Confessions

Something weird happens when you try to write things to impress people; you come off as sounding fake and contrived with little of anything of substance following. I have tried to construct or maybe narrate something from the last four months, months that still need unpacking and expounding. Every time I’ve tried it fizzles out after a paragraph or two. If we are to attempt, like Augustine, to narrate our lives as confession, I realize there’s much to confess. Part of the way my church tells their story is told in two ways, an outer story and an inner one. Usually the more interesting stories are always the ones that tell something beyond the facts of people, places, dates, and events. Very rarely is my heart captured by merely someone’s “people, places, dates, and events.” It gets boring, especially when the facts look nothing like mine. It’s the inner story that my heart always connects to and where mine and others’ can intersect, were things like joy and pain call home.

For confession to mean anything it requires memory, truthful and honest memory. It means letting your arms go limp and giving up the defenses that keep others out. It seems that for many like me, remembering the truth is a struggle. As a certain Texan brick layer and theologian has confessed before God, “We refuse to remember because memory is just another name for pain—dull, meaningless pain that makes us numb. But you would have us be a passionate people, filled with the Spirit, possessed by memory. We fear that if we remember, the pain will return and kill our present. ” I’ve come to see how much of my life and energy is spent on running from and avoiding any form of discomfort or pain. Weeks, it seems, are wasted wandering through the woods so those feelings are never felt. If I’ve been shown anything from the last four months, wading through both cancer and heartbreak, I’ve known for the first time what it’s like to be inducted into suffering, a suffering you can’t avoid.

I feel guilty for calling my pain suffering when there are so many in the world who know a suffering that I will never know being born white, wealthy, and American, but to say otherwise would be dishonest. I fear it might be impossible to describe it unless you yourself have been through it. But it’s also dishonest if I leave this part out. When asked before how I felt when I first got the diagnosis I expressed how I was in shock, afraid, like time had slowed and my future had taken a hard left. But I remember as I was leaving slowly through the white sterile halls, before I even got to the elevator, I felt three sets of arms crowding around me. I knew I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded. As a piercing love flowed into my heart, I knew someone immensely larger than both myself and cancer was with me. Soon I felt those arms reaching out through panicked phone conversations, weeping embraces, a continuously filled hospital chair rocking through the night, and behind a quiet curtain accompanied with whispers saying that “I’ve got you. I know the way home.”

I know it may sound cliché but I felt it, Christ was with me in it.  Just has he is with those now suffering in Haiti and with anyone else in the world who knows what it is to suffer, he was with me. That somehow this part of being human in this world right now is one of the things he’s setting right. But now, as I continue to heal and move forward, I can see that Christ doesn’t want me to continue to run from emptiness and suffering. It creates its own problems and usually prolongs it. No, His desire is not for us to carve out our own shelters to keep us from feeling. Suffering stretched arms on a cross are the only form of genuine peace there is.

I pray now with St. Brendan of Clonfert,

Lord, I will trust You, help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, can I trust You to be stronger than each storm in me?

Do I still yearn for your glory to lighten on me?

I will show others the care You’ve given me.

I determine amidst all uncertainty always to trust.

I choose to live beyond regret, and let you recreate my life.

I believe You will make a way for me and provide for me, if only I trust You and obey.

I will trust in the darkness and know that my times are still in Your hand.

I will believe You for my future, chapter by chapter, until all the story is written.

Focus my mind and my heart upon You, my attention always on You without alteration.

Strengthen me with your blessing and appoint me the task. Teach me to live with eternity in view.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven.

Feed me,

and, somehow,

make my obedience count for You.