Blog on the Lillypad
Monday, October 25, 2004
Spilled wine? Or an offering to God?
In May of 1999, I discovered an article about a well known actress's bizarre husband, and his very public efforts to humiliate his wife. I can't remember which of his weird deeds was the first one that caught my attention, but I did a search on him and discovered that he had run his own campaign, not only to humiliate her, but to keep appearing where ever she was.
It was too soon after the OJ Simpson case to not feel concern. The story, as I was able to put it together from news articles that spanned six months, was one of egregious lies, adultery, and even a cruel trick that had involved bringing their oldest son unwittingly into the father's affair. The actress actually stayed with her husband for a few months after he had flaunted his adultery in front of her, and then finally she left him and filed for divorce. But the bizarre stuff had just begun.
I was in night school at the time and working. But I felt that the husband's bizarre and attention-getting behavior could be a means of control over his wife. When I looked up her somewhat superficial autobiography and saw how young she had been when she'd married him, and how old he had been in contrast (and already married once before), I decided that there was a lot of evidence to support my suspicions of complete control over her in the marriage. Plus, he had been her manager, and I didn't think he was a very good manager. There had been huge gaps in her career.
I was concerned for her well being. I decided to write to her and explain some of the basics of how to engage in battle. I was a third degree black belt at the time, and I was familiar with Miyamoto Musashi's BOOK OF FIVE RINGS.
Fighting, you have to realize, occurs primarily in the mind, no matter what the weapons are. A stable mind relies upon a strong spirit, yet a strong fighting spirit is fed from universal truths that the mind must apprehend and fully believe. So training has to be a mixture of understanding, suffering hardship, and engaging in battles.
She would have plenty of battles and was under hardship, so I wrote to her to explain the very first principles of battle. I customized them for her situation. I was certain that if she only understood how to wage war in the mind, she had enough personal courage to fight for herself.
Not entirely to my surprise, she wrote back to thank me quite warmly, telling me she meant to keep my letter close at hand. And I sent her the second of the two-part epistle. Then over the next week I continued to read accounts of her husband in the news articles on Google.
I wrote to her again and asked her permission to continue to teach her these principles in weekly letters. She assented.
This began six or seven months of constant research on my part, intense physical training to keep my mind open to what I was addressing and learning, and daily writing and revising to produce the weekly letters (which were each about 2000 words).
I chose to drop out of school to work on this project. This woman, in the meantime, answered sparingly but graciously. She was jetting all over the world on acting gigs, making movies. At the very beginnning, I went for a good six weeks without hearing from her at all, and then just as I was writing the letter to apologize to her for wasting her time, she wrote a brief but quite effusive thank you to me from Germany. But never, in our correspondence, did she ever share anything in detail with me about her private life, or her husband, or her children, or even her beliefs. I think she was startled when I told her I was a Christian Fundamentalist, but she never commented on it. The greatest encouragement she gave me was when she told me that before each court appearance or meeting, she re-read all the essays, all over again.
I had asked her permission to write martial theory to her, and so I tried not to blatantly preach Christianity at her, fearing I would offend her by breaking my word. But I did tell her at several points that I had to explain what I was saying in terms of being a Christian. There are certain precepts of samurai thinking where I think Christian thought supplies a better answer. She never objected. Indeed, at least once when I cautioned her that I wanted to address a matter but would have to do so as a Christian, from the Bible, she was very open to what I said (because it was so true and it really did help her take another look at her situation from a fresh perspective).
The only thing that she ever really shared with me was court dates, and then only once or twice. But---when I knew about them---I would tailor the letters to these situations. At those points I wrote more than once a week.
I worried about her. There was no doubt that she was suffering. Yet she never blamed her husband to me, and once or twice when I included snide remarks about him, she didn't respond at all. At one point, she told me that she wanted to forgive him, and she was working on forgiving him, and she even asked me for my views on how to forgive. As far as I recall, that was the only direct question she ever asked me. I thought---and still think---she was completely sincere in this. I have never seen a person so completely unwilling to hate others outright. Whatever this woman does not believe about God or the Bible or Christanity, she knows better than most Christians---better than I, certainly---how absolutely essential it is to forgive in order to live a happy life.
