Guest and Ghosts

A Facebook friend posted a stunning piece that included a sentence to the effect of,  “The difference between a guest and a ghost is that one has been invited and the other has not.” There’s food for a few thousand pages of reflection! 

On the personal level, ain’t that the truth. All those parts of ourselves who our parents, our teachers, our religion, our culture, our own timid selves made clear were not welcome in the house— where do they go? Where can they go? Without a seat at our table or a place on the couch, they wander disembodied and haunt us, often without us even realizing their presence in their room. 

Of course, there are many, many parts of ourselves that we’d rather not sit next to, never mind engage in conversation with or hang out with. While poets, spiritual teachers and Jungian psychologists might encourage us to invite them in, it doesn’t mean they get a seat at the head of the table. Some deserve only a short conversation or a room in the basement, a cursory “thanks for your thought, but no thanks, I’m choosing a different direction. No more discussion needed right now. Please go to your room and be sure to close the door.” Others pull up a chair and after a few hours together, we finally realize that we sold them short by listening to the wrong people or wrong sides of ourselves and they are precisely who we need to spend time with. In either case, simply having the conversation changes everything.

What’s true on the personal level is also true on the collective level. All the conversations we’ve refused to have for far too long— about racism, misogyny, sexuality, codified and sanctioned capitalist greed, guns, religious trauma, purposefully manufactured ignorance and yet more— have slowly been invited into the house. That’s a good thing. That’s a necessary thing. When we watch the old movies or read the old books (and “old” can mean from 10 years ago!) and see how we have a new perspective on things that were not wholly considered then, it’s a sign that a healthier perspective is right around the corner. By inviting them all as guests to sit down and share tea or coffee, beer or wine, the conversation is richer and the conviviality truer.

But of course, those rich white folks, heavily represented in the Republican party, are aghast that such unwelcome guests are disturbing their unearned privilege and their fantasy of “everyone invited who looks like me/thinks like me/ acts like me can come in and the rest be damned!” And so they’re barricading the doors, trying to barricade the school doors (against knowledge and love, but guns are still welcome), trying to ban the books, trying to control the votes. Every needed conversation that Fox News refuses to have or denies or lies about releases yet more ghosts in our already haunted culture awash with wraiths and specters and shadows, with ghastly ghouls and feckless phantoms and howling banshees and lost wandering souls. All those innocent black people lynched, abused wives, abused Catholic boys, Native Americans still wandering on the Trail of Tears, gay men and women who cowered in the closet, might finally feel a moment of peace once we tell their stories and vow to draw the lines against future abuse, hatred, murder. 

In the Sleeping Beauty tale, the 13^th sister is not invited to the birth of the Princess. She crashes the party just after the 11^th Wise Woman has offering her blessing and takes vengeance for being excluding by prophesizing that the child will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall down dead on her 15^th birthday. The 12^th sister cannot undo the curse, but softens it by saying she will fall into a deep sleep.

Despite the King’s and Queen’s efforts to ban all spinning wheels, the Princess indeed pricks her finger and both she and the entire castle fall into a coma-like trance. The kind that sleeps through 140 mass shootings this year alone without making an effort to change anything. 

Personally and collectively, the awakening kiss of the Prince begins by opening our doors to the guests we’ve refused, offering tea and beginning the long, hard, overdue conversations. And then back to the spinning wheels to begin threading together the future we deserve.