I have a vision at the center of my soul: the vision of the temple with waters flowing out from under the threshold of the door, waters that flow out to feed a desert plain, flowing higher and higher, flooding the dust and penetrating beneath its wind-blown layers, eventually waking up the seeds that lay layers below, the faceless plain suddenly burgeoning into grassy meadows and a line of fruitful trees along the flowing river.
When I first came upon it, I knew this vision in Ezekiel prefigures the Temple, the Lord God, and, somehow Christ; I just did not know why, somehow, it pertained to me. Like certain poetic and prophetic images which call to us, intaglios already present, it seems, on the soul, perhaps from the moment of our existence (which is why we respond to them when we find them spoken to us in some way, either through words, the Word, or images), this image challenged me, as well as defined me. But I never understood it.
I have lived all my life also with terrible images and intuitions and in-pourings of radical abandonment, which always seemed a mystery to me, as my parents never did this to me: I had a loving family (not without problems, of course), and many tremendous gifts. It was that I saw it, when a young child, as daily images in Afghanistan, and they called to me: the beggar, the primitive, helpless mud huts, the children vulnerable to violence, the terrifying vision I had in 1974 that Afghanistan would be torn apart by fire; yet, there were gifts given, as well: beauty in Greece, love, relative wealth in so many ways. As a young person, I squandered many of these gifts in my flight from the abandonment and rejection I saw around me, and the resulting sins of despair, pride, and anger within me, lest it infect my life or lest I had to see myself as the marred creature I had become. One of the major ruptures in my life was to reject God because I felt I had trusted Him and been let down: I was a contemplative child--contemplation is not so lofty nor inaccessible, especially for a child--and I was His friend, His intimate; in my child's way, I knew how to listen to His silence; but as a child, I conflated peace in Him with peace in this life, and when that was shattered after we moved from Greece and I went through years of culture shock, loneliness, and bullying, I decided that He was not a very good friend. And so, I lost the Center of my life, and lived in my own shadow.
It took me ten years of running, of sin, of darkness and pain, and the grace of wounded healers in my life, to return to Him, and then almost ten more to come home to His Church, to a fuller communion with Him. I married a Socrates and my life of deep joy along with deeper suffering began in earnest. Underneath it all, in the place where I meet God inside me, still lay that image of water flowing from the eastern side of the Temple. I bathed in that water through the Sacraments, and I struggled with the pain I saw within people around me, within me, in the very call of the wind and the animals: the cry of suffering that Dorothea hears continually, in Eliot's Middlemarch. It is a cry echoed always in my own heart: I cannot build walls so that I cannot hear it and remain myself—yet I cannot survive the pain I take in, the pain I cause, alone. It is a kind of double-bind, the kind Fr. Keating speaks of.
As I look back to the time I began to understand that suffering had a place in the life of a Christian, and that indeed, somehow, God entered into that suffering, I begin to understand that what I have suffered with and feared most is rejection: I see why I began to learn how to simply love those who also seemed to feel that rejection; I could help because I was living it, day in and day out, had been familiar with it since childhood. The greatest pain, though, was as I saw myself, in turn, reject and slowly close off to my life, as despite my attempts at love, the process of rejection went deep inside and manifested itself in my body as I suffered a miscarriage, and a subsequent chronic illness that seemed to have a thousand faces of rejection: foods I could not eat, extreme chemical sensitivity, sensitivity to a climate, an atmosphere, and thus a community I loved but could not live in any longer.
In that image at the center of my soul, the water from the Temple seemed to have dried up; the opening seemed walled up, or blocked. I felt only confusion, abandonment, and a terrible murkiness; I felt again that terrible forsaking, and I realized again that this lay at the center. But I could not understand it. I have always cried out for simple, clear, friendly conversation with God, a conversation in which I cannot, will not, put words in His mouth, for a clarity of the path ahead instead of my sinful, prideful, idiotic stumbling around in the murkiness. I have had moments of such freedom that I wanted only His will. But then the fears come again, the feelings of abandonment.
