Session 10a - Understanding Love, by the Sound of Music

Transcription of session 10a – Surviving Love’s Torture. Interview conducted by Miss Sleeping Beauty. Interviewee: Mrs Maria Von Trapp

Sleeping Beauty (SB): “Good afternoon Mrs Von Trapp”

Mrs Maria Von Trapp (MVT): “Please call me Maria.”

SB: “With pleasure, Maria. Please can we confirm that you are aware your session is being recorded for research purposes?”

Mrs Maria Von Trapp (MVT): “Good afternoon, Miss Beauty. Yes, we can.”

SB: “It is such a privilege for me to be able to interview you. In all honesty, I was completely surprised to see you at Cinderalla’s Baby Shower, especially as it was only last week that Princess Din mentioned what a great idea it would be for me to interview you. She called you a ‘true woman of Soul’.”

MVT: “Smiling Ahh, yes, that is something Jasmine would say. She is such a delight, she really is. I’d hardly refer to myself as such though, I’m more a woman of Soul-Struggle really, but I always appreciate her kind thoughtfulness. I don’t believe that our meeting at the Baby Shower was by ‘chance’ myself. When you spoke of your research I felt a definite calling to respond to your request to interview me, especially as my experience is so fundamentally different to most of the other characters in the stories that are told. Thank-you for listening to your calling and inviting me here. It’s truly a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk about such an important topic.”

SB: “Do you believe that it is still important? So many people seem to feel that marriage is a trial and error experience these days. That being married is simply an option and if it doesn’t work, then join the other one in two who are divorced...”

MVT: “Miss Beauty, within the very core of my being I know that marriage is one of the most enriching, powerful and life-changing experiences that anyone can experience as a human being; more so if you live it out and persevere and grow into its magnificence. I feel that the people of today are too cut off from their Spirit, their inner voice, and their truth to be able to hear when it speaks about who they should marry. We are made to naturally love all others, but love takes lots of work and energy, indeed it can be exhaustingly draining; but when linked to another person the difficult times are shared and halved in their misery and the good times are shared and doubled in their joy. To know that consistency, to have the freedom of unconditional love and to know that your spouse is there for you no matter what, is liberating in ways I cannot even begin to describe. I find the youth of today lost. I’m so grateful that our children grew up in times of struggle and war so they could learn to appreciate life in all its abundance, I really am, struggle gives one a purpose. You have a reason and a cause: to get out of the struggle. When I say the youth of today are lost, I’m referring to ‘lost in Spirit’, ‘lost in presence in the moment’, ‘lost in having a purpose’ and ‘lost in where and what their place is in society’. They have been over-compensated, over-indulged, given rights without responsibilities and gifts without effort. They have been molly-coddled to expect to be given things, to think they are all-important and have thus been taught very few communal, helpful and/or love skills. They have not been brought up with the skills and capacity to cope with struggle, sharing, communicating, and/or with giving their everything. As I finish off most of my conversations with the youth of today I’m usually sending up prayers of gratitude for God’s incredible presence in my life and hope that they get out of their bubbles and become truly aware of what life is really about – giving love to all others.”

SB: “I don’t understand how you can be grateful to God. Everything you had was taken from you. You went into a nunnery when it wasn’t the place for you. You loved a man and lived through the guilt of loving him and not being able to be with him. You resolved that situation after great struggles, and then had to escape the Gestapo. Had to escape your homeland and live in exile to start again with nothing to your name and seven children to feed! I don’t understand how that could possibly be “God’s presence” as you put it.”

MVT: “Ahh Miss Beauty. God does not tell us that we won’t have struggles in life, but He does tell us that He will be with us every step of the way, and indeed I have no doubt that He was and is with me. My time in the nunnery taught me patience; it taught me the importance of prayer. Learning to live with all those different nuns in the Abbey helped me to cope with the personality differences of the eight new family members I acquired the moment I met the Captain. The precious time in the Abbey taught me the value of being still, of trusting my Father in Heaven and knowing that He is great and He will never let any of those who choose to believe in Him down. I wish everyone in all our worlds would have the blessing of being able to step out of their comfort zones and ‘normal’ life to be in a place of peace, contemplation and faith-moving awesomeness.

