Keep Your Eyes Open
What is it that makes us run from our pain?
Turn our backs, avert our eyes. We are shy of ourselves. We hear the rumblings of the deep and sense the darkness that lies beneath our surface, a darkness that quickens the heart and the feet to run.
Why?
The murky blackness of our souls is something we are prone to sleep through, like the blackness of the night. There is mystery and terror there. There is the fear that if we face our pain it will rise up and flood our whole self, like an ocean the shore can't stop. I have felt this fear. I see it everywhere. And we turn off our awareness of the dark, we turn on every light in the house, anything to keep away the black corners and keep the monsters under the bed.
"Go back to sleep," we tell ourselves, and during the day, "Don't slow down." Run and run and run. Sadness and slowness and darkness and fear are ushered out to the prisons and hospitals, and when our own evil breaks out in the streets, like in Ferguson, we either ignore or fire quick "solutions" at the crowd.
There are no quick solutions.
The world is about keeping your eyes open.
The past year has taught me a little about remaining. It has taught me about staying planted in my shoes when darkness is inches from my nose. My own darkness - my fear and anxiety and the ugly parts of my soul - the parts of me that question God and feel abandoned and get the deep sense that the universe is an empty void with no meaning, all of which can come right up to the surface at 3am sometimes. The darkness of the world around me, inflicting needless pain, shooting innocent people, waging meaningless wars; the darkness of interpersonal pain, the kind we all inflict on each other and are reeling from as we move through the world, fighting our own instinct to retaliate.
I have been learning it will not all be fixed.
And that my job, instead, is to remain.
To see it all with both of my eyes, and not to avoid, but stay. When I go for really long runs, or any run for that matter, I teach myself to stay with the pain. Let it settle and stare me in the face, get to know it and the contours of its shape. You don't become an ultramarathoner by avoiding the pain, but by taking all the joy and anguish as elements of the story. The one story. Integrated and full, rising and falling like a good melody.
I heard an athlete say once, "If you have pain, you have bliss on tap." We humans cannot get to bliss without knowing our pain. Pain belongs just like joy. It all must first belong in us.
The hope I have is that the Story of us all, of God and the world, is one where everything belongs. Where the absolute terror of night and the bottomless ocean of pain we sometimes feel are integrated into the bliss we are promised. I don't think we can get to the end without the middle. I don't think we can go back into Eden the way we came. The angels are guarding that door, so that we go through the world's mountains and valleys before we make it back home. It will be a long journey, a long road, and there will be so many miles of uncertainty. It doesn't mean evil is right, but it means evil is part of the redemption, and it doesn't make sense but we can watch it happen.
We just have to keep our eyes open.
Turn our backs, avert our eyes. We are shy of ourselves. We hear the rumblings of the deep and sense the darkness that lies beneath our surface, a darkness that quickens the heart and the feet to run.
Why?
The murky blackness of our souls is something we are prone to sleep through, like the blackness of the night. There is mystery and terror there. There is the fear that if we face our pain it will rise up and flood our whole self, like an ocean the shore can't stop. I have felt this fear. I see it everywhere. And we turn off our awareness of the dark, we turn on every light in the house, anything to keep away the black corners and keep the monsters under the bed.
"Go back to sleep," we tell ourselves, and during the day, "Don't slow down." Run and run and run. Sadness and slowness and darkness and fear are ushered out to the prisons and hospitals, and when our own evil breaks out in the streets, like in Ferguson, we either ignore or fire quick "solutions" at the crowd.
There are no quick solutions.
The world is about keeping your eyes open.
The past year has taught me a little about remaining. It has taught me about staying planted in my shoes when darkness is inches from my nose. My own darkness - my fear and anxiety and the ugly parts of my soul - the parts of me that question God and feel abandoned and get the deep sense that the universe is an empty void with no meaning, all of which can come right up to the surface at 3am sometimes. The darkness of the world around me, inflicting needless pain, shooting innocent people, waging meaningless wars; the darkness of interpersonal pain, the kind we all inflict on each other and are reeling from as we move through the world, fighting our own instinct to retaliate.
I have been learning it will not all be fixed.
And that my job, instead, is to remain.
To see it all with both of my eyes, and not to avoid, but stay. When I go for really long runs, or any run for that matter, I teach myself to stay with the pain. Let it settle and stare me in the face, get to know it and the contours of its shape. You don't become an ultramarathoner by avoiding the pain, but by taking all the joy and anguish as elements of the story. The one story. Integrated and full, rising and falling like a good melody.
I heard an athlete say once, "If you have pain, you have bliss on tap." We humans cannot get to bliss without knowing our pain. Pain belongs just like joy. It all must first belong in us.
The hope I have is that the Story of us all, of God and the world, is one where everything belongs. Where the absolute terror of night and the bottomless ocean of pain we sometimes feel are integrated into the bliss we are promised. I don't think we can get to the end without the middle. I don't think we can go back into Eden the way we came. The angels are guarding that door, so that we go through the world's mountains and valleys before we make it back home. It will be a long journey, a long road, and there will be so many miles of uncertainty. It doesn't mean evil is right, but it means evil is part of the redemption, and it doesn't make sense but we can watch it happen.
We just have to keep our eyes open.
Du Dunkelheit, aus der ich stamme
by Rilke
You, darkness, of whom I am born --
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.
But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations -- just as they are.
It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.
Comments
Post a Comment