I finished the first series of letters by the end of the year and wrote a shorter series to her the next year. But she was losing interest, and the letters were losing their pertinence to her situation. Eventually, as her troubles with her x-husband faded, her replies to me faded as well, until I stopped writing to her altogether.
I found it personally upsetting, and offensive, when she mocked Bible-believers on the television show, POLITICALLY INCORRECT. That occurred when I was still writing to her. And I let her know it was offensive. She never apologized or even addressed it with me again. But weeks later, on another episode of the same show, she took great pains to make sure the viewers knew that, though she disagreed with Jerry Falwell (who was on the show with her that night), she respected him.
Every now and then in reading news interviews where she was featured, I would catch some phrase she would use as a borrowing from the essays that I'd written to her. I edited the essays to remove all references to her personal situation, and I put them online to help others. (Click here to read them.)
Then, of course, after all was finished, and I was working on new projects, I learned about some of the R rated films she'd down as a young woman. I was stunned. Now, more recently, new allegations of affairs and even an abortion have come out (put out by her ex-husband, of course).
I labored hard to write essays to help a person, but as it turns out, that person likely has caused or contributed to the downfall of others---at least of their souls. (She's not the type to attack anybody outright.) I understood from the start that there is no trade off on Christian service. We can help another person and never see that person change. We can be a friend and not have a friend. Joseph served Pharoah. Daniel served Nebuchadnezzar. Neither of the men they served changed, though they condescended to be gracious to the religion of their servant (if one can *condescend* to that which is greater and wiser than any emperor).
Following Christ is about giving more than receiving, and I understood that. Indeed, the letters themselves, once edited, have turned out to be of benefit to many people, a gift of service that has a broader scope than just their first recipient. And working wth her distant graciousness helped me understand the highly stratified classes of our society. She was born of British aristocracy and truly was (and is) a member of the "Jet Set." Some people are so beautiful, so refined, and so thoroughly cosmopolitan, that the only way NOT to be foolish in front of them is to be strictly yourself and have no pretense. I understood that I must have come across like a provincial person (though very well read) and certainly very middle class. But knowing that, she treated me with respect and could even laugh at my jokes (in writing).
I learned a lot about writing, a lot about getting past my own awe of people, a lot about having to battle the conditioning of my culture in order to love as God commands us to love, without respect of persons but with great fear of God. I learned to pray to love her as God loves her but to treat her as she expected to be treated.
The greatest benefactor from the letters is me, thus fulfilling Christ's promise that it is better to give than to receive. What I gave certainly has come back to me. How often I have used those letters when in difficulty and encountering adult bullies!
My own life reached a turning point when I wrote those letters, because I hammered out for myself and came to understand how universally true the great truths of the universe are. These days, in my constant struggle with corruption in Independent Baptist Fundamentalism, the education I got from researching the letters has been a tremendous help. (In fact, I have uncovered some new points that I wish I had written in the first edition.)
But the touch of troubled amazement remains. On the one hand, a woman was in danger of being destroyed (emotionally, possibly financially, if not physically) by a man who openly displayed the most bizarre of behaviors. I don't know if her husband physically frightened her or not; his actions certainly frightened me on her behalf. To watch from the sidelines, knowing I could at least offer to help her, yet refusing, would have been unthinkable.
On the other hand, she has done catastrophic harm to others in supporting pornography and in her personal choices. My elderly neighbor, on first hearing of this from me, told me that we have to accept that those who do not believe in the Saviour will act contrary to the teachings of the Saviour. They do not have Christian values, nor should we expect them to. We have to love them with the love of Christ.
Certainly, I never watered down truth to her. How innocently did I assure her that one reason her husband was so bizarre in his public behavior was that his adultery had started to unhinge his mind! He now alleges that she had numerous affairs. Oh dear, no wonder she remained quite distant! I had no idea at the time---as she knew full well---what sort of life she had led behind that extremely respectable exterior.
