Building Spiritual Relationships
Rev. Amy Russell
February 18, 2007

When we find someone we love enough to imagine a life together, we dream that this idyllic love we’ve found will transform us and our loved one into the heroes and heroines of our own story.  We are given pictures of relationships in which there is a give and take, an equal communication in which we become “helpmeets” of one another for life.
              
Many of us found that storybook picture didn’t measure up to real life. 

Nancy Mairs, author of Ordinary Time, Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal had such assumptions when she married her very bright, but somewhat reticent, Naval officer boyfriend.  At the time they shared a belief in that optimistic picture of happiness and an inherited faith in God and their own ability to figure out a life that could be more or less happy.

After nine years of marriage, many years of her own black debilitating depressions, times when her husband just stopped talking, and several affairs, the roof came crashing down on the marriage.

She says that her marriage from the beginning was based on “social propriety, sexual and intellectual compatibility, personal growth, responsibility for our children”.  These values were sound enough, she says, but they were not enough to withstand the inevitable decline of the marriage when each partner was engaged in figuring out who they were in the world and how they wanted to exist there as spiritual beings.  The marriage they found themselves in didn’t give them room for this kind of spiritual growth.  They had to fashion a different kind of relationship.

Nancy and her husband George, had a re-commitment ceremony twenty-five years later based on their spiritual commitment to each other’s growth in life with the marriage providing a framework for that growth, not the marriage being the commitment to stop each other’s growth.  In this new relationship, she says, “George and I nourish and sustain each other.  Instead of eating each other up, we find we have enough, more than we’d ever dreamed, a surplus, a superabandancae, plenty to squander in every direction and more where that came from…”

Mairs tells us that a spiritual framework to a relationship means that each partner is committed to their own growth as well as the growth of their partner.  What does this mean?

Gary Zukav, author of Seat of the Soul, calls a “spiritual partnership” a relationship with another person where each partner brings a special spiritual energy into the relationship.  With shared values, a feeling of equality and a partnering on goals, each partner makes a  commitment toward each other’s mutual spiritual growth.  Zukov says that we find ourselves in any relationship for a reason- for our own growth.

Zukav believes that life is a journey of one’s soul’s evolutionary growth.  He describes a soul as a “positive, purposeful force at the core of your being.  It is that part of you that understands the impersonal nature of the energy dynamics in which you are involved, that loves without restriction and accepts without judgment.”  In our own evolutionary growth, we learn to make choices for our life that will transform us into people of accepting, loving and joyful humans. 

In Zukav’s very Buddhist description of the life we life on this planet, he says that every thought, action, and emotion we carry become causes for which there will be felt effects.  This is a Buddhist’s description of karma.  That every condition we see in our lives is the result of the causes we’ve made in this life or in past lives.  Even every thought we have creates an effect that we will feel, even if sub-consciously.  People who are not enjoying their lives, have created causes that have unconsciously created their unhappiness.

Zukav’s description of karma includes an understanding that the relationships that we find ourselves in are our responsibility- not anyone else’s.  And if we are truly on a spiritual journey, our relationships will reflect the kind of journey we are on.  If our relationships are open and supportive to our own growth, then our spiritual journey will proceed.  But if they are closed and create anger and fear in us, then we must look to ourselves and the causes we have made to create the kind of environment in which we really can’t grow spiritually.

The basis of any strong supportive relationship is trust.  Trusting others is not something that comes naturally to everyone.  Some people whose family environment was cold and unsupportive or abusive have a great deal of difficulty in trusting others.  Trust can be learned later in life if people find other relationships that demonstrate to them that people can be trusted. 

But trusting others usually starts with trusting oneself.  Sue Patton Thoele says that “Becoming a trustworthy friend to ourselves helps us choose relationships that are right for us and weather the times when even right relationships feel wrong.  Being able to trust ourselves completely makes us better friends, lovers, parents, and acquaintances.” (from The Courage to Trust, by Cynthia Wall)  Even later in life, we can learn to trust ourselves and begin to trust others.

Have you ever taken a trust walk with someone?  Where they blind you and have someone else lead you around?  Did you examine what was going on inside of you when this was happening?  Certainly you had to trust the other person to let them lead you around.  But also you had to have some trust for your own reflexes and your own ability to negotiate rough terrain without your eyes helping you.  A lot of that exercise has to do with trusting your own instincts.

If you can feel good about yourself, not belittle yourself, feel that you yourself are trustworthy, then trusting others comes more naturally. 

I had a friend once who had grown up in an abusive home.  She had been adopted by a family and the father had abused her sexually.  She grew up feeling badly about herself and fearful of others.  At age 18, she married an older man in order to get out of that house with her abusive father.  While the marriage seemed fine on the outside, she would confide in me that she was not happy in her marriage and she did not trust her husband.  She ended up in an affair with another older man. 

Many years later when I ran into her, she was in a second marriage with a man close to her own age and she looked happy and relaxed.  While I only had a few minutes with her, she told me briefly that she had gone into therapy and realized how much she didn’t trust or like herself.  She spent many years learning to think of herself in a positive light and then began to trust others slowly.

