Avoiding — The Point

Here is a counter-intuitive truth I’ve discovered during my years working in mental health: Long-term couples, when in the tumult of relationship distress, often discuss the wrong problem.

This is a natural defense. If the problem were easy, one or both partners would address it headlong, search for a solution, and adapt in ways that strengthen both themselves and the relationship. Such is the nuanced dance that all couples engage in on a daily basis.

But not all dances are so easily choreographed. On occasion, there can arise a problem so enormously challenging that all the tried-and-true solutions cease to make sense. If the couple senses that focusing on the problem will NOT help to resolve it, they will most likely fail to even discuss it. All the while, the pressure and anxiety created by the problem continues to build … until something has to give. So rather than discussing the actual problem, to relieve the pressure they will instead find an unrelated, sometimes bogus problem on which to direct their energy.

The point of these efforts is not to solve the decoy problem, but rather to avoid talking about the real problem. And when troubles reach this stage, avoidance can appear to be the only thing that the couple can silently agree upon. Avoidance becomes the point of the empty gestures, the salvation of couple’s life as a functioning unit…at least for a while.

Now my point in this brief discourse on marital therapy is to draw attention to the parallel themes between a troubled marriage and the fevered discussions of religion in this (or perhaps any) age.

Throughout the history of Christendom, relationships both within and across its boundaries have been filled with the same kinds of tumult over trivialities that effect our troubled couple. These include frequent explosions of anger (even murderous religious rage), defensive acrimony among otherwise civil people, and schisms between religious siblings over matters so seemingly meaningless as the adoption of a single creedal word (e.g., “filioque“).

The same is periodically true of every religion in history. People’s faiths define them via the inane interpretations of the entirely irrelevant. Viewed from outside the religion, the pointless nature of these conflicts is as obvious as the pointlessness of building a sand castle below the tide line. Therefore every religion is open to ridicule for the exact same reason that it ridicules all others.

I suggest that such discussions are the flares of phony problems, signals that the entire enterprise is put together as a way to avoid the real, unassailable problem, which is as follows:

You, I, and one-by-one everyone that we know and love is going to die, to cease to exist, and relatively quickly fade so completely from memory that it will be as if we never existed at all.

It is an undeniable (but avoided) truth that such fate has already befallen almost the entire assembly of humankind before us, and each day, the seeming contributions of more and more of our predecessors (pre-deceasers) pass into oblivion. There is nothing we can do about this shared dilemma, and so through religion, humanity has engaged in a full-court press to skip out on facing it. Thus, we obsess on the number of deities vested with the immortality we lack; we latch onto explanations of existence that include an everlasting memory bank; or we vainly search for keys that will let us pass into the fantasized afterlife that only the deserving few can supposedly attain.

But just as with the conflicted couple, there is a certain relief associated with avoiding the truth: At difficult moments, the fantasy helps people to cope. Religion provides comfort in grief and peace of mind when facing death, and it simulates a sense of purpose while living. And arguing over the trivial details of even a humongous humbug can create an illusion of holding special knowledge, the possession of which can lead to the transcendence of this mortal coil.

At its core, the paradox is that avoidance works.

If I am correct in both naming the truth and naming the reason we avoid it, then it falls on us who claim mortality as a victory to call it such. We need to declare, and declare loudly, that it is neither wisdom to live life as if it never ended, nor a blessing to offer such self-deception as a gift to others.

Rather, the reminder that each sunrise could be our final one (or the last time we hear the voice of a loved one) heightens the senses and confirms connections that are truly meaningful in the here and now. In this context, each of my relatives, friends, and community members mean something to me regardless of their creedal thinking, simply because we have shared kindnesses and tragedies and because the same fate awaits us all. That is enough. In a life unencumbered by religion, it will always be enough.

But even as I write these words, I am aware that they and I will depart as quickly and silently as most others. For now, however, I find these thoughts, those that level our playing field, both comforting and inspiring. If the couple ultimately addresses the avoided problem, new growth potentials arise in the relationship that they could not have predicted. If humanity would acknowledge our great temporariness, the same evolution could occur. But until then religion will be present to help us avoid it.

- {♂♂} – {♂♀} – {♀♀} -

(© 2007. Originally published on my Yahoo! 360 blog on May 20, 2007.)