If I had known, would I have declined to help her? Does God want us to extend such labor willingly to those who oppose His ways? Where do love of others and fear of God meet? Joseph had no choice in his service, nor did Daniel. Fearing God, they served proud kings who took what they wanted and were laws unto themselves. And I, not knowing, helped a proud, aristocratic woman who also has been a law unto herself.
The other thing that bothers me is that it was God's will that I not know until well after the fact. This chills my heart about myself. It is difficult to assist those who neither care about us nor respect our values. If I'd realized ahead of time that this woman had earned money from loathesome films and had done all the rest, would I have told myself it was God's will to back off, when actually He decreed that I help her?
It makes me think of Peter and the tent that came down. We draw back and say, "I'm too righteous to do that, Lord," but God says, "go do it, in faith."
This woman demonstrated, quite unconsciously, qualities that I admire a lot. First, she forgave a wretched man who was incredibly cruel to her. And forgiving him, no matter how many times he came back to hurt her, was a very high priority in her mind. I really respect that. I wish I held forgiveness in such high esteem. In fact, I learned from her to value forgiveness more.
In spite of living a life that I think was dishonest (in that she created an image of respectability when she was actually doing radically immoral things), there was an honesty in her that was jarring to me. As I said, she didn't reply back to me much, but what she said she would do, she always did. The first time she told me about a court case, I was almost as worried about it as she was. I did extra research into what is called "blending" (Check the essays.) and wrote an extra essay just to help her face her husband in person. She knew I was genuinely concerned, and she promised to e-mail me the same day as the court appearance, to let me know how she did.
At the time, I did not know she was scheduled to fly out to Europe as part of her busy filming schedule. The next morning, I got an e-mail from her with a time stamp of 11:57 PM from LA. If it was the last thing she did on that busy day, she was going to keep her promise and let me know how it went. The e-mail waas only two sentences long, typical of her. That same day there was a remark in the paper that she had just flown out, and I realized that she had kept her word at some inconvenience to herself, simply because she had said she would do it. I could see from her e-mailsl that she was honest in what she said. If she didn't want to tell the truth about something, she said nothing. But when she spoke, she told the truth. Also, she expressed genuine grief once or twice, but she never expressed self pity. She never expressed rancor. She never wrote bitterly.
And, oddly enough, she was remarkably open minded (to everything except the Bible). When I paused to consider (as I often did) that I must be coming across to her as pretty provincial and limited and middle class, it amazed me that she accorded my words with the same level of trust that she accorded advice from her own peers. (Indeed, at times she accorded my words more confidence.) She maintained that gracious distance from me (which I realize may have been as much for my benefit as hers, as she knew her life would be shocking to me), but there was no doubt that she was following what I wrote to her and doing much of what I suggested. She never grudged on telling me which specific letters had really helped her, and she did acknowledge changing her point of view on a couple things I wrote about.
On the other hand, the whole aristocratic thing itself, the derision she has expressed about middle class values, her complete dismissal of the Bible coupled with her complete ignorance of it (which she also demonstrated on POLITICALLY INCORRECT), they are all foolishness and pride. The rich and powerful often assume they have morality by the tale, and then their self-serving actions turn into a monster that bites them, or even devours them. And they never figure out the way that the entire universe runs, and it admits no exceptions to its laws.
My mind was remade as I considered our different worlds. (Oh so different!) Even now, four years later, as I write this, my mind is still reforming around these paradoxes of such transparent humility and such stunning pride, such willingness from one who knew so much to learn something new from a nobody; and yet such hard heartedness when her own deeds had come back to her, to mock the beliefs of those who believe Bible (including her own correspondent, who was trying to help her).
And now to read of the revelry and riot of her life. At times it's difficult not to judge. At other times, I am so thankful God tells not to judge. Have faith in Him, do good, exercise patience in our labors, wait on the Lord. So I tell myself. And I pray for her. It;s been sporadic, but as news has recurred of her bitter husband attacking once again, I have started to pray for her regularly again.
There's nothing else to say to her, except this: Although it's really, really hard to beat the devil, it is absolutely impossible to make a truce with him.
