37, 38 & 39:The Story Turns

I have missed three Sundays.

There are two ways I could tell that story. In the first, I fell behind. The woman who promised herself a year of Sundays let the calendar outrun her, and the blank weeks prove she could not keep up. In the second, the season was so full of dissertation, defense, clients, classrooms, and grandchildren that the Sundays did not disappear. They piled up like unopened letters, each one waiting to be read in its own time.

Both versions use the same facts. What differs is the story, and I am learning, slowly and on purpose, that the story is the part I get to write.

For much of this year, I have been running on a familiar script: super mom. That script says she handles everything. She teaches the class, meets the deadline, answers the client, shows up for the family, and still has something left for the grandbabies. For a long time it felt like strength, and in many ways it was. But Jung had a word for what happens when we lean too hard on one side of ourselves. He borrowed enantiodromia from Heraclitus to describe how any one-sided attitude, pushed far enough, eventually produces its opposite (Jung, 1921/1971). The overextended mother becomes the depleted one. Relentless doing turns into the sudden inability to do anything at all.

I used to read that exhaustion as failure. Now I read it as correction. The psyche is not punishing us when it swings back. It is trying to restore balance. The weeks I could not write were not evidence that I had lost my consistency. They were evidence that something in me was insisting on a different kind of wholeness.

This is where Mary keeps meeting me, as she has all year.

We tend to picture holy women as tireless and serene, a kind of spiritual super mom. The Gospel writers give us something quieter. When the shepherds leave and the excitement settles, Luke tells us that Mary kept these things and turned them over in her heart (New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989, Luke 2:19). She did not rush to explain her life. She pondered it. She let the meaning develop slowly, the way a photograph comes up in a darkroom.

Then there is the Magnificat, her great song in Luke 1. It is an entire hymn of enantiodromia: the proud are scattered, the mighty come down from their thrones, the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled. Before any theologian named the pattern, Mary sang it.

Most striking to me is that she tells her own story. By the standards of her world, a young, unmarried, pregnant girl from Nazareth could easily have been a story of scandal. Mary tells it as a story of blessing and declares that all generations will call her blessed. She did not control her circumstances, but she did shape the meaning of them. That is not denial. That is authorship.

At the foot of the cross, John tells us simply that she was standing there (New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989, John 19:25). She did not fix anything, and she did not do it all. She stayed. Perhaps that is the truest definition of consistency: not an unbroken record, but a steady willingness to return and remain present.

My third companion for these weeks may seem an unlikely one: Lee Child, the creator of Jack Reacher.

In the mid-1990s, at around forty, Child lost the television job he had held for nearly two decades. He could have told that as a story of loss. Instead he bought paper and pencils and began writing the novel that became Killing Floor (Child, 1997). The ending of one story became the first chapter of another, which is enantiodromia again, this time in a much more practical form.

What I admire most is how he made consistency a ritual rather than a test of perfection. For years he began each new novel on the first of September (Martin, 2015). He did not wait until he felt inspired. He simply showed up on the day he had chosen. Consistency, in his hands, is less about never missing and more about always coming back to the page.

Child has also explained that suspense comes from raising a question and delaying the answer (Child, 2012). I have found that oddly comforting. Many of us are living in the middle chapters right now, with the questions raised and the answers still held back. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the plot. It is what keeps the story worth reading.

And then there is Reacher himself. Whenever he enters a room, he is not thinking about how he looks. He is reading the room: the exits, the people, the light, what is out of place. This month my mindset has shifted in a similar way. I have been looking at the world rather than at myself. On my morning walks, I have tried to notice less of my own to-do list and more of the trees, the neighbors, the sky, and the small faces who call me Grammy. Jung reminds us that individuation does not isolate us from the world. It gathers the world into us (Jung, 1960/1969). The more I look outward, the more I seem to find myself.

Here is what I am carrying out of these three Sundays.

Ellis and Harper (1997) taught that events do not disturb us so much as the sentences we tell ourselves about them. When the sentence changes, the behavior follows. "I am behind" makes me freeze. "I am gathering" makes me move. "I failed to be consistent" keeps me stuck. "I am returning" brings me back to the page, which is exactly what I am doing tonight.

Near the beginning of his memoir, Jung wrote that he could only tell his life in stories, and that the real question was not whether they were objectively true but whether they were his truth (Jung, 1963). I am claiming mine. These three Sundays were not lost. They were lived. The super mom is setting down her cape, not because she has failed, but because the story has turned, and she is curious to read the next chapter.

An Invitation

What story have you been telling yourself about your own missed Sundays? It might be the workout you skipped, the call you did not return, or the goal that slipped quietly off the calendar. This week, try rewriting just one sentence. Replace I failed with I am returning, or I am behind with I am gathering. Then notice what your feet do next.

Like Mary, you do not need to control every circumstance to be the author of their meaning.

References

Child, L. (1997). Killing floor. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Child, L. (2012, December 8). A simple way to create suspense. The New York Times.

Ellis, A., & Harper, R. A. (1997). A guide to rational living (3rd ed.). Wilshire Book Company.

Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. Winston & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 8). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1960)

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (H. G. Baynes, Trans.; rev. R. F. C. Hull; Vol. 6). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Martin, A. (2015). Reacher said nothing: Lee Child and the making of Make Me. Bantam Press.

New Revised Standard Version Bible. (1989). National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.