Confession
O Lover,
I confess that I have moments when I wonder whether You and/or I are an illusion; whether religion and spirituality are mere human projections fueled by fear of finitude in general, mortality in particular; whether apophatic references to You like “darkness, “silence” or “emptiness” are actually euphemisms for “absence,” to say nothing of mere gibberish; whether You and el Diáblo are, finally, indistinguishable; whether despair, particularly when lubricated with Churchill’s “black dog” of depression, may be the most integrous stance of all; whether in the end the capitalist maw will devour its disenfranchised and its religious hucksters alike; whether “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10) is indeed Marx’s “opiate”; whether life-long learnings regarding the givenness of human agency or doubt as intrinsic to finitude may yet succumb to a damning perfectionism reaping only damnation. Yes, O Lover, this my confession is messy and disturbing. Kyrie eleison.
But such moments, occasionally extending into episodes, are more often exceptions, sometimes aggravated by my “two trees of monkeys” or carelessness with the black dog. These exceptions invariably imply the more common experience with which they are contrasted. Stated otherwise, they presuppose a state which is more, much more, prevalent albeit also aspirational.
But what precisely is the basis for that more common state? When I launched this blog I chose the word “ambushee” for its handle. Now, a dozen years later that term’s germaneness has only increased. I experience my life as a succession of ambushes, and You are Ambusher. Texts like the Psalter’s “Where can I go from Your Spirit?” (139:7) have variously haunted and enraptured my entire lifespan. I am a creature and not a god, and my earlier more frequent responses have been flight, “down the nights and down the days, . . .down the arches of the years, . . .down the labyrinthian ways of my own mind” in the memorable words of Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven. But in one way or another You have relentlessly pursued, stalked, preyed upon me. For decades that relentlessness was mostly bad news, for I feared You to be Exactor, Judge, and Punisher, perhaps even Devourer. Now, thanks principally to Your Self-disclosure in the Christ, my image of You most of the time is that of Lover.
These years that experience of You as Lover takes place primarily in the silence in which the atrophying of linearity, words, and images is becoming more friend than foe. I long to embrace more fully the Big Picture You have Self-disclosed in Your Christ: loving disposition sans exception, propensity to set catastrophe chrysalis-like on its head, drawer home of wanderers, dreamer of the ineffable and splendiferous. Stated otherwise, I am being drawn into Your M.O. in which my confusion and darkness (¶ #1) is being transformationally enfolded into Your tenacious commitment to make all things new (Apoc 21:5). Thus I declare to You far more than I understand: Qui tóllis peccáta múndi!
