Girl Talk: Finding and Filling Our Empty Places

The Greatest Love of All — Image via Wikipedia

Whitney Houston has been dead a week, and I find myself wondering, still, if she was not like so many of us women: empty of the kind of love we crave.

Why is it that so many of us end up with people who are not good for us or to us? We are not with these people under duress: we choose and stay with people who do us emotional harm, who damage our already frail inner selves, and for what?

I guess men do it, too, but it seems like we women do it more. It seems that the worse we are treated, the harder we hold onto the person who is treating us so badly. We internalize blame for the reason we are being treated badly, and we decide that “if we can just” improve ourselves, do something better, that person whom we love so much will see the light …and there will be a “happily ever after” for us.

I am not saying that was the case with Whitney and Bobby Brown, but it just feels like, from the outside, that Whitney, for all her talent and beauty, had an emptiness inside of her that she was counting on Bobby Brown to fill.

Nobody can fill our empty spaces but ourselves.

It is ironic that Whitney sang the absolute notes off the pages when she performed “The Greatest Love of All,” but in the end, resorted to drugs to self medicate the inner pain she felt from that emptiness that too many people in general, but surely too many women feel.

Years ago, a woman came to my door in the middle of the night. She was bloodied all over her head; she was crying and shaking and said she needed help. I didn’t have to ask; I knew she had been beaten. I didn’t really know this woman, so I was afraid to let her in, but I finally offered to take her to the hospital. She didn’t want to go. She only wanted to talk. She wanted some water, and she wanted to talk, and talk she did, about this man of hers who “really was a nice guy.” As she talked, I couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of her injuries. I finally offered to call the police, but she said, “no. It’ll be OK. He just gets mad sometimes. I’m trying to be a better person…”

Though I had never been physically beaten, I had had my share of experiences with guys who were “really nice guys” but who were oppressive in their treatment of me. They didn’t have the problem; I did, because I took it. I was so interested in having a relationship that I accepted treatment that damaged my spirit. I, too, had been trying to be a “better” person.

I have to believe that we women will find ways to identify our empty places, and stare them down instead of running to or staying with people who will only exploit them. It baffles me that so many of us women are so love-starved that we latch onto people who mean us no good. I find myself wondering what it is we are being taught, even subliminally, as we are being raised. What is it that makes us doubt ourselves and be willing to compromise our very spirits for the sake of being in a relationship?

Certainly nobody wants to be lonely, but we should want to have quality lives while we are yet alive, and there is no quality of life when we are in relationships with people who exploit our personalities. We are looking for something and we are finding it, too often, in the wrong places and in the wrong people.

Kevin Costner said, in his remarks at Whitney Houston’s funeral, that she wondered if she was “good enough” as she auditioned for her part in “The Bodyguard.” She was “the voice,” for goodness’ sake! She was amazingly beautiful. She was smart…and still, she doubted if she was good enough. The “empty place” syndrome that plagues so many of us women plagued even her.

Kevin Costner said to Whitney, post-mortem, “Yes, Whitney, you were good enough.” Maybe that’s something we should say, as women, to ourselves, every day, no matter what we look like: no matter the color or length of our hair, the size of our hips, the number of mistakes we have made in our lives. Maybe we should say that we are “good enough” to ourselves, and in so doing, begin filling up our empty places so that we don’t depend on a human being to do what only we and God can do.

Just a painful…and candid…observation.

Somebody Ought to Tell the Truth!

In a front page article written by Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff which appeared in The New York Times on February 12, a gentleman was described as being

anti big government. He printed tee shirts for his local Tea Party affiliate, and says he doesn’t need or want help from the government.

Yet, the article said, he gets a payment from the government every year, a subsidy for working families called the “earned income tax credit,” “he has signed his three school age children up to receive free breakfasts,” paid for the by the federal government, and his mother, who had to have hip surgery twice, is on Medicare – again, a federal program.

This kind of situation is not the exception, but, rather, the rule, and I am finding it harder and harder to listen to GOP presidential contenders talk about how they will slash domestic spending because it represents big government. At the end of the day, politicians are not telling people the truth, but, rather, what they want to hear. The people are not clear on what “big government” is, and politicians are allowing their ignorance to remain, because their lack of knowledge is the pot in which raw emotions fester, and politicians know that many an election has been won by stirring the right pot with the right emotions.

Are people really thinking about what would happen if the host of government benefits we all take so for granted suddenly were not there? What WOULD happen to our elderly if Medicare were no more? The Times article said that “dozens of benefits programs provided an average of $6,583 for each man, woman and child in 2009, a 69 percent increase since 2000.” The article said that older people get most of the benefits, primarily through Social Security and Medicare. So, if we cut domestic spending, how would “the least of these,” in this case, the elderly, get by?

Rick Santorum said that while Jesus wanted people to help poor people, social justice creates lazy Christians. That statement was stunning in and of itself, but it is disturbing and misleading and leads Americans to visualize “the poor” as lazy and probably members of a minority group. Like it or not, there are certain buzz words that get self-righteous Americans stirred up about who “the American taxpayer” is helping…but what is not being discussed or highlighted is that, again according to the Times article “the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits.” Now it seems that the doling out of government benefits has been more focused on saving the slowly dying middle class.

There is no doubt that the nation’s economy, in fact, the world’s economy, is in horrible shape. GOP presidential hopefuls who want to beat President Obama cannot be pleased that the economy seems to be getting better, albeit slowly. That fact takes the wind out of their argument that the Obama administration is a “failed presidency,” but they still beat the drum that the biggest reason, or one of the biggest reasons the economy has pitted is because of big government and reckless government spending.