In an intimate relationship, love is not always enough to create an environment where both partners can grow.  Each partner must be able to trust in order to be able to give and to receive from each other.  In an open fully giving relationship, each partner can be free to express themselves and grow to become who they want to be.  In a relationship where you feel that you are totally accepted for who you are, you have room to allow that self to grow.

In a spiritual partnership, each person is growing spiritually.  What one person learns, the partner can also learn.  Both partners both grow through watching the other learn. 

Zukav has a world view that sees the world as a place where souls come to grow and learn.  He sees the world as being made of one type of dense energy and our souls being a kind of energy that vibrates at a different frequency.  He sees each self made up of a personality which is the basis for how we operate in our bodies in life and our souls which are our true selves- our hopes, our strengths, our highest selves.  We live mostly in our personalities which are often centered on fear.  When we are aware of our souls, we can understand that we are made of love, and that we can trust the universe.

Operating from our personalities, we often operate from fear and insecurity.  Zukav says our personalities drive us to manipulate others so we can receive power over others.  When we operate from our soul space, we don’t need power over others, because we operate from authentic power- our desire to be loving and accepting of all others.

Zukav’s theory is an attractive one.  We’d all like to be living in a place of joyful loving all around us. But it isn’t easy to operate from one’s soul all the time, because life is a scary place sometimes and people are not all that easy to understand. 

In the novel Independence Day, by Richard Ford, the main character, Frank, lives his life out of the grief over losing his son at an early age and the subsequent divorce with his wife.  He lives in grief and in fear over losing everything else he has.  He becomes so paralyzed that he basically gives up everything of joy and lives in a space of in between.  He gives up his writing.  He was a novelist and then a sportswriter. He moves away from his two remaining kids, and he gives up on relationships even when they offer him hope. 

He lives out of the loss he feels.  He doesn’t mope around and feel sad all day.  He lives day to day, moment to moment, having some small satisfactions in his meals, his superficial relationships, his viewing other’s lives.  But he stops living his own life.  Every relationship he attempts demands too much of him.  His relationship with his son just demands his attention and his being present.  But even that becomes difficult when his son gets hurt and he can’t prevent it.  His relationship with his former wife is sometimes comforting to him when they share memories of his son. But his wife wants to see him take his grief and move forward, having it enrich and broaden his experience- to write about it, for instance.  But instead, he wants to hold on to his grief.  It becomes a boulder in his life that he holds onto for dear life.  It keeps him where he is, not growing, not moving on.  Staying absolutely stationery and stuck. 

Sometimes we all get stuck in life.  We get stuck in boring jobs and can’t seem to loosen the stays that prevent us from flying free and finding a way toward our dream job.  We get stuck in our families who seem to hold us down in mundane chores- the laundry, the endless chaperoning children around, the grocery shopping.  And we get stuck in our relationships.

This stuckness, this inability to move forward is our souls getting stuck in the mud.  We are stuck in what Zukov calls our “personalities” - our ways of dealing with survival, dealing with our fears.  Living life every day and making sure our families have enough to eat and a roof over their heads is important. It’s not always easy to see a way to ensuring that.  But once we’ve provided the basic needs for survival, we stop and don’t move past that to our joy, to our challenges of our spirits, on to what we dream for in life.  Like writing that novel, or getting around to our artwork again, or to trying out meditation, or taking a walk in the woods.  Or anything that feeds our souls.

And that’s when our relationships suffer.  That’s when we lose our shine- our light, that inner light that attracts other people toward us.  Relationships in our lives that could be spiritual partnerships become work.  Relationships feel like weight in our lives when we’re stuck in a place of darkness, of boredom, a period of no growth in our lives.  When we’re in a time like this in our lives, sometimes someone who loves us will say, “You seem flat.  You seem down.  Your eyes are lifeless.  What’s going on?”

In Richard Ford’s novel, the protagonist, Frank Bascombe describes his fear for life,

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon.  You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments, you tell yourself you’ll have to change your way of doing things.  Only you don’t.  You can’t.  Somehow it’s already too late.  And maybe it’s even worse than that.  Maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath.  And what you’ve feared will happen has already taken place…And in that very way our life get over before we know it.  We miss it.  And like the poet said: ‘The ways we miss our lives are life.’”

The ways we miss our lives don’t have to become our life.  The ways we miss our relationships don’t have to stop us.  We can change them.  We can start living in our souls, in our highest truest selves, instead of in our personalities, in our fears. We can find the little meaningful things in our lives and start with them.  Just noticing how someone who loves us looks at us.  How they touch us.  How they want us to be happy. We start from there in making our relationships a part of our spiritual life.  A part of how we want to live from our loving, accepting parts.  To create relationships that give each other room for spiritual growth.  For joy. For life that is lived forward, not lived backward to our past failures, our constant fears.

Marge Piercy, one of my favorite poets, speaks of a love that allows each person to be free in their own growth:

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
 with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring, and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again.  It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
 conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

References:
Mairs, Nancy, Ordinary Time, Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, Beacon Press, 1993.

Wall, Cynthia L, The Courage to Trust, New Harbinger Pub., 2004

Ford, Richard, Independence Day, Vintage Books, 1995

Zukav, Gary, The Seat of the Soul, Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Piercy, Marge, from Risking Everything, editor, Roger Housden, Harmony Books, 2003.