Affairs and Religion

Eternal.

My tarot card readings have been interesting this week. I'm supposed to be doing something important, but I'm not. Something creative, something career-related.

Instead, I've become more and more obsessed with this idea that all our life possibilities really ARE spelled out in our transits over time, and we just don't recognize it because we're only looking at two or three years of transits at once and assuming that all describe the path we're on with equal force. I have a theory that if I look more carefully at mine, I'll see that the transits I look at and go, "Huh? What's that doing there? That doesn't describe my life at all!" actually can be traced to something that had an opportunity to occur in the past but didn't, and it's part of an inactive timeline for my life ... a road not taken. Sort of like when I had an opportunity to spend time with Chi every two weeks again, but turned it down.


I took the unprecedented (so far as I know) step of printing out all my Liz Greene transit reports for the next three years and cutting them apart so I can group them according to what they seem to be describing. It turns out that I actually have three timelines in my transits--one where I'm embroiled in a destructive affair with Chi, one where I discover a meaning and a purpose in my writing and go on to discover a blazing passion in life and am happily occupied even though I'm all alone (at least for a few more years), and then there's that last one ... where neither of the above happens. Chi never comes back, I'm STILL all alone, but I sink into apathy and ennui because I feel I have no purpose in life. 


On Astro.com, Liz Greene has a wonderful article about  how astrology reflects a person's will to live. She writes that human beings need to feel that they're here on this planet for a reason, and if they have that sense, they are happily engaged in life. When we don't, we start to stagnate and die, engaging in all kinds of harmful behaviors and degenerating into sour, old, unhappy, unhealthy people. And looking at all this, I can see that's true. If Chi is in my life and I respond unhealthily, giving up on writing because now I can make trying to fix his problems my priority (convenient--now I don't have to brave this difficult marketplace, because I'm a very unhealthy family caregiver instead, and I made that my purpose--"He needs me!") Whether he's in my life or not, I can find my purpose or I can give up on it and be purposeless ... and there's all that negative behavior Liz Greene says we do in that case when we don't know why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing. And I know it's true. (Look at my BPD mom and how she acts.)

OK, I got that, but what's my purpose in life? I had thought maybe it was showing people how to marry astrology and psychology to make more sense of their lives. Chi not ever coming back had cast that into doubt. Yeah, I'd studied hard, I knew what was happening and why, and because I did that, I knew unerringly what to do and why when he showed up again.

But if the guy never shows up again, even though we have these and those transits that said he would...I've obsessed over all that work, to no good purpose. Fatal flaw in that work, huh?

Not necessarily. You're probably wondering what any of the preceding has to do with religion. Well, hold on tight, because it does.

I had to take a break in all this because the 94-year-old great aunt I've taken care of for the past nine years passed away. I had just spent Mother's Day with her a month ago. During the visit, I was upset because I had discovered my own (BPD) mom going around Facebook posting some very untrue lies about me everywhere my brother had posted a family picture of me.

My great aunt responded by saying, "Don't worry, I'll be your mom. You've never ever disappointed me, I'm your mom." And then I started to cry, and she said, "It's okay, we'll sit here and bawl together!"

And a month later she was gone.

I can see through the events of the funeral that she really was my mom, in more ways than one, because she helped me give birth to myself. I don't just mean that it's been a heavy burden taking care of her and her handicapped daughter and I have really had to grow and become more competent in doing all of that these last nine years, or that she treated me better than my own mother all my life. (Although, both are definitely true.)

I mean: She was almost 95, she could have passed away at any time. Why now, right when I'm struggling with why I'm alive, with no one close in my life at all, struggling to pay bills so I can struggle to pay bills? While my horoscope and the cards are saying I have a purpose and I'd better find it or I'm going to sink into apathy and depression and the rest of my life is going to suck, like that of the lonely, empty alcoholic who lives upstairs?

Because of my two cousins who came up for the funeral. When their last aunt died, no doubt they were going to bring a certain family picture to the funeral and say the same things about it, but my aunt died now instead of any other time, right when I'm struggling.

The picture is a group photo of my great aunt and all seven of her siblings, together with their parents--my great-grandparents. Right before my great-grandfather left the family for a younger woman. (Sort of like Chi almost did for me, only all his kids are grown up and gone.)

This never-forgotten family story still gets trotted out from time to time. The children in the photo--my great aunt, my grandmother, and their brothers and sisters--all are gone now, and this happened in 1941. Seventy-seven years ago! Yet, after the funeral, this photo and this family tragedy and the picture made another reappearance.

My cousins, both of whom are religious, God-fearing kind of people, talked a lot about how terrible it was for the children, how it wrecked the children's mental health, and how they just couldn't understand why or how a person could do such an ungodly thing and leave eight children and a wife.

At no other time would I have reacted to that photo and that discussion the way I did yesterday.

Because before Chi, I was just a little girl. "How could that person do that to all those other people? No wonder the Bible calls that a sin." Just like everyone else, I reacted that way to that family story when I actually was a little girl.

Now I've been the other woman, and I know why my particular man had to leave, and my entire last three and a half years has been one long ongoing consideration of what the right thing is to do and what's fairest and best for everyone. Not just me, everyone.

(Being the other woman, I've come to understand, confers a very grave responsibility. Not all of us recognize this, but it's true.)

I've read before that we don't see things the way they are, we see them the way we are. And it's true that most of the pain in this mixed-up world comes from everyone seeing that person or group of people they're angry at or disappointed in, from their own perspective and not the other people's.

This is what I heard at dinner last night, and because of the last three years, I see that this is what's wrong with using religion as the sole guiding principle of your life. And now that I've had these experiences, I can tell you why this is.

