Monday, February 21, 2011

Crisis Reconciliation

C S Lewis describes how grief returns upon itself in crazy twists and turns where one walks through a terrain and is confused because they've already been there before. One wonders why they're passing through again. And then there's the brain's remarkable protective functioning of being unable to process more than one "issue"-the most life-threatening one- at a time in traumatic situation.

So then, add in the spiritual crisis too, and you have one enormous mess. The very idea that this mess is going to get sorted out whether one likes it or not is VERY overwhelming. How in the world does one even proceed?

I literally feel like my brain has become a spiritual and psychological experiment. Just when I feel I've reconciled one teensy string, another huge ball of tangled mess is violently thrown in and that string is suddenly tangled into hundreds of others.

I wasn't even aware of these lurking "sorting outs" that were coming my way. But new things have caused a whirlwind of them. It's remarkable how God uses community to bring us into closer communion with  him.

I made the statement to S a few weeks ago that "I feel like my head is coming out of the abyss and entering humanity again." But it feels like Blast From the Past. I'm coming into the same town, but everything is different. But instead of the town being the "different," I'm the different. I'm having to reorder everything.

It's quite a feeling when one suddenly realizes that the past- however -many- years have felt like being "dead" and now one feels "alive". And that "alive" now has completely different qualities than it did before. And that scripts for this "alive" are completely in God's hands.

These new things are causing me to address two things concurrently; to hold them in tension with the answer a complete mystery. Suffering as an integral part of life with Christ, and the prayerful response borne out of humility as a result of suffering.

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