The move to become a governess was incredibly difficult. I felt like a failure as a nun and like I had let God and the Reverend Mother down badly. It was a weight I decided to turn into a positive. Seven children was a challenge beyond anything I’d ever experienced before, but God used me. God taught me the beauty of all; He showed me that I have an incredible capacity to love. He reignited my love for music and united me with a family who love music as much as I do; something I was never allowed to explore in the nunnery. God had taken away what I loved, so that I would learn to appreciate it when I received it once again in abundance.

As my relationship with the children grew and I felt like I was finally succeeding at something, bam, God hit me again. He hit me with a dance with the Captain that altered my entire existence. I will never forget that moment. It is frozen in my Soul. I was in his arms, my smile escalated from my innermost being and for the first time ever I felt I had found my place; safe, loved, needed, blessed, the other half of something so incredible that no other power but God’s could have ordained that moment. I could have melted into the Captain forever right there and at the same time I knew I couldn’t. At the very same time fear struck me with regards to consequences, context and the reality of what I was feeling. I knew my place as a servant in the Captain’s home and as being there as a God’s servant. I knew that something far bigger than I was working and I had no power, permission or right to do anything about it. When the Countess spoke to me and brought my hidden truth to light, I knew I had to leave. I knew that it was not my place to be as I was when the Captain was as he was. God does not advocate lust or desire of another woman’s man. God hates adultery and there I was, on God’s mission and feeling all that My Father commands I do not feel. I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t be a hypocrite, a sinner and a woman who would put the man she loves into a position to hurt any other woman whom he loves.

The turmoil, the hurt, the guilt, the overwhelming sense of failure fell over me in the blackest of suffocating darknesses when I returned to the Abbey. I was beyond blessed to have had that home to go to. Beyond blessed to have the Reverend Mother to mentor me, console me, understand me and love me as much as she did, God bless her.”

SB: “I’ve always wondered what you went through back at the Abbey, before you returned to the house, and I’ve always admired the courage that it took to return and face the situation with such dignity and grace.”

MVT: “Thank-you. It was not by my strength at all. It was purely through the grace and presence of my Lord and Father. I don’t think anyone can get anything completed, or face any hardship in life for that matter, with dignity and grace, unless they have Jesus in their hearts. Fear is a very big antagonist in the story of life. It lurks at every turn and corner. Fear of appearances, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of the power that we have given other humans to hold over us, so much fear everywhere, which can become crippling to any soul who doesn’t have God to be their shield against the darkness of fear. I had God’s light in my life and in my heart and that light cast out the darkness, it had to. Dark cannot exist in the presence of light and God is light. He is my light, He is my strength and He didn’t let me down, He helped me face what I needed to face and what the children deserved to have me face, I loved them too, so very dearly and now, even more so.

My retreat back to the Abbey to try and figure it all out had me cling to God with all of my being. I had never before been so desperate for God, never before did I have to devour His Word for help, consolation and proof that He is in control, that I was not guilty, that He would see me through the darkness. He helped me get up in the morning. He stopped me from ending my life, a thought which crossed my mind almost by the hour to begin with.

The love I felt for the Captain was of a power like nothing I had ever experienced before, yet I could not have him. I couldn’t be with him. It was torture. Absolute hell. After the first few weeks of constant crying and fasting and barely functioning beyond automatic, things began to settle. I began to get into a routine of taking my deathly self to a journal. I wrote 10 full journals in that brief time. Mostly the entries began with my cursing and hating God for what I perceived as His cruelty, then, after I had released the toxic incomprehensions of my ego and vanity God would speak to me. Once I stepped aside, put my emotions and instability in God’s hands and let My Father speak, peace arrived, hope arrived, trust arrived, God took over, cradled me, whispered to me, hugged me, loved me and showed me His grace and mercy and that He was there in my pain with me, and I needed to trust Him that all would be well. I fought, I couldn’t comprehend how, I couldn’t rationalise how on earth everything that was overwhelming me to the point of self-destruction would ‘be ok’, it didn’t seem possible to me. Yet, God held me and carried me through it all.

