Reality Checks

Then everything started coming up.  In that state of silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind.  I felt like a junkie in detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged.  I cried a lot.  I prayed a lot.  It was difficult and it was terrifying, but this much I knew - I never didn't want to be there, and I never wished that anyone were there with me.  I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.

This is like Advanced Counseling for Patients.  It's what happens after you start to unravel yourself a bit and understand that stillness and solitude must come and reveal the rest.  It's the entering into pain, after finally having someone introduce you to it, and tell you its name.

I don't talk much about what it's been like for me to go to counseling the last two years.  For many people, it's simply too embarrassing (or possibly shameful) to hear.  I'm also not entirely convinced it's useful to explain the complexities, depth and sheer intensity of emotions, memories, connections and insights; they're mine, after all. 

But I do wonder at what it is exactly that draws some of us into this particular stage of growth: why do we willingly enter into this suffering and pain and hellish torment of the soul, despite having descriptions like the ones above, to warn us?  What prompted me?

Well, it helps that I didn't understand exactly what I'd be getting into until it was too late to back out.  I came to Bruce, our counselor, because our marriage had finally come to an impasse: I wasn't moving and neither was he.  Thankfully (by God's merciful grace), this was simply too painful for either of us to bear. 

But what actually drew me into the Mystery that she describes above - that strange, voluntary hell as we go through the process of looking at ourselves, at Reality - was a promise I read in a book, given to a woman who was just like me, standing at her own crossroads and faced with a choice to walk down the path or not: "you will have a better life than you could ever imagine".

Well, it sounded like another promise that Jesus gave, about life and, really, abundant life.  Obviously: yes, please.  So down I went into the rabbit hole.  And this woman (who I will reluctantly admit is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love) describes it well in the quote above.

I'm becoming a Reformed Mystic, I suppose, and marveling at all the mysteries in this world, and also at the funny joke God plays on us by giving us hints of the divine but also giving us bread, and wine and pudding and roller coasters and beaches.  The Incarnate and the Transcendent, together.