I've been thinking about fantasies of personal transformation.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
As New Year's Eve approached, I thought about resolutions I’ve made and failed at in the past.
As with so many things, when it comes to transformation, we want it NOW, we don’t want to work and wait and realize we will never quite get there. My recurring desire for such a quick conversion moment always reminds me of what Woody Allen quipped in Annie Hall: “I'm gonna give [my analyst] one more year, and then I'm going to Lourdes,” abandoning the hard work for the promised but never delivered miracle.
Lourdes Grotto
It’s hard to let go of a fantasy, however futile, that promises to transport us to whatever promised land we’re longing for. It’s hard to acknowledge that the only way to get there is to get up each day, put our left foot in front of our right foot, and continue the unfinished journey that will last our lifetime.
As I worked my way once again through this perpetual conundrum, I thought about how my Heroes of Psychotherapy dealt with their own journeys. I know enough about Freud and Jung and B.F. Skinner and Carl Rogers and their successors to know that their genius did not translate into the psychological promise of becoming a new person. Each of them was at least as neurotic as the rest of us, some of them more so. Most of them acknowledged that the work of transformation was, to quote Freud, interminable.
When the lure of psychotherapy led me to believe, over forty years ago, that I could become a new person, I called a therapist for the first time. I was stunned when, after half a dozen sessions, he described me as doing quite well -- for someone with an anxiety disorder. What? Me? With an actual mental health problem that had a name? I realized this new person I wanted to become would require some work. So I set out to cure myself of this defect. I wondered, How long will it take to get past this debilitating anxiety? Several months? Maybe a year?
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
I’m eighty years old, and after decades with several therapists, I manage my emotions well; I can, as the jargon wishes, self-regulate. But anxiety still lurks: I worry about a recurrence of prostate cancer or any of its metastatic variants, about my depleted energy and my more frequent memory lapses. And I worry every day about our grandkids: their safety, of course, (the eldest just got his driver’s license!), but also their ability to thrive in the world our generation leaves them. Albeit in a gentler manner, I still travel hand in hand with my indelible anxiety disorder.
And what about spiritual transformation, somehow becoming the person I thought God created me to be? Well, given my life-long struggle to be that person, perhaps I would have been better off going to Lourdes! I should have learned from the Heroes of my Faith that transformation is a long hard slog. Both Moses and David were murderers and life-long complainers; Jesus wrestled not only with the Devil in the desert (Get thee behind me, Satan!), but with God on the cross (Why have you forsaken me?); and it took another murderer, Saul of Tarsus, fourteen years after he got knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus to figure out what happened to him, and to finally became Paul the Apostle.
Caravaggio, The Conversion on the Way to Damascus
Like each of them early in life, I actually did have my conversion moment. When I was ten years old, I’d been attending my fourth-grade Sunday School class for a few months when my teacher, Mr. McNary, invited me and one other ten-year-old to join him and a group of adults at a Billy Graham Crusade meeting at the Hollywood Bowl in the fall of 1951. When the altar call came at the end of the evening, my friend Chris started walking down the cement steps to the stage where Graham had been preaching and where a choir was now singing, over and over,
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me
And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!
as streams of people flowed down every aisle toward their conversion moments.
I followed Chris, and was soon sitting with a counsellor named Ron, who talked with me about my sins and Jesus’ death that freed me from bondage to them, then asked me to pray and invite Jesus to be my Lord and Savior, none of which I understood. According to Dr. Graham, by making this prayerful request as a ten-year-old, my life was transformed: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he quoted, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (I Corinthians 5:17)
Certainly, that evening was the beginning of a new way of understanding myself. From that evening forward, I identified myself as a Christian devoted to Jesus of Nazareth. But I was hardly a new creation; the old had not gone, the new has still not come. I continue to be a work in progress. Six months past my 80th birthday, this new person is still working his way through the birth canal.
True, my faith is deeper, wiser, more open-hearted and open-minded than it’s ever been. I wake up every morning believing that I am a beloved child of a Creator I’m not certain exists. Jesus of Nazareth is my model for intellectual honesty, arms-wide compassion, and a courage that continues to astound me. My spiritual purposes in life are to be as authentically Rick Thyne as I can be, and to contribute as much as I can to turning the human race into the human family. But each of these is, of course, unfinished business and nothing like a new reality.
So I’m making resolutions this year that have nothing to do with hope for some miracle, but which correspond to what the mounting decades have taught me.
For 2022, I resolve:
To spend regular time with people I love and who love me, so we can nurture one another, body and soul.
To spend less time with people who suck life out of me, so I can maintain my well-being against the ebbing tide of vitality.
To be even more honest with my clients so I can model for them what it means to be an authentic person.
To write with as much integrity as I can muster, even when I’m afraid that what I say may give offense. (It’s curious: I don’t mind being corrected when I’m wrong, but I don’t like it when what I write or say might hurt someone, even if it’s true.)
To remember that this unfinished journey continues for a lifetime.
I wish you a New Year in which your journey takes you to a more authentic and gratifying place, both spiritually and emotionally.