In solitude, I saw myself. In all things you were standing right in front of me. But I was distracted by thoughts about food and possessions, satisfaction and status. I was anxiously driven to too much or too little work. I used sadness to manipulate, used others bodies and attention to cover emotions. I overreacted in anger to push people away, thought myself above them, believed myself self-sufficient. So you gave the sacraments to teach safe vulnerability. Everyone under the sun is born, hungers, grows and matures. Everyone who toils also longs to love and be loved, falters at being of service. All have sinned. All will grow ill and then die, will fall as short of God’s glory as Moses was distant from the promised land. You showed us how to be weak, and to do all that without substituting thought for embodiment. As surely as the Holy of holies, the wounds in your side, and the mind of Christ were all names for emptiness, you gave us the Eucharist to help us celebrate poverty and find others who knew the throes of transformation.
You sought the lost, healed the broken, became sin, surrendered to the cross and the grave–this is so that, when you rose as the true self, ego might wax a little noble, seek the parts of the psyche that are relegated to shadow. This is so that I might recognize that all pain is one, that my pain and the stripes I’m healed by are the same. This is so all will know what’s painful and pleasurable both to carry your presence and teachings. You became bread and told us to eat (lest the way be too long) when we longed for death in the wilderness. You became wine to gladden the heart, light to make the path clear. You made yourself all forms of overwhelming need: strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the imprisoned. When I was averse to your presence, you made mustering gentle fortitude my anxiety’s only remedy. When I was attracted to your presence, you made letting go my only peace. With ever-increasing speed, I recognized dissociation, overwhelm, scandal and condemnability to be your preferred way of teaching. And you made me so disgusted with my ignorance that learning your lessons was the only way to live with myself. The kind of “weary letting down of the nets” I once objected to, I have seen myself do at the behest of strangers, because their faces and yours are the same. Instincts to generosity increase with a speed that can only begin with the Spirit. I have seen this, sometimes and too seldom, in myself.
You said once “I in them and they in me, so that they may all be one.” You confused beholder and beheld, then handed it all over to the Father. You have showed me all this, so that I might cease living my life from a safe observational distance, and instead live safe behind the shut door of my heart where the father who sees in secret is the only necessary reward, and there is no me left to worry. So I know that everything in you—your crucifixion, your resurrection and your ascension—these are always happening, and will happen in me. Your transfiguration is always happening, and will happen in me. But I will be unsurprised if what glowed white on the mountain for you is a cross and God’s absence for my small and short-sighted ego. I don’t necessarily enjoy that part of how things are, but I won’t blame the way things are for my lack of acceptance.
Now I know what you’ve been trying to teach me. You became flesh so that all people could be grounded and at home in their own bodies. You breathed until you heard the name of God echoing in your own lungs. You listened to the sound of the wind until sound and sensation were one, until your whole body became an ear. You felt sensation until you had given up your spirit, and your inside became like your outside. You said, “keep listening, and do not understand, keep looking, but do not comprehend,” and, for us, it made” self and thought” forever an optional part of reflecting God’s image . All flesh will see it together: all sensation belongs to you, and nothing’s mine to build a remorseful little ego narrative with.
And yet, I am tired. I’ve heard it said that the Word is the ordering principle of the universe. For others, maybe, but not, apparently, for me. For me the Word is a double edged sword, separating joint from marrow. Underneath action, my thoughts are a circus of errors. Underneath thought, there’s emotion. Underneath emotion, there’s sensation, and underneath sensation there’s energy. Each layer is made more unmanageable by the “self” with which I judge. I am like a tree, planted beside flowing waters, remaining fruitless nonetheless. You told me to dig around the roots, fertilize and wait: despite my feelings of powerlessness and uselessness, here I am, waiting.
The world tells me faith is certainty, and intellectual assent. Yet I am riddled with doubt and resentment, anger and sadness. The epistles say “I died daily”--that’s shockingly non-metaphorical, and I am ashamed at ever having expected otherwise. I am numb, I can count all my bones, my soul is racked with pain. So long as Gilead is elsewhere, no balm exists for the wounds I carry. I know the version of myself that’s perishing, I have not yet discovered the resources to stand quietly and confidently in my present discomfort.
Though it’s in a mirror, dimmed by intuition, I know it: there is no “us” or “them,” there’s only Christ–and the image of you that I am becoming is a nobody, not a somebody. There is no self, there is only Christ in me. For them there are no pains–and it’s the same for me–but only because the body always carries your sufferings, so that your life might be made visible there as well. You said “because I live, you also will live” and I have to watch that the precarity of the morning not lead, at close of day, to hopelessness. Only by belonging to Christ was my pain, my life, my self rendered tolerable.
First words have formed me, though I’ve strayed from them. “In the beginning,” said St. John, “was the Word.” Benedict said “Listen, my son, to the master’s instructions. These are the words of a Father who loves you.” The psalmist was perhaps most apt. “Happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked.” To the increase of suffering, I skimmed over the words and it wrecked my serenity: there were too many emotions, too many distractions, too many shiny little bits of resentment to grab at.
A happy old monk once said “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again till next time.” Today, I will begin. Morning by morning, when you waken my ear, I will listen. I will not seek a gladness that’s a commodity, I will not seek bliss induced by others: the Word is bigger than I am, and after all, I am nailed to it. “Happy indeed is the man. Happy, in deed.” May I disappear in the doing of the Word.
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