A message given to West Hills Friends on 3/24/2019
To love at
all is to be vulnerable. Love anything
and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact
you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all engagements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of
your selfishness. But in that casket,
safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken, it will become
unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable.
~C.S. Lewis
I think that’s a really interesting question. For me, like many of you, the Bible once served as true North, but has since failed to live up to the task, or taken on a different role. But for those of us who grew up with a source of objective morality, when that loses its power, where are we to turn for guidance? When asked what my true north is, I interpret the question through the lens of someone who had one, and has lost it.
Pondering
true north during silence, the images that kept rising for me come from the
book I’ve returned to most often since college.
The book is called The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays by Albert
Camus. It contains essays on a topic I
spend a lot of time thinking about: how difficult life is, and how it’s so much
easier to quit in the face of hardship than to push through it. With so many ways for life to be difficult,
how does a person maintain joy in the face of everything trying to take it
away.
To begin a
bit of my story as of late, I’d like to quote from one of the early essays in
Camus’ book:
“Like great
works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse or a repulsion
in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in
consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings take with them their own
universe, splendid or abject. They light
up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their
climate.”
One of the
battles I’ve faced in the past few years is how to be a functioning rational
person while also having an emotional landscape that isn’t a flat line. Halfway through college, between the end of
an engagement, my parents’ divorce, and the loss of my childhood faith, my body
decided it was done having a wide variety of emotions. I spent the ages of 20-34 mostly content,
fairly peaceful, and completely cut off from emotions like romantic love, joy,
and anxiety. My days were routine, my
jobs were routine, my marriage was routine.
As a
teenager, my emotional landscape was just the opposite. I was nearly obsessed with the idea of having
a soulmate. I’d sit in my room listening
to Jars of Clay albums, halfway singing worship songs to Jesus, and halfway
sending those same words to whichever person I had a crush on at the time. Christian music is funny that way. I was nearly always anxious, anticipating the
next youth group event where a crush might be present. I loved Bible camp, then fell into deep
depression after coming home, where there wasn’t any more worship music or
campfire story time. My journals reek of
desperation. Desperation to be seen
completely, to see another completely, to bond souls with someone who would do
the same with me.
My shift in
college took all of that desperation away.
I was no longer concerned with finding a soulmate. I wasn’t much concerned with love at all. I came to value consistency as the ideal
goal. Consistency did not move me up and
down like a small boat in the ocean. It
didn’t cost me sleep, or cause deep depression.
The highs weren’t very high, but the lows also weren’t very low. I was satisfied with the trade off, though I
wasn’t aware that’s what had happened.
If Bono couldn’t find what he was looking for, what hope did I have?
The summer
of 2012 sent the first meteor into my emotional walls. I lost my job in unceremonious fashion, a job
I had planned to retire from. All of a
sudden my sense of security, and consistency, was gone. My entire financial future now rested on the
job market, and my pregnant wife. During
this time I could barely get off the couch.
I spent hours staring at the wall, full of dread. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t
find motivation to do much of anything. After
2 weeks of this, we moved from our home into Vancouver into my mother’s
basement. That move allowed the shock to
subside, and I slowly found the ability to function again. I had to run away in order to move forward. 2 months into this period of my life, I first
visited West Hills Friends. 3 months
after that, my son was born.
The second crack
my emotional walls came in the summer of 2016.
My wife had been on her own journey during this time. First, she realized she was bisexual. Not long after, she came to identify as
polyamorous. Those of you present in
this meeting around that time may have been present for her messages on these
topics. Our marriage had suddenly become
much more interesting. We would spend
night after night processing her discoveries, and what it meant for us. As I am prone to do, I read all the books I
could find, and eventually came to find that I agreed with the principles of
polyamory, even if I wasn’t sure it would ever happen for me. I wasn’t much for emotions, after all. And without the emotions, what’s the point?
It’s a
strange thing to hear that your one and only doesn’t necessarily want you to be
her one and only. I managed pretty
well. But then I met someone who saw me
for who I was, and now I wasn’t sure I wanted to be my wife’s one and
only. That’s when emotions broke my
brain again. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I could
barely get off the couch. The emotions
were too much for my brain to handle. The
only way out was to walk away from the stress point. Once again, I had to run
in order to move forward. I did, and my ability to function returned
again.
I want to
return to Camus for a moment. In the
myth, Sisyphus escaped from the underworld in order to castigate his wife, who
had wronged him while he was alive. As
punishment, the gods forced him to roll a boulder up a mountain, only to have
it roll back down once he reached the top.
He was to perform this menial task for eternity. Camus uses this myth as a metaphor for the
struggles of our daily lives. We too
have boulders we push up mountains every day.
And every once in awhile, there is a pause. The stone rolls down the hill, and we turn to
look down upon it, then begin the walk back down the mountain.
Camus is
fascinated by what must go through the mind of Sisyphus as he returns to his
stone. If this is his fate, his body has
no choice about what it will do. But his
mind does. In his mind, there are no
chains, or boulders, or mountains. The
power to be peaceful, or loving, or joyous, still exists in the mind. And if our boulders are never going to stop,
perhaps the only way forward is to find a way to love our punishment. To quote Camus again:
“I leave
Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burdens
again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher
fidelity that negates gods and raises rocks.
He too concludes that all is well.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile
nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled
mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the height is
enough to fill man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
As of now,
I’m 3 months in to a new battle against overwhelming emotions. It too has left me full of dread and anxiety,
unable to eat or sleep. But over the
last few years I’ve learned through experience that I am capable of setting
self-improvement goals and following through on them. When the dreaded anxieties have arrived, I’ve
always run away. This time, I decided
I’m not going to run. This time, I’m
already in the process of finding out what’s on the other side. I’ve begun therapy for the first time in my
life. I’m practicing having and
expressing emotions every day. And I’m
following Sisyphus’ lead. I too will
find a way to be happy while I’m rolling my boulder up the hill. And when I get to the top, I’ll appreciate
the view before walking down and starting all over again. There must be joy to be found in pain and
difficulty. I’m determined to prove this
true.
Queries:
What parts
of yourself feel too difficult to change?What would you gain if you managed to change them?
What would you lose?
Have you ever surprised yourself by accomplishing something you’d previously believed was impossible?
