Alas! To be human! We find ourselves in a constant battle between our need for security, our longing for freedom, and the authenticity of our hearts and souls. These run surface to deep with security demanding our immediate attention, then into our longing for freedom, and eventually, if we're blessed, into our deepest, most evasive layer: our most authentic selves, what I will call our “heart-soul identities.” Beyond this already challenging set of forces, we further complicate our battle with our shadow self (our pride, surface-level desires, ignorance, and so forth), which do provide additional clues to our heart-soul identities, but these are clues and not answers. To discover our heart-soul identities beneath these pressures is no easy feat. It is what mythologist Joseph Campbell has famously called the "Hero's Journey."
Meanwhile, we’re also called to be responsible, and not only for ourselves, but also for those around us, some of whom may still plead for security. This becomes especially tricky in marriage. We marry for many reasons, usually in our youth, and before we’ve transcended into a place where we can embark on the journey into our heart-soul identities. Our deeper longings rise up later, and when they do, our need for security starts to fade, while the journey takes center stage. By divine mercy, this process often happens with synchronicity: both partners around the same time are blessed with the chance to grow together into the new people they’re discovering themselves to be.
But what if this synchronicity does not happen for both partners? What if we begin it while others still wish for us to keep them secure? Or, even trickier, what if they will be really hurt if we long for freedom? Not wishing to hurt the people we love, we are faced with a true quandary. Do we follow our authentic self and embark into the journey's murky depths? Or do we provide the security they are crying for? Do we show them that we don’t wish to hurt them by sacrificing our deeper calling?
No single answer can solve this quandary, and it is this one that Jasmine and Davie are each facing in the book I’m blogging Just like Eve. I made my job as their author easier by making both of their marriages childless. Should they choose to follow their deepest selves, leave their marriages, and potentially, though not necessarily, come together, they will not be revoking any responsibilities to any children that neither of them has. They may, however, be revoking their responsibility to their spouses, to the vow they’ve been conditioned to believe God wants them to keep, and to their own wish to avoid hurting their spouses. As their author, I had also made a promise to myself from the beginning to keep all four spouses well-intentioned. There was to be no easy out for either Jasmine or Davie.
These two also face yet another complexity: the distinction between their
surface-level desire for one another (often called “lust”) and their genuine
soul-bond at the root of their heart-soul identities. The church can see
only what it would call their lust, and it can’t see their soul-bond as part of
something much deeper. The Hero’s Journey each of them is beginning (for
Jasmine to be free to “think at odds” and for Davie to be free to follow his
own dreams) are supported by one another, but not by their spouses.
Therefore, their relationship is tied into their authenticity, but
their marriages are not, something their families and church communities are
very unlikely to understand. Both Jasmine and Davie must discover it for
themselves and search for a path toward it that still honors their spouses.
What a task I
have given to myself as an author!
And little
did I know I might walk into some of this myself. My own marriage is coming to an end,
officially in March. Naturally, my own
life story at this critical moment complicates my work of completing Jasmine’s
story. It seems fitting then, to follow
the suggestion of my writer friends, who have been asking for a spin-off into
my own story. Next month, I’ll do so for
the portion from my own life that is not recent, but goes far back, and is the
only autobiographical parallel that was planned: the
“no-contact” order.
I will be
quiet about any recent parallels, except what I will now share in this single
paragraph. After a lengthy time of soul searching and marriage counseling, my husband and I made a
mutual decision to shift from marriage to friendship in keeping with mentor
Ethan’s perspective on a “successfully completed marriage.” Of this, I can express only a piece of my own
part of the decision. Similar to the quandary
facing both Jasmine and Davie, to support and celebrate who my husband is and
how he is wired, I had to stifle an important part of who I am and how I am
wired, including the mystic within me.
Just as Jasmine
says her husband Tim is like a rock and she is more like a ball rolling further
and further away, I
am also a rolling ball. My husband is far more politically progressive
than Jasmine’s husband Tim, and mine is less like a rock than he is a branch on
a tree, able to sway in the wind, but still needing to be firmly fixed to the
tree, which for him remains tied to the evangelical tradition that we were both
married into. Now separated from him and
almost divorced, I am now finally finding myself free to identify myself as a
mystic. I no longer need to straddle, as
expressed in 2013 in The
Evangelical and the Mystic. The mystic's journey dives into waters that for a traditional evangelical, at least within the context of marriage, are too complex, too "heretical," ("other thinking") -- which, like "liberal" ("open-minded") should be a good thing? I will always
love the man I married as my soul-brother, a bond you can read about in the
same story that introduces the pastor for the
autobiographical premise to Just like Eve.
This is all I
will say about anything recent. Next
month, I’ll start sharing the story of my connection with the pastor behind the
no-contact order that I received for the same reason Jasmine received hers: a
mutual attraction with a pastor and a request for accountability. This order is the premise of the storyline
for “Just like Eve,” and it’s one I’ve imagined could have two responses from
critics. Some will shrug it off, as I
received quite a few apathetic responses: of course I had been cast out. Why should I expect different? (Uhhh, what the Bible says . . . ?) Others will cry out against the premise as “unrealistic.”
They might say no church would ever order a woman out of church for a
mutual attraction with one of its pastors, let alone if both she and the
pastor, individually and privately, took the very steps the church teaches its
adherents to take: to request support and prayer from the church leaders.
They’ll claim it couldn’t happen. I beg to differ. It
happened to me. I’ve heard I’m not the only one. In my case, it
wasn’t the pastor’s church, which dearly loved me, who gave the order, but the
leader of the church team of my ministry. And I didn’t even get a
kiss out of the deal. (Dang!)
In fact, any
of the instances in “Just like Eve” of church patriarchy that are most likely
to make readers cringe (the
no-contact order, the
prayer, and Dr.
Dobson’s reply to Jasmine's inquiry) are all
autobiographical and nearly verbatim to the messages I received from their counterparts
(including the actual Dr. James Dobson).
My own leaders meant no harm, but their fear prevented them from a
response in keeping with biblical principles and within the spirit of humanity.
You’ve already met the pastor from my own parallel story, and if not, you can do so now, while also discovering my soul-brother bond with the man I married and why I married a soul-brother rather than a soul-mate, and ready yourself for my own parallel story to the premise, coming here in March . . .
© by karina. All rights reserved. Please use with permission and/or a link to this blog post.
Update, a few days later: I began drafting the story a few weeks ago, but to really tell it, I need to relive the memories. I'm reading through my old journals . . . breathing through my old journals. I may or may not have a piece of this story ready by March. We'll see. As all of us have been learning through this pandemic, we can't expect or plan for anything, can we?
Autobiographical links:
The pastor for the autobiographical parallel and soul-brother husband
The Evangelical and the Mystic
Just like Eve links:
Jasmine like a ball rolling away from Tim the rock (& her inquiry to Dr. Dobson)
Ethan on successfully completed marriages
The elder’s “prayer” over Jasmine
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