But she probably has learned that without my help.
In May of 1999, I discovered an article about a well known actress's bizarre husband, and his very public efforts to humiliate his wife. I can't remember which of his weird deeds was the first one that caught my attention, but I did a search on him and discovered that he had run his own campaign, not only to humiliate her, but to keep appearing where ever she was.
It was too soon after the OJ Simpson case to not feel concern. The story, as I was able to put it together from news articles that spanned six months, was one of egregious lies, adultery, and even a cruel trick that had involved bringing their oldest son unwittingly into the father's affair. The actress actually stayed with her husband for a few months after he had flaunted his adultery in front of her, and then finally she left him and filed for divorce. But the bizarre stuff had just begun.
I was in night school at the time and working. But I felt that the husband's bizarre and attention-getting behavior could be a means of control over his wife. When I looked up her somewhat superficial autobiography and saw how young she had been when she'd married him, and how old he had been in contrast (and already married once before), I decided that there was a lot of evidence to support my suspicions of complete control over her in the marriage. Plus, he had been her manager, and I didn't think he was a very good manager. There had been huge gaps in her career.
I was concerned for her well being. I decided to write to her and explain some of the basics of how to engage in battle. I was a third degree black belt at the time, and I was familiar with Miyamoto Musashi's BOOK OF FIVE RINGS.
Fighting, you have to realize, occurs primarily in the mind, no matter what the weapons are. A stable mind relies upon a strong spirit, yet a strong fighting spirit is fed from universal truths that the mind must apprehend and fully believe. So training has to be a mixture of understanding, suffering hardship, and engaging in battles.
She would have plenty of battles and was under hardship, so I wrote to her to explain the very first principles of battle. I customized them for her situation. I was certain that if she only understood how to wage war in the mind, she had enough personal courage to fight for herself.
Not entirely to my surprise, she wrote back to thank me quite warmly, telling me she meant to keep my letter close at hand. And I sent her the second of the two-part epistle. Then over the next week I continued to read accounts of her husband in the news articles on Google.
I wrote to her again and asked her permission to continue to teach her these principles in weekly letters. She assented.
This began six or seven months of constant research on my part, intense physical training to keep my mind open to what I was addressing and learning, and daily writing and revising to produce the weekly letters (which were each about 2000 words).
I chose to drop out of school to work on this project. This woman, in the meantime, answered sparingly but graciously. She was jetting all over the world on acting gigs, making movies. At the very beginnning, I went for a good six weeks without hearing from her at all, and then just as I was writing the letter to apologize to her for wasting her time, she wrote a brief but quite effusive thank you to me from Germany. But never, in our correspondence, did she ever share anything in detail with me about her private life, or her husband, or her children, or even her beliefs. I think she was startled when I told her I was a Christian Fundamentalist, but she never commented on it. The greatest encouragement she gave me was when she told me that before each court appearance or meeting, she re-read all the essays, all over again.
I had asked her permission to write martial theory to her, and so I tried not to blatantly preach Christianity at her, fearing I would offend her by breaking my word. But I did tell her at several points that I had to explain what I was saying in terms of being a Christian. There are certain precepts of samurai thinking where I think Christian thought supplies a better answer. She never objected. Indeed, at least once when I cautioned her that I wanted to address a matter but would have to do so as a Christian, from the Bible, she was very open to what I said (because it was so true and it really did help her take another look at her situation from a fresh perspective).
The only thing that she ever really shared with me was court dates, and then only once or twice. But---when I knew about them---I would tailor the letters to these situations. At those points I wrote more than once a week.
I worried about her. There was no doubt that she was suffering. Yet she never blamed her husband to me, and once or twice when I included snide remarks about him, she didn't respond at all. At one point, she told me that she wanted to forgive him, and she was working on forgiving him, and she even asked me for my views on how to forgive. As far as I recall, that was the only direct question she ever asked me. I thought---and still think---she was completely sincere in this. I have never seen a person so completely unwilling to hate others outright. Whatever this woman does not believe about God or the Bible or Christanity, she knows better than most Christians---better than I, certainly---how absolutely essential it is to forgive in order to live a happy life.
