Live Wire

 

God is like a live wire.

Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters

In the case of other people, we try to control them and hold them within limits that enable us to feel secure.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love

How is God like a live wire?  Electrifying, startling, disturbing?  There are people we come across family, friends, co-workers who are like live wires.  Until you realize their potential, it’s hard not to get scorched. I have an aunt that is a live wire.  She is only 13 years older than me and in an extended family we lived together when I was young. I remember how as a teenager she bit her nails until they bled and wouldn’t stop smoking even though I would steal her cigarettes and stub them out. I was a bridesmaid at her wedding and was so happy when my cousin was born to have a little brother-like baby to care for and play with. While she has suffered health difficulties her whole life including losing all of the hair on her body before she was forty, a tendency towards hypochondria made it difficult to know what was serious.  Her marriage though long has not always been so happy. 

From a young age I felt sorry for her because her life seemed so much smaller than it might have been and ashamed for all that I had that she did not in terms of opportunities to grow and live more freely in the world.  Our lives were different not because of anything but the luck of who we were born to.  Her parents, my grandparents, from a different generation and the old country.  My parents young and kind of hip and my father especially who extraordinarily wanted more for me than marriage and babies. The closeness I felt towards her as a child faded when I got older. We grew more distant especially after my father died. Even though I knew how she eventually distanced herself from just about every friend she ever had and most of her family, I believed that her love and commitment to me would be unyielding.  She had told me as much over the years.

So last year when I for the first time became the target of her neuroses, it scorched me like a live wire.  It was time to move my mother into assisted living a process that was one of the most difficult of my life to navigate.  There were enormous financial and emotional obstacles including my mother’s increasing confusion. Instead of helping, being someone I could count on, my aunt made just about everything more difficult for me and my mother putting my mother’s health, housing, finances in jeopardy along the way.  At one point, she kidnapped my mother bringing her to live 50 miles away from her home and friends, not allowing me or any of my mother’s friends to speak to her or visit without my aunt being present.  She hired a lawyer in an attempt to wrench control of my mother’s finances and power of attorney away from me.  She took my mother to visit facilities that she could not afford trying to coax her into moving in.  She told my mother’s friends and other family members that I was an awful and selfish daughter.  It was a betrayal of epic proportions that still amazes me.  My aunt was a live wire not just incapable of helping me when I needed it, as I had believed family should, but forcibly making everything more difficult and precarious. 

How could God be anything like this strike of a live wire?

In ways that are difficult to express and understand, when my aunt cut into my heart with her betrayal, a deeper channel opened up between me and my mother.  I felt a stronger connection to my mother and a commitment to take the next step to fight for her safety and security into the unknown and the chaos unleashed by my aunt.  Perhaps God came through to me through that waking up sting of the live wire as nothing else could? Wrenched from any guard rails and safety, I had to let go of everything I had been depending on finding a deeper courage and faith to help me through. What I discovered underneath the chaos that my aunt had unleashed, in the darkness, was a conduit of love connecting me to my mother through God like and umbilical cord, beyond words, at the feeling level, my bridge to her, my compass.

God sometimes wakes us up like this, like a live wire cutting through our density and fear, through the woundedness of others, so that we might find what connects us to each other and to the divine at the deeper level of things.