I often fear that when I reveal such truths people will think that I’m melodramatic, that the ending would be a happy ‘fairytale’, so what was I worried about? But the fairytale ending was not within my reach or possible future whilst I was in my cell at the Abbey, knowing that the Captain was to marry the Countess. It felt incomprehensible that he could marry someone who wasn’t me, yet I knew he had never said or implied that he loved me, so I felt like I was going completely mad. In all reality the Countess was far more suitable for the Captain than I was. She was above my status, someone with social class and standing and wealth, and there was me, an ex-nun who had tried to be a governess and failed on both counts. The reality of that story was no fairytale.

I had no way of knowing the ending. All I knew was that every part of my being felt that the Captain was my other half, my love, the person who had brought me closer to My God than I had ever been before. So many theories state that one must not live by or trust their emotions, but my emotions were overwhelming and beyond understanding or control, it felt supernatural. It literally felt beyond me and made me feel like more of a failure because I couldn’t control them.

Still, once again, God stepped in and brought value to my suffering. The time of separation from the Captain became a lived metaphor for me. It became a metaphor representing the Love God has for all of us who choose Him. Separation from God, from Love, is ‘hell’. There is nothing worse than being apart from the love your Soul knows is there and knows is absolutely supposed to be a part of you. To get through each day knowing that you are not with, not going to see, touch and/or speak with Love is the stuff that destroys Souls, kills one’s reason to live and sends one into anxiety, depression and traumatic-stress. I’m not exaggerating here. Anyone who has known real, God-given, God-breathed unconditional Love will tell you that every single moment away from that Love is like a dagger in the heart that puts Romeo and Juliet’s story into the realm of literal truth.

God used my situation to show me the power of the Love He has for me. This brought me to my knees in worship, realisation and request for forgiveness for how I was so ignorant of how Awesome He really is. In my cell, I journaled these words “What you feel for the Captain, my Child, is minute next to what I feel for You. You are cherished, unconditionally loved and adored infinitesimally more than what you are feeling for the Captain. Know that whenever one of my children turns their back to me, I feel the suicidal pain and rejection so much more than how you are feeling it now. My Child, my Love, know that I love you; learn from this how much I Love You; experience the knowing of how incredible My Love is for you and that I Am… Love. Know Love and let yourself be loved. Your worthiness as a bride has been proven beyond question. Thank-You for returning to Me, My Child, for consulting Me, and for knowing that before you are any man’s bride, You Are Mine and I will NEVER let You go, NEVER. Go forth knowing that this is truth, that I AM. Be still and know that I Am. Know the depth and breadth of My Love for You and know that there is no room for doubt. You will always be abundantly provided for when You choose me first. I LOVE YOU MARIA, more and beyond and greater than all your feelings for the Captain combined. May My joy at you, with you, and of you, be yours too, forever and always.”

Silence.

SB: “Wow! ”

MVT: “With all due respect Miss Beauty, I wouldn’t ever, not for anything in any of the worlds or Universe give up those moments of struggle that led me to insights that I have held in my Soul as my truth ever since. I don’t believe I loved myself at all before the moment God told me He loved me. If The Creator of the Universe could Love me so incredibly, then how could I not love me? How could I not deem myself worthy of being loved?

I advocate struggle and trials; because they bring you closer to truth, to Love and to understanding that we are all simply little characters in a VERY big story being told by a far greater power than any of us can imagine or even attempt to get our small minds around. The reason my marriage has been an incredible success, that has touched the hearts of thousands, is because I married God first. In my opinion, there is no other way to go about it. God first and then the rest will work. That is a promise.”