Something in me is dying; is it some essential part, or a persona that needs to be shed? Am I,whole, entire, in some kind of death throe? I cannot tell if it is a death of hope, or a death of that part of me sold into slavery to the opinions of others, to success, to being seen. It feels the same: so I wake in the night, most nights, in some kind of labor, in panic; I have seen the death process, and sometimes it is a long one, the body fighting tooth and nail, without reason, to keep the organism alive--whether the soul is on board or not--to the point that I've seen non-fatal doses of morphine sometimes given 'to knock back' the fury of the body, the panicked attempts to protect important organs, to let the soul decide. A difficult, fine line, which I don't quite understand.
For ten years now, I have watched my body going through this process in a milder way--I have been on the fringes, the edges, of that most intense process I have seen others go through in hospitals and nursing homes and bedrooms. I think, actually, for us all this process goes on over a lifetime, as George Herbert describes in his poem "Mortification": "the swaddling clothes the winding sheet"; "the music of youth the death knell." Sometimes, when we fight long-term illness, in my case, the vacuously-named 'dysbiosis.' it is a parable for the same needed in the soul, a harbinger of the Lord, a preparation, as it has been, I think, in my case.
Does the soul, like the body, resist death without distinguishing a necessary death from a harmful one? How does one distinguish the death of self from the death of hope, especially when one is selfish? Wouldn't the death of self feel like death of all that one has placed value upon, all things that made one happy, what one looked forward to? For one like myself who has always struggled particularly with easy discouragement and resulting depression, how do I know the difference?
I'm beginning to wonder if, in the state I'm in, the habit of self-absorption, I can only sit in the dark and trust God. Inside myself, I see a light over a dark hill which is the boundary of the dark valley I live in now; I sense, rather than see, some path I must walk in order to get to that light--it is a path of death, or rather, perhaps, a turning, a deeper repentance that feels, to my selfish heart like death, in which I begin to walk after St. Francis in spirit, after those who were given the grace to actually die to self. To me it is too big; I have always lived in fear of losing out. I've been attached to so much under the guise of not being attached to much; it isn't about something I'm supposed to do in the eyes of anybody outside myself. I can sense a deep choice the Lord is laying out in front of me, but just like bodily death, everything around me, inside of me, is scrambling to hold onto what I know--my doubts, my anger, my fears, my grievances, my smaller loves, especially that of how I am seen. I am in a limbo of irreconcilable things, like the cruelty and abandonment I experience and see in the world with God's love and providence.
What is the choice? I can't frame it well, for it is in a much more subtle language than any human language. It is a hand held out, someone waiting for an answer, a kind of surrender, a change of focus, a change of treasure--a sparkling one for a lump in the dark--a step in the dark, leading to an Other with whom I have wrestled, been angry at, and have loved all my life, best expressed in Herbert's poem, "The Pearl." It is, simply, a transfer of love--from the self to the Lord, who is difficult for me to love, because He has a different love language from mine. He doesn't hug me or often tell me what to do; I often feel abandoned. But it is because I must change my language, and learn His? Or will He teach me His? Perhaps it is that: a willingness to be taught, to listen anew, while yet still in the dark. I can't express it well.
I want to run, and jump, and say, 'Yes!" but my soul is still strangled by itself, still in the death throes most often in the hours of the night while I lay looking at the spider webs beside the ceiling beams, and I know these throes can go on for eternity, because the soul is eternal. I am in that valley, weighted down, shackled, and I have the key--or God is trying to open my hand so that He can use it. My heart is broken, my spirit crushed, my body likewise broken and crushed daily. Deep inside, the child that I am longs to simply run to Him, to find Him, but the adulteration has all the weight of an ocean of water, filling that dark valley, drowning my soul. I can only cry out to God. And so I do. I do.
