A Wednesday Refrain

It's Wednesday today, the smack-dab-middle of the week; I didn't sleep again last night. Before the sun was up, my spirit was already bent beneath the weight of the day, like the trees under this new snowfall. A silent bearing, a stark remaining.

My work is hard. I'm three years in, but there were three years before that, and four before that. Maybe it's not the duration so much as the intensity, the all-of-me that it requires, the vigilance and the attunement and the background-app-refresh of working with complex ideas day in and day out. Being a theologian means pondering the unknowable yet not turning away, almost as if what can't be known urgently must be known. 

And indeed, it must.

Or maybe the hard part is not the work itself, but coming to realize that who I am and what I produce is always going to be at the fringes of my profession. It's a reckoning with loneliness, I suppose. To look around and realize the brightest minds in bioethics are always going to see me as a fringe critique, read me with skepticism, and look disparagingly on my work as if I'm out of touch -- either a catastrophist or an idealist, and in any case overly concerned with metaphysics.

Yes, today the weight on my chest and the lump in my throat is the question, "What if my committee fails my comps paper?" But it's more than that. It's really about a whole career of wondering if I'm wrong, if I'll always be going it alone outside the mainstream of bioethics.

I know deep down that I will be (partly, largely) alone in the mainstream, and that actually that's exactly where I'm supposed to be. But it doesn't take away the weight of rejection and failure, my deep fear of being wrong or bad, my "reaction to the primal catastrophe, the loss of the connection to real wholeness, the very ground of our being" (as my enneagram emails tell me).

The only thing to do is to bear it, like the trees bear the snow, without urgency or struggle. To bear the weight and keep working, keep standing in the breach of the unknown, and reaching to grasp in the end what is only yearned for now. For comfort today, nothing else will do besides Rudyard Kipling's wise assurance that:

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,

When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,

We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an æon or two,

Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.

 

And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;         

They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.

They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;

They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

 

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;

And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,

But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

Rudyard Kipling