Two Truths

Two ideas to salvage for comfort if ever I'm stranded on a metaphysical island.

"God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:16)
"Our nature is founded in movement; absolute stillness is death" (Pascal).

*Possible Greek lexicon for the term "love".

Loss

So seductively easy to lose myself in real glowing moments of blistering happiness, God-given moments of happiness, blessings in the truest sense of the word -- over my clarified life meaning, over the ones I love, over my abilities, over even my spiritual maturation -- and lose God completely, and not even think about Him until the end of the day when silence inevitably catches me. Then I know why these moments of happiness have spaces, why there is even an abiding sense of anxiety that underlies all of it, why I can't enjoy them as fully as I can. You can be happy and in elated awe at the polyphonic goodness of life, and yet still not have any real engagement with it, still not have a deeply spiritual, will-based love of it. She dances with you, scintillating in her glory, but are you really taking your turn to share the lead?

On Relating

A real psychologist, who has the skill to understand the mountains and valleys of others in the moment, is almost antithetical to the psychologist on paper -- the researcher, the professor. A lot of people make this mistake. You're good at reading people, you have a knack for personality theories, you love the sacred interaction between two souls, and you love being the healer in person's history that has had little else but tormentors and microstessors -- well then, I'm going to study psychology. But you'd be surprised. This intuitive, caring compass for others gets buried away in latency, or at the very least severely mediated, by statistical analyses, hours of research, experimental and control groups, speculation with experts, main effect or no main effect, type type type your twenty-eight pages, prayers for publication.

This is all vital, but a therapist needs warm bodies, as much as the selves who own these bodies need him. The therapist contains the remnants of the archetypal sage. There's something terribly sacred here. All other life is hustle and bustle, self annihilation in worries and work, kids and spouses, love and loss. The therapist genuinely smiles as she opens the door for her client, and even though the sheer insanity of society pours through, the moment the lock clicks all these poisonous fumes dissolve away. Now we're alone. Now we can talk. Now there's intimacy, and with it the lucidity of pure relation and the beginnings of the God-only-knows power of being born again to wholeness. Oh, clients are rarely ever that collaborative, but that's the direction, contrary to all other directions the world prefers -- directions that lead to looking beyond, to self concealment, to the loss of really feeling others in the moment, to fear of loving and being loved, to fear of living. Simply walking this sanctified direction is the right way, towards listening to yourself, towards the salvation of personal meaning. It's the contagious world that's broken first. And it's the simple act of being there that convinces the needful that they're not as lost as they believe. This being there, this listening and carefully responding, this value of the other beyond his constituents of personality -- that's really love, isn't it? Therapists are professional lovers.

Ridiculous

All this week I've been looking beyond a concrete beyond, into the sheer insanity of possibilities. It's not, as it should be, "what will I emphasize as a therapist for the next two years, what will my thesis be, how will I develop my skills before practicum?" but rather a complete bypass of this flesh carrying future into plans for doctoral work in what and where, plans for licensure in psychology, plans for research in preferred areas. And then I come back to myself in bewilderment, smiling ironically at how much the child element still sticks around no matter how many rungs up the latter of maturity I've climbed, and find God smiling too as an eternal word benevolently sears my soul: you're a fiction writer first, you know.

What did I lack in all this baseless planning? Not intelligence, prudence, modesty, calculation, resignation, but one very basic, all-important thing. Myself. All this long-term, far-sighted planning is an escape from becoming who we're meant to be. We're cowards and so we clamber towards a cold but clear futurity, away from the healing embers of sacrificial selfhood.

Therapy; or, Wisdom in Movement

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?:" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon I replied, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.
-- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Cont.

And what is the pulse behind this doubt? That I am eclectic to the core, a mastermind, and my intellectual curiosity has spoiled me. Yet the world thrives on the singular. Try Pascal again: it is better to learn a little of everything than a lot of one thing. Not these days! My curse: I know a modest amount of everything, and everything tantalizes me to a potential career. But I must choose one thing or two, because the world thrives on the singular. I am a rainbow in a monochrome world.

But the devil of the crowd mocks back, filling the cracks of semivictorious silence: the world thrives on the singular.

Doubt

This is my year of doubt. More than any other time in my life uncertainty, trepidation, insecurity, and all associated psychosomatic bedfellows have harassed my footsteps like a starving stray dog. And yet, so very interestingly, this has been my year of signs, in the purest divine sense.

Let me tell you about signs, ye contemplative theists. Signs do nothing to crystallize faith. At their most useful, signs satisfy the insatiable hunger pangs of doubt, but only if this doubt has a glimmer of faith to save it. They've pulled me out of an extrinsic depression, where my center was sanctified through faith and I still had a hope that couldn't reach the periphery of myself, at very important times. I doubted to the point where I was choked with my thoughts; then a sigh became my prayer, and lo, an impossible coincidence drifted from the world and saved me. Euphoria was reborn, and everything seemed right.

But only for a season. I find myself looking back on signs as coincidences, like a crestfallen lover looking back on his moments of passion while bitterly labeling them empty, even though they truly were earth shattering moments of life unrutting itself to smile at him. I know they weren't just coincidences. But that doesn't matter: I need a cure now, and if I had faith at the moment of thoughts like these, thoughts like these would be entirely superfluous. Faith provides its own inner proof. The heart has its reasons which the heart knows not, as Pascal scintillatingly said.

Signs dance with doubt because -- it has to be -- I am being pressed to my limit, because this is the crucial time that determines the outcome. Yet if I had a faith that pervaded every second of who I am, I wouldn't even need signs, would I? I need signs because I overvalue the finite, and this only because I'm not moving toward eternity. Once again I have to catch myself and backhand the flaccid fear that tags me: off to hell, world. What comes, comes, and I'm doing the only thing I can.

Leap before you look, child. It's all Maya anyways.