Imprinting

This is a tough topic. I'm going to muddle through it and hope I don't spill too much of myself on the screen. Since this is a topic that reaches beyond what I have words for, I think it will be best to stick in the realm of metaphors. If you have trouble with Contemplative writing of this kind, do us both a favor and skip this entry.

I often refer to myself as a sheepdog. The metaphor has been especially powerful for me lately. In my life, I've noticed certain times when I seem inexorably drawn to someone. I just can't get them out of my head and I am overwhelmed with deep love for them. Not in a romantic way, but real love. These bonds are not at all easily broken. In fact, I can't really think of one time that I have broken it. I don't think I could. The people may go, but the bond stays in me if nowhere else.

One example, I was so impressed upon by God once when I was giving a presentation at a school of second graders about this one child in front of me. I don't know her name, I don't know anything about her, but I have prayed for that child for the past 10 years or more. I've never forgotten her and I could never even find her if I wanted to. But I pray for her to be safe and to grow and to be whole and loved. This is a weaker form of what I mean.

The bond with my friend that I mentioned in the previous post is similar but stronger for having interacted with this friend for so long. Then it happens periodically with the kids I minister to. I love them all and am fiercely protective of them, but every so often there is one that I am really impressed upon. Usually, I don't initiate the connection. In fact with kids, they usually do it because they are so much more apt to respond to those feelings, even though they don't understand how to verbalize them. Heck I can't even describe it. But I feel it deep in my soul in a way I don't with most kid-like clinginess. It's like my heart is bound to that person and something spiritual occurs. I've even seen it go both ways in which I feel myself healing from unrelated heart issues simply by interacting with someone I am attached to. I don't need any reciprocity and am joyed when I see development in the other person in the areas that I have been shown in their heart.

I've struggled with how to explain this in a way that doesn't come across creepy, espeically when talking about kids, but nothing has worked. Then, as often happens with pop culture, I was reading the Twilight series with my wife...I know, mixed reactions, I'm having them myself...but I have to admit it has entered our cultural consciousness very much like the Matrix and Star Wars and it will not go away. There is a lot of truth in those books, packaged amongst the preteen romance and the faddy vampire stuff.

Anyway, the idea that struck me about this was the idea of imprinting. How perfectly apt to my sheepdog metaphor! The wolves have this process of imprinting which is based in real developmental psychology, but fantasized into a spiritual attachment of a positive kind. I hesitate to use that term, since in the vocabulary of Spiritualism, spiritual attachments are pretty exclusively negative. But this concept of imprinting is so well described in the books even down to the confusion with creepiness. It isn't that at all. In fact it is so much the opposite. Someone I am "imprinted on" for lack of a better term is perhaps safer with me than anyone else in the world because I only want what is good for them, only want to help and heal and protect. Just like Jacob and Renesmee.

I've looked for other ways to describe this phenomenon, but they just aren't there. There is nothing in Christian literature that I have yet to find, though the concept is not foreign to Christianity. Jesus is said to have been deeply moved with compassion for people and mystics often talk about being given a heart for someone. I think it must be a process whereby God connects people who need each other for something, even if one of them doesn't realize it.

I'm not trying to make a doctrine out of this. I'm just trying to give a window into something that I wish was more widely recognized. And this metaphor melds well to the situation and with other metaphors that I find helpful.

In the meantime, if I seem inordinately attached to someone, please play it out against this metaphorical backdrop and see if it doesn't fit. It's all positive as far as I can run with it. And at the very least, I feel that someone has recognized the concept in some form or it never would have come out in the book.