{"id":6443,"date":"2014-05-17T13:04:01","date_gmt":"2014-05-17T12:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/?p=6443"},"modified":"2015-12-17T18:14:51","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T18:14:51","slug":"struggling-with-possessiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/?p=6443","title":{"rendered":"Struggling With Possessiveness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Struggling With Possessiveness<\/strong><\/p>\n

The award-winning Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God, tells an interesting story of how love\u00a0can go wrong, even when it seems like it\u2019s going right.\u00a0The story focuses on a spirited young woman who is deaf. Intelligent, sensitive, and wounded, she\u00a0resists most attempts to help her, until one day a gifted teacher, a man her own age, enters her\u00a0life. For awhile she resists both his love and his efforts to help her, but eventually trust grows in
\nher and she opens up to him. They fall in love and, for awhile, things are wonderful and he helps\u00a0open her to the world.\u00a0But then the story takes a curious turn. At a point, a huge tension begins to grow up between\u00a0them. She feels guilty about it, sensing she should be grateful, even as resentment and anger\u00a0continue to grow in her. For his part, he can\u2019t help feeling angry because he feels himself being\u00a0pushed away after all he has done for her. The tension eventually produces a storm, a big one,\u00a0lots of anger, lots of shouting, lots of recrimination, and a calm afterwards.\u00a0In that calm, she, still feeling guilty, apologizes and tells him she feels badly because he has been\u00a0such a great teacher and she owes so much to him. But the storm has taught him its lesson. He\u00a0now knows the reason for her resentment. In essence, he puts it this way: \u201cI\u2019ve been a good\u00a0teacher and have loved you, up to a point, but now I realize what I was really doing. In effect, I was\u00a0saying this to you: `Grow, but not so much that you don\u2019t need me any more. Understand yourself,\u00a0but not better than I understand you. Be free, but not of my expectations for you.\u2019 I offered you my\u00a0love and help \u2026 as long as I could dictate how you use them.\u201d\u00a0Perhaps the deepest struggle we have (psychologically, morally, and spiritually) is with\u00a0possessiveness and what that triggers in us, restlessness, jealousy, greed, and manipulation.\u00a0Something inside our very DNA makes us want to possess whatever is beautiful and to have\u00a0exclusively for ourselves whatever we love. It\u2019s no accident that there are two commandments\u00a0against jealousy. From a toddler\u2019s tantrum over his mother\u2019s inattention to the sexual jealousy so\u00a0universal in adulthood, we see that it\u2019s hard to look at what attracts us and respond only with gratitude and admiration.\u00a0For this reason, when we should be feeling wonderful, we often feel unsettled, restless, obsessed,\u00a0and jealous in the face of beauty and love. Etty Hillesum gives us an honest expression of this in\u00a0her insightful memoir, An Interrupted Life:\u00a0\u201cAnd here I have hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed\u00a0to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful
\nscenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual, I might almost write too greedy. I
\nyearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it. Hence the painful longing that\u00a0could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my\u00a0creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to\u00a0produce great works. It all suddenly changed, God alone knows by what inner process, but it is5\/9\/2014 Struggling with Possessiveness\u00a0different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my short walk round the Skating\u00a0Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees\u00a0alive with the light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew\u00a0precisely how I had felt in the past. Then all the beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart\u00a0and I would not have known what to do with the pain. Then I would have felt the need to write, to\u00a0compose verses, but the words would still have refused to come. I would have felt utterly\u00a0miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have\u00a0sapped all my energy. \u2026 but its beauty now filled me with joy. \u2026 I no longer wanted to own it. I\u00a0went home invigorated.\u201d\u00a0What do we do with our possessiveness? Good spirituality and good psychology agree that the\u00a0answer lies in a healthy maturity that can admire without seeking to own and love without seeking\u00a0to manipulate. But that\u2019s easier said than done. We don\u2019t change our deepest instincts (John of the\u00a0Cross calls them \u201cour metaphysics\u201d) simply by willing away possessiveness.\u00a0What\u2019s the answer? A life-long walk towards a very difficult maturity. Overcoming our incurable\u00a0instinct to possess is one of the final hurdles in life. When we\u2019re no longer prone to jealousy, we\u2019re\u00a0saints.\u00a0In the meantime, it can be helpful to name this. A symptom suffers less when it knows where it\u00a0belongs.<\/p>\n

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Struggling With Possessiveness The award-winning Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God, tells an interesting story of how love\u00a0can go wrong, even when it seems like it\u2019s going right.\u00a0The story focuses on a spirited young woman who is deaf. Intelligent, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fr-ron-rolheiser-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6444,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443\/revisions\/6444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}