Somebody needs to be bold and tell the truth about what is going on. Rick Santorum looks like a clean-cut, all-American choir boy, and he stands on his Christianity, but Christianity i.e., the following of the Christ – demands a social conscience and a heart for “the least of these.” Santorum has not voiced the truth that “the least of these” is a group growing larger and larger as the income disparity between rich and poor gets wider and wider. William Sloan Coffin once said that what the “Christian community needs to do above all else is to raise up men and women of thought and of conscience…” Merely advocating for slashing of needed government programs, at the expense of people who have been the backbone of this country, providing the labor and services that made wealth possible for so many, would seem to be immoral, unethical …and un-Christian.

Santorum is talking a lot of religion lately, going so far as to say President Obama has a “phony theology.” I do not understand that phrase, but what I do know is that the Jesus in the scriptures I read would not condone the wealthy getting more wealthy while more and more people are falling deeper and deeper into financial ruin, with the threat of what little help they have hanging over their heads.

I cannot believe God is pleased with what is going on.

A candid observation.

The Convenient Use and Disuse of God

When I visited the Holy Land some years ago, I remember standing on what I guess was a plaza. In back of me was the Wailing Wall, where Jewish men (no women !!) were praying fervently; to my left was the Dome of the Rock, or the Temple Mount, built atop the earlier place where the Jewish Temple had stood before being destroyed in 70 ACE, and to my right was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

All three sites are awe-inspiring; all mark important holy sites with rich histories for all three major religions. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for example, stands on the site where Golgotha, or Calvary was, the place where Jesus was hung on a cross to die, and that site is also believed to be the place where his tomb was originally. Just the thought of the importance of that site is chilling.

For the Muslims, the Temple Mount is third in terms of being a holy site, after Mecca and Medina, but it sacred to Jews and Christians as well. It was the location of the Temple of Jerusalem, that built by Solomon and the Second Temple which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 ACE. It is supposedly the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac. for Muslims, it is thought to be the place from which the prophet Muhammad journeyed to heaven.

The Wailing Wall is thought to be the western wall of the Second Temple. It is a moving site to see people praying there, sometimes wailing, and sometimes writing prayers and pushing them into holes that are in the wall itself.

The image of that place is something I cannot get out of my mind. The “truly religious” pray there, members of the three major faiths of the world. It is almost as if you can feel God himself there.

But in spite of the holiness of that place, the profound sense of the presence of God, there is the reality – and it hits you like a ton of bricks – that in spite of God and all this holiness, there is not peace but war, not a desire to be drawn together and live together, but a desire to use God and religious beliefs to keep apart and flame disagreements using God as the cover and the rationale.

The sense of holiness I felt was doused at that moment by cloud of sadness.

I thought about that site as I watched a program on the history of the Ku Klux Klan. I was mostly fascinated by what I was learning, but found myself deeply saddened as Klan members explained the meaning of the burning of crosses. Jesus was the light of the world, the Klansman said, and we light crosses to remind people that we bring the light of the world to a world of darkness, a world where (the “n” word) and Jews are not wanted.

Then the program showed a cross burning, or cross lighting ceremony, where scriptures were read and where, to my horror, the song “Amazing Grace” was sung as crosses were lit and were allowed to burn.

It hit me that God, or the sacredness of God, is different, and is explained and understood differently, by humans. The God of the KKK is one who allows murder and domestic terrorism in His name; this God condones racial and religious hatred. The God that everyone worships in Jerusalem on the site where all three major religions are represented is a God who allows, sanctions, enmity between religious groups, again in the name of God.

The God I believe in doesn’t condone or approve of any of that.

President Jimmy Carter explained, in an interview by Paul Raushenbush on the Huffington Post that he felt part of the reason he was elected president was to help bring peace to the Middle East. He was and is deeply religious, as was Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Three people of different faiths, President Carter suggests in the interview, had like minds when it came to what God would have wanted. These men seemed all to have been whispered to by God to bring the confusion about who God is and what God wants to an end.

Their efforts were not appreciated. Anwar Sadat was assassinated, and President Carter was voted out of office;Begin lost support amongst Israelis and after his wife died, became more and more depressed and kind o faded out of the spotlight. Before that happened, Begin and Sadat signed a peace treaty; they had been brought together by President Carter. The Camp David Accords were socially historic but religiously monumental. Here were three men who saw God in the same way, their different faiths notwithstanding…but they were not appreciated. Their people thought they were wusses.

I think of the first term of President Barack Obama. I remember him saying he was going to reach across the isles; he was going to try to make Washington a different place. It was going to be place where “change” included Republicans and Democrats actually working together.

Instead, it has been a mess, with the Republicans jamming the president at every turn and the president coming off and being touted as being “weak” and “too accommodating.” It is as though the Gospel precepts are good for church, but are damned if one tries to practice them in real life.

One must not appear to be weak, and how better to appear strong if you take controversial stands on things, like your political beliefs, and use God as justification?

I cannot help but thinking that believing in God is a hard thing to do, if one is genuine. Believing in God and trying to do what a loving God would want does not win people praise or accolades, but instead resigns them to places of despair and loneliness.

I found myself, as I watched the history of the Klan, being angry at God. “Why don’t You just fix us?” I asked, meaning, why doesn’t God make us differently, wire us differently, so that we are not only capable of bringing real peace to the world, but willing as well.

Of course, God didn’t answer.

God usually doesn’t…

A candid observation.