You: like a ghost of yourself flitting in and out of my thoughts.
In just the same way I long to be home while trapped overnight--unexpectedly--in Atlanta, or I long for the monks and their gentleness when I am at the office, or when I am with the monks I ask why I am not at home, or when I am home I look around at the neglected rooms and put them off, or I think of the little papers to be graded, I think of all the Blake I must read and present, of the emails I must write, of meetings to set up, I think of all the cat hair I must vacuum up, and I put it off, all of it--you--for I am partly bored and partly lonely and partly always dwelling either in memory or in anticipation of stuff coming up. As for the present, I rarely bear with its little deaths for long. I open a browser on the screen and spend hours searching for the answer to a student's question. I watch a movie when at last, in the evening, the world I've made pauses long enough to sleep.
Always wanting to be elsewhere--always heading elsewhere. What is this restlessness, Lord? Against my fantasy of staying put? "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." We are broken in such weird ways. I'm inclined to think fear is a wakeful state, but no: fear is a sleepy-headed demon with all of its heads heading anywhere but here. I am overwhelmed by my escapes. By how I carry them, by how I use them to carry me, by how I don't recognize them, by how I do. "Watch and pray," you said. And instead, incredibly, they slept.
I am certain that if I am to touch you, it must be Here, where I must be stripped of all I hold close, of all I love, of all that comforts me and lulls me to sleep. I am certain now that terror trounces beauty. That while I go looking for your beauty, you keep bringing me back to how it annihilates every concrete manifestation of itself, to how it erases itself, empties out, and points to the abyss of the genesis. Your vast wound. Which is my wound.
Today, Holy Thursday, an anniversary of my first confession, two years now. It feels like a wound.
I give myself little reminders to keep you from my ghosts and fail. At fasting. At renouncing my stupid habits--diet soda, cigarettes, sloth. And I'm selective about what I'll renounce, too. I will not take cold showers or sleep on the floor, no, for my mind cannot make sense of those particular self-inflictions--I am sure you could do less with me were I crumpling emotionally like wet Kleenex from sleep deprivation--I am sure cold showers are too much like sexual repressions. But of constant or enduring physical discomforts, the ones that call me back to my body, which is your body, I understand, I see perfectly well why the saints put them to work. The cilice, the hairshirt. The fasting. In fact, these are easy compared to what you would have me prune.
Suffering, Fr said once, is a shortcut to the heart. So many times I miss the profundity of what he says because my first reaction is to understand as if I understand entirely. What did he mean? That suffering might be the only experience that is always present-tense. Pain itself is not very imaginative. It is haunted, certainly, but those hauntings produce afflictions in the immediate sense of affliction. Trauma is not recollection or even replication, but repetition in the purest sense of the word. It inflicts again with some of the old and with much that is new, and carries it forward. When Kierkegaard wondered whether repetition was ever possible, he was thinking of love, of happy love, and decided that in fact only recollection, only memory, is available to us, while repetition, which is beyond hope, becomes merely that in becoming, a hope, and is otherwise humanly impossible.
But it seems to me now that pain dwells within your secret, the one that knows what knowing is beyond time and space where again is meaningless against ever.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.
Amen.
***
Repetition's love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection's love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection--it has the blissful security of the moment. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags. (131-2)***
Kierkegaard, Repetition
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