...therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
The same from Matthew 19:
Have you not read that he who made man at the beginning made him male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh?
What else could leaving your mother and father entail? Do we dare look? Do we dare ask the question? Sometimes you need to be careful what you ask for.
In an insightful passage from the book "The Middle Passage" we get a fresh and sobering gut check on how we are doing in terms of little considered inner-self elements of leaving our father and mother.
This is from the first chapter:
When I was in fifth grade, just after World War Two, our teacher bought some glass prisms which had been intended for submarine periscopes. Before and after class we would amuse ourselves by lurching down the aisles, running into walls and each other. We were fascinated by the question of reality and how to find one’s way by such bent angles of sight.
I wondered if those children who had to wear glasses all the time saw better or only different worlds. When I considered that the lens in our eyes also refracted the light, I had to wonder further whether the reality we saw might wholly depend on the lens through which we saw it.
It remains useful to borrow that youthful perception, to acknowledge that whatever reality may be, it will to some extent be shaped by the lens through which we see it. When we are born we are handed multiple lenses: genetic inheritance, gender, a specific culture and the variables of our family environment, all of which constitute our sense of reality. Looking back later, we have to admit that we have perhaps lived less from our true nature than from the vision of reality ordained by the lenses we used.
Therapists sometimes assemble a genogram which represents an emotional family tree. The history of the extended family over several generations reveals recurrent motifs. While genetic predispositions play their role, it is clear that families transmit their vision of life from generation to generation. The lens passes from parent to child, and out of that refracted perspective choices and consequences are repeated. And just as we see some aspects of the world through any given lens, so we will miss others.
Perhaps the first step in making the Middle Passage meaningful is to acknowledge the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture, and through which we have made our choices and suffered their consequences. If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens. The lens we received generated a conditional life, which represents not who we are but how we were conditioned to see life and make choices. All generations are seduced into anthropocentrism, tending to defend their vision of the world as superior to that of others. So, too, we succumb to the belief that the way we have grown to see the world is the only way to see it, the right way to see it, and we seldom suspect the conditioned nature of our perception.
Even in the most privileged of childhoods, life may be experienced as traumatic. We were connected to the heartbeat of the cosmos in our mother’s womb. Suddenly we were thrust violently into the world to begin an exile and a search to recover the lost connectedness. Even religion (from Latin religio, “bond between man and the gods,” or religare, “to bind back”) may be seen as a projection of the search for lost connections onto the cosmos itself. For many, given the impact of poverty, hunger, abuses of various kinds, the initial experience of the world is devastating to their sense of self.
These wounds, and the various unconscious responses adopted by the inner child, become strong determinants of the adult personality. The child cannot incarnate a freely expressed personality; rather, childhood experience shapes his or her role in the world. Out of the wounding of childhood, then, the adult personality is less a series of choices than a reflexive response to the early experiences and traumata of life.
So we all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.
The problem is not that we have complexes but that complexes have us. Some complexes are useful in protecting the human organism, but others interfere with choice and may even dominate a person’s life.
Complexes are always more or less unconscious; they are charged with energy and operate autonomously. Although usually activated by an event in the present, the psyche operates analogously, saying in effect, “When have I been here before?” The current stimulus may be only remotely similar to something that happened in the past, but if the situation is emotionally analogous then the historically occasioned response is triggered. There are few who do not have an emotionally charged response around such issues as sex, money and authority because they are usually associated with important experiences in the past.
Of all the complexes, the most influential are those internalized experiences of parents we call the mother complex and the father complex. These are generally the two most important people we have ever encountered. They were there for the laying of the keel and the launching of the vessel. It was their treatment of us and their strategies toward life to which we were exposed.
Ok, with that in mind, consider again the passage to leave your mother and father and join with your spouse in a new united life. Oh boy, God embedded a whole lifetime inside those words to leave father and mother. It may be that we have underestimated the magnitude and implications of what God is saying. And the amount of work it may take. If we are to leave father and mother... that's no easy task. At one point of development such an idea was not even conceivable. Even as an adult, and perhaps despite moving halfway around the world, we may still need to leave our mother and father and join with our spouse in oneness.
Marriage was established at the beginning as a covenant by the word and authority of God, between the woman and God, the man and woman, and the man and God.
It's interesting that the man and woman both have an individual covenant with God. There's individual work involved and only then does it start to look like what was established at the beginning.
Continuing on with excerpts from the same chapter from The Middle Passage:
Another ego-related hope of youth is the desire for the perfect relationship. While one has seen less than perfect relationships all around, we are prone to assume we are somehow wiser, better able to choose, better equipped to avoid the pitfalls. The Koran warns, “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you? We imagine such advice applies to others.
One may look at the sorry remains of a parent’s marriage and conclude, “I know better than they and will choose wisely.” One may still expect to be CEO, write the Great American Novel, be a terrific parent.
Heroic thinking is useful, for were one to suspect the trials and disappointments ahead, who would have set off into adulthood? I have yet to be asked to give a commencement address, but loathsome as such speeches usually are, I still might not have the heart to tell the truth. Who could bear to say to eager and hopeful faces, “In a few years you will likely hate your job, your marriage will be in peril, your kids will cause you fits, you may very well experience so much pain and confusion about your life that you will think of writing a book about it.”
Who could do that to the dewy-eyed, hitching their wagons to a star, even as they lurch down the same confused and wounding way their parents trod? Heroic thinking, with its hopes and projections barely tempered by the world’s ways, helps the young leave home and dive, as they must, into life.
More will be said later of the role of projection in marriage, but perhaps no other social construct has so much unconscious baggage imposed upon it. Few at the altar are conscious of the enormity of their expectations. No one would speak aloud the immense hopes: “I am counting on you to make my life meaningful.” “I am counting on you to always be there for me.” “I am counting on you to read my mind and anticipate all my needs.” “I am counting on you to bind my wounds and fulfill the deficits of my life.” “I am counting on you to complete me, to make me a whole person, to heal my stricken soul.” Just as the truth cannot be told in a commencement address, so the hidden agenda may not be spoken at the altar. One would be too embarrassed, if one acknowledged them, by the impossibility of these demands.
These are sobering remarks from psychologist James Hollis. I found his insights fascinating and humbling. I disagree that marriage is just a “social construct” but that wasn’t the point he was making. The unconscious baggage is what we can work to “leave” as we contemplate leaving our mother and father and entering marriage.
I don't detect anything in the scripture or those passages that suggests we be ungrateful, or discard anything good that a persona's mother and father offered or provided. We ought to be grateful and honor our parents, as the original 10 commandments taught. What I do see in these words is that we can't really claim it as “us” or claim authentic living if we are unconsciously acting out automatic extensions of our parent's worldview, lens, values or belief system. If we had different parents, we would be unconsciously living out those patterns. And very likely be part of whatever their religion happened to be.
So, what is to be done? The author of that book suggests we recognize it and work to make what’s unconscious more conscious and reclaim (or allow) unknown parts of ourselves to live more fully, more conscious, and (in my interpretation) allow our God given identity to surface and bring new and additional meaning to life.
Leaving parents seems to include this inner work. Connecting to God yourself. Then, having reconnected to the God of the universe yourself, creating a united life with your spouse. Conscious and full of light, taking responsibility and accountability for the gift that is your life.