Religion is great at providing prescriptions for life, but in most cases religious dogma does not take into account what's going on in the marriage. As a general rule, it's best to stay married and work out the problems with the one you married, BUT...

Maybe somebody is mentally ill. Maybe somebody is being abused. Maybe the combined dysfunction of the two people dovetails on itself such that a mutually unhealthy situation keeps perpetuating between these two--behind closed doors, while things look so good in front of everyone else.

What I do know is, in the case of my grandmother, all six girls in the family were diagnosed bipolar--and that is highly heritable. So, just like my mother's grandmother showed signs of mental illness back in the day, and that side of the family talked about that for decades--it's possible that some problems we will never know about affected my other great-grandparents' marriage.

Religion just says, "Stay married. Period." And, knowing what Chi was living with and how, "Stay married. Period." turned out for him, it would upset me greatly--and did--that other people reacted this way to him. They did not understand anything about the marriage or what the marriage was doing to the people in it. I knew what to ask, and Chi would tell me a bit about what the two therapists were saying. Other people didn't know to ask these things. They just saw a man leaving an apparently good wife after an apparently happy 38-year marriage, and they rushed to judge.

"In life," says Religion, "generally it doesn't work too well to do things in that way or that way. To get your best results, we strongly recommend that you do things this way." Only humans came along and attached these other harmful ideas to that: The idea of a Big Boss in the sky who watches and judges what we do, who's angry and displeased, who metes out pronouncements and sends people to hell fire eternal if they, for instance, leave their wives. Look what you did to your children! Sinner! Hell and Damnation!!!

All I'm saying is, who knows why my great-grandfather left? Who knows how the marriage really was? We'll never know, because all the people who were living at the time have died. Maybe it really was the awful childish mistake the extended and descended family believes it was. Or maybe, like Chi, my grandfather was running for his life. I'll never forget what Chi wrote me once. I know I just can't move back into that house. It feels like death to move back into that house.

And, last October, that's exactly what he was describing to me. It happened. (And the cards and the astrology are in agreement that it probably hasn't gotten much better.)

I hope something happens so it doesn't end that way for him, whatever that may be.

That stuff after what's in orange up there is what Religion does wrong, and how it's undoing with the left hand, the good stuff it just did with the right. Let's not even talk about all the religious wars, and how humans here on earth hate and kill one another because of the idea of the judgmental god. Even my hyperreligious relatives, including the very aunt just deceased, used to sit around and argue that this one was going to heaven and that one was going to hell because one of them believed the right way and the other one believed the wrong way.

All this is stuff and nonsense, and obscures all the other ways humans have to make sense of life, which some ignore and pooh-pooh because they are not Religion. Religion says, "My dogmatic teaching is the only thing you are to use and listen to, and it's a sin if you use any other source of knowledge," and that's too bad, because Religion as practiced by what I grew up with, is a good start, but woefully inadequate alone.

So here we have Religion, who offers great prescriptions about how to do things in the way that generally offers the best results. But unfortunately Religion offers no deeper explanations for human behavior, as I've pointed out here before. Religion simply slaps people's hands and says, "It's bad. Don't do it."

Dogma does not help people see or learn the deeper reasons behind the doing of it, nor help them heal so they no longer NEED to do it.

Because really, people. Folks wouldn't drink, folks wouldn't eat themselves to six hundred pounds and up, folks wouldn't have affairs, folks wouldn't do anything "bad," anything that heaps condemnation down on their heads from all of family and society, unless they really NEED to for some reason. And religion does nothing to help people understand that.

And when we're short on understanding and long on judgment, it does not help to heal these people, ourselves, and the world.

So along comes Psychology, which says, "Here is why that person is doing what he is doing." Now we can make some progress toward fulfilling those great prescriptions created by our Religion, because we can see and understand what's standing in the way. We can see how things got that way. That means we now know how to prevent, so things don't get this bad ever again, and we have an easier time forgiving, because we see the why behind that person doing that painful thing that we hate him for. Religion isn't good at this, except for the riddles such as, "The sins of the father are visited upon the child unto the seventh generation."

WTF does THAT mean? Religion tries to get it in there, but Psychology explains it in a way that we can understand it.

Now we come to Astrology. Ah, that terrible discipline with the bad name. It mostly has a bad name because it purports to be able to predict the future, and sometimes it "looks" like it's "wrong."

(Oh, and because Religion says it's bad, of course.)

But what I see, because I've studied psychology as well as astrology, and because this awful situation in my life drove me to look at more than three years of transits at a time (the way most professional astrologers do), is that astrology not only accurately describes your character, but it also describes your life. In my transits right now I see three different outcomes, and when I ask--and this is important!--Does this sound likely? Does this make sense? the answer is yes.

And who decides which outcome I will get? Well, one of them is partially decided by someone else, but the main answer is, I do. Not only that, but your natal chart has something to say about why you decided to come into this life, what you meant to do here, and why things turned out the way they have.

Not ONLY that, but when you can look at three charts and see everything in one reflected in the other three--and this is all in the position of the planets and stars--obviously you have some evidence of intelligent design.

This does not mean that you have a punitive god you have to answer to, and who's supposed to direct your life  (as in, the way some Christians apparently do, you think you should stand in front of your closet every morning and let Someone Else think for you ("Lord, should I wear the red dress or the green?"), or the idea, with the concept of Godly this and Godly that, that you are better than everyone else, because you're allowing certain other people, speaking and writing as this cosmic Superbeing, to think for you.

But Something is obviously cocreating with you, for every planet in the heavens to reflect something real about you, something psychology can confirm, tell you how it came about and what you have to do to get it to go better, and religion can give you some guidance about the most desirable earthly outcome.

And I can tell you all this now, so that must be my purpose.

I'm supposed to have some faith that if I build it, they will come.

(Whoever they is.)