I finished the first series of letters by the end of the year and wrote a shorter series to her the next year. But she was losing interest, and the letters were losing their pertinence to her situation. Eventually, as her troubles with her x-husband faded, her replies to me faded as well, until I stopped writing to her altogether.
I found it personally upsetting, and offensive, when she mocked Bible-believers on the television show, POLITICALLY INCORRECT. That occurred when I was still writing to her. And I let her know it was offensive. She never apologized or even addressed it with me again. But weeks later, on another episode of the same show, she took great pains to make sure the viewers knew that, though she disagreed with Jerry Falwell (who was on the show with her that night), she respected him.
Every now and then in reading news interviews where she was featured, I would catch some phrase she would use as a borrowing from the essays that I'd written to her. I edited the essays to remove all references to her personal situation, and I put them online to help others. (Click here to read them.)
Then, of course, after all was finished, and I was working on new projects, I learned about some of the R rated films she'd down as a young woman. I was stunned. Now, more recently, new allegations of affairs and even an abortion have come out (put out by her ex-husband, of course).
I labored hard to write essays to help a person, but as it turns out, that person likely has caused or contributed to the downfall of others---at least of their souls. (She's not the type to attack anybody outright.) I understood from the start that there is no trade off on Christian service. We can help another person and never see that person change. We can be a friend and not have a friend. Joseph served Pharoah. Daniel served Nebuchadnezzar. Neither of the men they served changed, though they condescended to be gracious to the religion of their servant (if one can *condescend* to that which is greater and wiser than any emperor).
Following Christ is about giving more than receiving, and I understood that. Indeed, the letters themselves, once edited, have turned out to be of benefit to many people, a gift of service that has a broader scope than just their first recipient. And working wth her distant graciousness helped me understand the highly stratified classes of our society. She was born of British aristocracy and truly was (and is) a member of the "Jet Set." Some people are so beautiful, so refined, and so thoroughly cosmopolitan, that the only way NOT to be foolish in front of them is to be strictly yourself and have no pretense. I understood that I must have come across like a provincial person (though very well read) and certainly very middle class. But knowing that, she treated me with respect and could even laugh at my jokes (in writing).
I learned a lot about writing, a lot about getting past my own awe of people, a lot about having to battle the conditioning of my culture in order to love as God commands us to love, without respect of persons but with great fear of God. I learned to pray to love her as God loves her but to treat her as she expected to be treated.
The greatest benefactor from the letters is me, thus fulfilling Christ's promise that it is better to give than to receive. What I gave certainly has come back to me. How often I have used those letters when in difficulty and encountering adult bullies!
My own life reached a turning point when I wrote those letters, because I hammered out for myself and came to understand how universally true the great truths of the universe are. These days, in my constant struggle with corruption in Independent Baptist Fundamentalism, the education I got from researching the letters has been a tremendous help. (In fact, I have uncovered some new points that I wish I had written in the first edition.)
But the touch of troubled amazement remains. On the one hand, a woman was in danger of being destroyed (emotionally, possibly financially, if not physically) by a man who openly displayed the most bizarre of behaviors. I don't know if her husband physically frightened her or not; his actions certainly frightened me on her behalf. To watch from the sidelines, knowing I could at least offer to help her, yet refusing, would have been unthinkable.
On the other hand, she has done catastrophic harm to others in supporting pornography and in her personal choices. My elderly neighbor, on first hearing of this from me, told me that we have to accept that those who do not believe in the Saviour will act contrary to the teachings of the Saviour. They do not have Christian values, nor should we expect them to. We have to love them with the love of Christ.
Certainly, I never watered down truth to her. How innocently did I assure her that one reason her husband was so bizarre in his public behavior was that his adultery had started to unhinge his mind! He now alleges that she had numerous affairs. Oh dear, no wonder she remained quite distant! I had no idea at the time---as she knew full well---what sort of life she had led behind that extremely respectable exterior.
