Chief Activator – Super-Villain

Most of my family came to town for Peter’s funeral.  The night they arrived, my sister, her husband and 3 children, my brother, his wife and three children, my mother, my step-father, my step-sister, my aunt and I went out for dinner.  Only my sister in Alaska wasn’t able to make it.  It wasn’t an entirely sad occasion.  I did notice that John, my step-father, had to step out a couple of times to regain his composure.  For the most part, though, it was a pretty nice evening, breaking bread with each other and remembering Peter.

Afterward my aunt and I grabbed some coffee at Starbuck’s and went to her house to talk; commiserate really.  She is in the throes of a very nasty divorce from a man I usually refer to as “Skid Mark” – and I’m licking my wounds at having chosen so poorly again.  We both choose poorly.  We have histories of choosing poorly.  After awhile she confessed to me with tears in her eyes that she is afraid of becoming the “crazy old aunt.  The hanger on.  The one the kids are afraid of.”  I could completely identify.  I hope the worst case is that I become the eccentric, fun uncle; the one the parents are a little worried about but that the kids love.  And I guess it could happen.

And all that, particularly the disappearance of the Man Who Never Was, got me thinking about the last part of the 7th step.

“The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear–primarily that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded.”

So “the fabric” of my life is “shot through” with an “evil and corrosive thread” that is the “chief activator” of the worst parts of my character.  The baffling thing is that it felt very much like caring for someone; like loving.  I’m still trying to figure out when I stopped being sane and got caught up in the self-centered fear that I would lose a relationship that I didn’t even have yet – and to what extent I actually created a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing so.  Fear made me grasp more tightly when I knew I should let go.  I have fear now that I will live and die alone.   And even though I know that I am surrounded by love at all times – agape and storge but not eros, I miss eros. I ache for eros.  And the idea that hanging on to the desire for that kind relationship is actually causing me pain; causing me to shut myself off from the sunlight of the Spirit is just sad.

Can it be that my own fear over losing something that I didn’t even have drove me to push it away before I had it?  Exactly what defect of character is that?  Lust?  I remember saying to TMWNW once that “fear is the heart of love”, yet it seems that I may have been mistaken.  Fear may be the death of love.   Fear may be a super-villain.