Over the last painful and beautiful years in the high mountains, in certain moments, the water would flow again, pure and clear, when I tried to get out of the way and identify with another's pain in mentoring, teaching, mothering, and friendship. It seems to me now that it was pure because I knew I could do nothing myself. It was the greatest joy, the joy of motherhood, like the joy I have in being the mother of my own children, aware that I am not the source of life for them. I was not crushed by others' suffering in the same way I am by my own; I knew simply that I must be a conduit and lay that suffering down at the foot of the Cross--and so I wore the carpet down between my office and the little college Adoration Chapel, where Christ waited to take on the pain.
But, like the loss of Greece, again I have felt my sin, again, and the sorrow of leaving that little office in the downstairs corridor. I think now I was reaching another layer of wall of rock, pride and sin in myself that had to be knocked down. All I know now is that I am, again, perhaps through my own faults, in a place of abandonment and insecurity, wrestling with rejection and my weaknesses. I am not the child anymore so quickly conflating the peace of this world with that of God, but I am that child at heart, heartbroken and alone in the dark. Here, in sunny California, among my beloved cypress, bougainvillea, near the ocean, I see, as one sees beyond a veil, along with the love and beauty in nature and in others, more suffering here in this society than I have since Afghanistan, and I again feel completely helpless to help; I simply feel the abandonment, the rejection, the rage, the despair. One of my young students here phrased it well: "Underneath the veneer of relentless positivity, is rage." It comes through me, seeking solace, and without God I would have nothing but confusion, fear, rage, and weakness to offer in return.
Listening to a priest's thoughts on contemplation, though, has perhaps connected me in a new way to that image of the Temple watering the desert. He spoke about a surrender to love, a kind of annihilation of self which allows us to transmit Christ to those around us. This is what I saw within myself, this is the deepest desire I have: to be Christ: I have wanted to heal, to bind up, to bring joy, to suffer alongside, to watch a soul light up again, freed from fear and despair--for others, especially my students, I have the vision of the light that is before them, that will become who they are, glowing love in the darkness, Christ's particular manifestation in them. I don't have that for myself, really; I feel inside, when I look at myself, only selfishness greedily eating up that light, pride taking over that light and turning it into a solipsistic neon sign.
And I keep crying out to God, to the Blessed Mother, for that simple conversation in the sunlight on the back porch, for the end to the rejection and abandonment and darkness and fear that I know are woven into my heart, at times blocking me away from everyone around me, even from the color and wind.
The priest-teacher said that God is humble because He allows His creation to be messed with, in the hopes that we will love Him, because one can only love via free will. And then I saw Christ on the Cross, looking down on His people, the ones who mocked and rejected, the ones who stayed in sorrow, the ones who ran from Him because He was not successful; I saw His look of love, the look that sometimes, just sometimes, I have felt coming through me towards a hurting young person, frightened and alone, sitting across from me, the look I can see in my brilliant, honest, humble husband, a Socrates often rejected, a gadfly. This look is us, yet not; it wasn't just me--it was Him with my will allowing His will, His look, to pass to others in that simple way that I long for myself, always. I only know to allow it through myself because I feel the same need, the same desire, the same poverty as the person across from me. I have had the infinite privilege at moments to be Fr. Nouwen's Wounded Healer.
I looked at that image of Him at the greatest moment of failure, on the Cross, taking pain into Himself, sin, rejection, even abandonment by the Father, and returning a look of love; I have said to students before that this look, at this moment, is so beyond what a human can do--this forgiveness, this overcoming, this flowing of pain in, love out--is so astounding, especially when we know who He is: our Creator, our King. Only the most sublime can reach the true depths of humility, pain, rejection, and abandonment: a rejection unmitigated by any pride or sin that deserves, in some way, that rejection: this rejection of the infinite, the sublime God is the deepest rejection possible, and so His look of love is the greatest love. This is another image that has, in the last two years, begun also to call to me, alongside that Temple image.
