assuagement of deeper, unprocessed emotional drivers but a loss of the relational intimacy, health, and healing for which I truly long.
I recently finished Clive Staples Lewis’ richly rewarding ‘Till We Have Faces’ and it felt a bit like his retold Greek myth was actually a journey into my own wounded spirit.
A brief primer: Lewis’ novel reworks the classical myth of Cupid and the beautiful Psyche by focusing on the journey of Orual, Psyche’s explicitly ugly, older sister. Orual believes she loves her sister Psyche fiercely and purely - she essentially raises Psyche with the help of other servants in the King’s (Orual & Psyche’s father) household. A series of events relating to Psyche’s beauty leads to the younger sister being offered as a sacrifice on a faraway hill to an unknown god. Orual’s desperate, controlling “love” interrupts this process and it leads to Psyche’s banishment and a long, embittering journey for Orual.
I’ve felt an intimate connection with Orual’s concerted attempts to control others while projecting her own woundedness and calling it “love”. And I’ve identified with the resulting embittering journey.
In the story Orual wears a veil to hide her ugliness but she finds that it serves as a way to further control people because they can’t read her intentions and can only imagine what is going on behind it. The veil functions both as a metaphor and also, practically, as a way for Orual to protect herself, avoid vulnerability, and continue to act out of her own woundedness. In the end, she comes to finally see herself as a force that saps the life and goodwill around her in service to her own woundedness and she recognizes that she can’t truly be herself and love healthily and heal her inner brokenness until she has a face - nor can the rest of us ‘till we have faces’. Until we can crawl out, full of pain, from our hiding places and vulnerably present our true self.
We all hide, don’t we? And whatever we hide behind serves to protect us from the vulnerability that will actually heal the things we want to hide - our wounded parts and the parts of ourselves about which we experience deep wells of shame.
Hiding looks like a lot of different things but for me it looks like control. If I can manage situations and people and ensure desirable outcomes then I can achieve some level of happiness and ease the deep psychic pain of my own wounding and shame. And if I do this enough then I forget that there’s any pain underneath and I simply become this controlling force - I cede my identity to the need for control because my actual identity is too painful to engage and process. Just like Orual.
Oh, but how I want a face; my true face! A face that can be known and loved and deeply healed.
Mostly about my own need for it and, increasingly, how the pursuit of it undermines not only my own emotional health but also the health of my relationships.
Gaining some level of control is ultimately a pyrrhic victory - an assuagement of deeper, unprocessed emotional drivers but a loss of the relational intimacy, health, and healing for which I truly long.
I recently finished Clive Staples Lewis’ richly rewarding ‘Till We Have Faces’ and it felt a bit like his retold Greek myth was actually a journey into my own wounded spirit.
A brief primer: Lewis’ novel reworks the classical myth of Cupid and the beautiful Psyche by focusing on the journey of Orual, Psyche’s explicitly ugly, older sister. Orual believes she loves her sister Psyche fiercely and purely - she essentially raises Psyche with the help of other servants in the King’s (Orual & Psyche’s father) household. A series of events relating to Psyche’s beauty leads to the younger sister being offered as a sacrifice on a faraway hill to an unknown god. Orual’s desperate, controlling “love” interrupts this process and it leads to Psyche’s banishment and a long, embittering journey for Orual.
I’ve felt an intimate connection with Orual’s concerted attempts to control others while projecting her own woundedness and calling it “love”. And I’ve identified with the resulting embittering journey.
In the story Orual wears a veil to hide her ugliness but she finds that it serves as a way to further control people because they can’t read her intentions and can only imagine what is going on behind it. The veil functions both as a metaphor and also, practically, as a way for Orual to protect herself, avoid vulnerability, and continue to act out of her own woundedness. In the end, she comes to finally see herself as a force that saps the life and goodwill around her in service to her own woundedness and she recognizes that she can’t truly be herself and love healthily and heal her inner brokenness until she has a face - nor can the rest of us ‘till we have faces’. Until we can crawl out, full of pain, from our hiding places and vulnerably present our true self.
We all hide, don’t we? And whatever we hide behind serves to protect us from the vulnerability that will actually heal the things we want to hide - our wounded parts and the parts of ourselves about which we experience deep wells of shame.
Hiding looks like a lot of different things but for me it looks like control. If I can manage situations and people and ensure desirable outcomes then I can achieve some level of happiness and ease the deep psychic pain of my own wounding and shame. And if I do this enough then I forget that there’s any pain underneath and I simply become this controlling force - I cede my identity to the need for control because my actual identity is too painful to engage and process. Just like Orual.
Oh, but how I want a face; my true face! A face that can be known and loved and deeply healed.