H,
I have not written you a letter in a long time. I started to today and so I went back in time to the old letters to try and get a sense of what I used to say. The chords were all old. I understood the music being played but the recent upheavals had become the distance between the ideal and the real person beyond my best intentions. As Chris would say: “Marcus Aurelius had a dream. This is not it. This is not it.” Or something to that effect.
Yet before I bore you with tales of how I did not become my own dream for myself I should ask how you are doing. How are you? We talk all the time but it is not really talking. It is all business and avoidance and trying to keep up with things. It is like when we were younger it was somehow easier to talk. Now, life is political. We are always looking for the right thing to say or the right person to be. We are avoiding things. We are holding on for dear life more than just living a full life. We are talking more but saying less of anything substantial. Life has become a sequence of transactions where we vainly strive to find relevance in other lives and then smart and snort when they do not crown us kings of the jungle. We are running to make up time but we are further away than when we first believed. Well, at least it feels this way.
I do not need to explore in detail the great changes that have occurred in my life. You know that story all too well. My reaction has been odd, even to myself. I have seen outside my own personal narrative. In the very objective view of things this is a crash landing into open seas. In the much more universal sense of the reality we truly believe in, there is no difference. I have always been this fallen and I have always been this lost. I thought I needed a few turns left or right but I was nowhere near that old sense of self. The thing has happened to me in a series of slight twists and the drama is episodic. I do not need to declare it in one long sentence. This is a long life. I have time to get where I am going.
Isn’t it funny that waking up to God is slower than we imagine? It is a long series of false starts and failed trips to glory until we let true glory in. I do not even think I have hit it yet. There are still vestiges and castles of wrongdoing that have mounted sentries and dug in for a long war. The long winter of the soul may come soon.
Yet, I fell in love with this idea a long time ago. It hit me in the playgrounds of my very young mind that the world was not random and there was a message in the well of being alive. It hits me still now. This is the point where I give up. This is the point where I say I have done too many things wrong and too little things right and there is no use for me. But I am not sad. I am not even scared. I am certainly not giving up. Another story is building in my ear and in my heart. It is a beautiful piece of literature and it claims it has the song of the eternal in it. It makes all foibles of this dress rehearsal life seem like the passing of things so that the things that will not pass may arrive. I feel in my tired soul, the pressure of a deep sleep coming. Yet, I am not afraid. Sleep is just the other side of waking up.
Amen.