And then I saw it: water flowed from the side of the Temple, water and blood from the side of the Lord: I finally saw the meaning, the fulfillment of the image that had been pressed onto my soul, probably at my conception. It was the end, the purpose for my seeing and receiving that image of the desert, the waterless, the abandoned, the fruitless, and then the Temple with water flowing from under its threshold. On the Cross, it is no longer a trickle under the threshold, but a full opening, the veil and door of the Temple ripped open, as Christ's side is ripped open and water flows freely. He is the greater, more open door, as He is the greater Temple.
Somehow, through the priest's words that God calls us to also be emptied so that we may participate in His Divine Life, I saw who I am, my vocation, and it was true, and yet awful. I do not want it, know I will be perfectly terrible at it in my own efforts, but it simply is me. It is the only thing that makes sense of the pieces, the patchwork of my life: To be one of those little people who can be the Look from the Cross, the look that is both the precursor to the physical water flowing from His side, a symbol of the greater Water, and also the actual Water of Love flowing out from the side of the Temple, the Look of Love from the Cross--it is that which heals, a look which is with, not above, but with. God with man: Emmanuel.
I cannot do it, yet I am, have been in it, doing it in a broken, terrible way, in snitches and pieces. It is the listening ear, the watchful eyes, the simple things one can do for another in the day, for that is all He gives us; it is the openness to let love flow out, taking many forms (whether it is food for the hungry, or song in a wretched silence, or taking on spiritual or physical burdens); most of all, it is seeing the great beauty in another soul, without the blindness of fear or selfish ambition. I think now, for the opening in the Temple to flow through me, within me, I have to let Him do it, be it--that is the simplicity and beauty, the light yoke. I have been doing it all my life, but seeing it as a punishment, or the result of some lack in myself which somehow I must fix. I have many, many faults, and lacks, which must be fixed. But to stop and let Him be, again, the carpenter, the stoneworker, the architect, to let Him open the side, and to let Him be the Water, the One who upholds it and does it...
...and is this all? Is the end, the telos, a hanging on a Cross, strung between heaven and earth, yearning for the truth of God to flow out? My daughter reminded me, after reading a draft of these musings, that the Cross is the not the end; it is the beginning, in a sense; the opening of the side of Christ is eternal yet always fulfilled in a greater end: the Resurrection. By my daughter's admonition, I was taken back to when I was a young woman, about the same time I found the vision of the water flowing out of the Temple, and my beloved aunt asked me to choose a 'life verse": It was Philippians 3:10-11, St. Paul crying out, " I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead." The depths of humility and rejection were, are, plumbed by Jesus, and He conquered them, did a 'spiritual judo' on them, on evil, and have made them fruitful, the fertilizer for His people, for the world if it will receive Him; the water flowing from His side will result in endless orchards where once was only desert. I am, like millions of other small souls, called to join Him in this: "If by my life and death I can serve You..."
Don't fret because of evil men, or envy those who sin;
for like the grass they'll wither soon, like plants will die away;
trust in God, do good and dwell in safety in the land.
Delight in God alone and He will give to you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord, trust Him
and He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
and the justice of your cause, shine like the noonday sun.*
And now, with my 'mobile office' in tow, a super-rolly duffle bag, I again, at times, feel the water flowing out towards a young person sitting with me in various places around campus; Christ can love them through conversations about their intellectual thoughts and dreams, and their sorrows, all profound and weighty like the heaviness and softness of the Magi's gold. What a thing it is to find one's heart again, the pieces of one's deeper life in God come together, and to see it, and to say with St. Augustine, "Late...late.."Already I feel the failure; already I know that I will lapse into fear--but Lord, take it all, revive those who have, like me, become withered grass, turn the deserts into Your righteousness, Your justice, Your Look of Love, Emmanuel.
*Psalm 37
