Love.
On the night my wife went to Heaven I was connected to God’s transformational love. Mary and I had recently accepted Jesus into our lives and lived our lives with a focus on love for each other and our sons. I feared losing her love in death. When it came time for her soul to leave this world, a cascade of love poured over me. A rainbow followed her to Heaven and I was filled with light and love. I’ve stood imperfectly on that rainbow bridge ever since.
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It was a super power. I felt like Green Lantern with a ring that could cover the world in love. I said as much at her memorial and lived like that for months, loving on everyone I knew and met.
But there was another comic book character that inhabited me when no one was looking. Frank Castle, The Punisher, had been a favorite of mine as a boy. Now I was watching the TV show and wondering why the darkness of this man who lost his wife and children to violence was speaking to me. I chalked it up to the vagaries of grief. Mary’s death hadn’t felt like heartbreak (I was far too afraid to admit that to anyone), it was a psychological break (didn’t share that either). My ego was scaffolding bolted to a wall that read HUSBAND AND FATHER. When most of that was smashed, there wasn’t enough to hold onto. My mind slowly shattered and I lost a sense of Self as I fell.
I was drinking and hating myself like Castle at night (or morning, or whenever I could). I put on Green Lantern’s ring for the world to see, to cover up a brokeness I could only partly see. For a full year I acted the Jeckyl and Hyde routine. Even after sobering up, I was addicted to the power of the ring, exploiting my imagination to fill the world around me with love.
A heartbreak shook me from the cover up game. I had been showering love on a woman and her children and that was taken away. The hollowness of it left me confused, “I’m better at loss than this.”
I don’t know why I picked up Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I had carried it around for more than 20 years, a gift from my father. Maybe it was the rainbow heart on the cover.
Rereading the dedication now gives me all the answers. Self-worth, pure love, and self-acceptance were missing from my heart. I saw God’s infinite love as something external. A force or tool to wield, perhaps a weapon at times. I hadn’t personally accepted His love for me. I hadn’t seen the folly in trying to reciprocate a love that I wouldn’t accept for myself.
Through the reading, mostly done in early mornings on my kitchen floor, I turned my gaze inward and began to love the parts of myself that I had been hiding away. I didn’t need Green Lantern’s ring or The Punisher’s toughness to thrive, I needed to accept my own special place in an infinite love that flowed through, from, and around me.
It’s all still imperfect. I’m only a guru to myself. The self work is the thing.
As Hay would say, “All is well in my world.”