If I had known, would I have declined to help her? Does God want us to extend such labor willingly to those who oppose His ways? Where do love of others and fear of God meet? Joseph had no choice in his service, nor did Daniel. Fearing God, they served proud kings who took what they wanted and were laws unto themselves. And I, not knowing, helped a proud, aristocratic woman who also has been a law unto herself.
The other thing that bothers me is that it was God's will that I not know until well after the fact. This chills my heart about myself. It is difficult to assist those who neither care about us nor respect our values. If I'd realized ahead of time that this woman had earned money from loathesome films and had done all the rest, would I have told myself it was God's will to back off, when actually He decreed that I help her?
It makes me think of Peter and the tent that came down. We draw back and say, "I'm too righteous to do that, Lord," but God says, "go do it, in faith."
This woman demonstrated, quite unconsciously, qualities that I admire a lot. First, she forgave a wretched man who was incredibly cruel to her. And forgiving him, no matter how many times he came back to hurt her, was a very high priority in her mind. I really respect that. I wish I held forgiveness in such high esteem. In fact, I learned from her to value forgiveness more.
In spite of living a life that I think was dishonest (in that she created an image of respectability when she was actually doing radically immoral things), there was an honesty in her that was jarring to me. As I said, she didn't reply back to me much, but what she said she would do, she always did. The first time she told me about a court case, I was almost as worried about it as she was. I did extra research into what is called "blending" (Check the essays.) and wrote an extra essay just to help her face her husband in person. She knew I was genuinely concerned, and she promised to e-mail me the same day as the court appearance, to let me know how she did.
At the time, I did not know she was scheduled to fly out to Europe as part of her busy filming schedule. The next morning, I got an e-mail from her with a time stamp of 11:57 PM from LA. If it was the last thing she did on that busy day, she was going to keep her promise and let me know how it went. The e-mail waas only two sentences long, typical of her. That same day there was a remark in the paper that she had just flown out, and I realized that she had kept her word at some inconvenience to herself, simply because she had said she would do it. I could see from her e-mailsl that she was honest in what she said. If she didn't want to tell the truth about something, she said nothing. But when she spoke, she told the truth. Also, she expressed genuine grief once or twice, but she never expressed self pity. She never expressed rancor. She never wrote bitterly.
And, oddly enough, she was remarkably open minded (to everything except the Bible). When I paused to consider (as I often did) that I must be coming across to her as pretty provincial and limited and middle class, it amazed me that she accorded my words with the same level of trust that she accorded advice from her own peers. (Indeed, at times she accorded my words more confidence.) She maintained that gracious distance from me (which I realize may have been as much for my benefit as hers, as she knew her life would be shocking to me), but there was no doubt that she was following what I wrote to her and doing much of what I suggested. She never grudged on telling me which specific letters had really helped her, and she did acknowledge changing her point of view on a couple things I wrote about.
On the other hand, the whole aristocratic thing itself, the derision she has expressed about middle class values, her complete dismissal of the Bible coupled with her complete ignorance of it (which she also demonstrated on POLITICALLY INCORRECT), they are all foolishness and pride. The rich and powerful often assume they have morality by the tale, and then their self-serving actions turn into a monster that bites them, or even devours them. And they never figure out the way that the entire universe runs, and it admits no exceptions to its laws.
My mind was remade as I considered our different worlds. (Oh so different!) Even now, four years later, as I write this, my mind is still reforming around these paradoxes of such transparent humility and such stunning pride, such willingness from one who knew so much to learn something new from a nobody; and yet such hard heartedness when her own deeds had come back to her, to mock the beliefs of those who believe Bible (including her own correspondent, who was trying to help her).
And now to read of the revelry and riot of her life. At times it's difficult not to judge. At other times, I am so thankful God tells not to judge. Have faith in Him, do good, exercise patience in our labors, wait on the Lord. So I tell myself. And I pray for her. It;s been sporadic, but as news has recurred of her bitter husband attacking once again, I have started to pray for her regularly again.
There's nothing else to say to her, except this: Although it's really, really hard to beat the devil, it is absolutely impossible to make a truce with him.
But she probably has learned that without my help.
