A few years ago, James (my older brother) and I were up late in the back room of our house, talking about philosophy and life and ourselves (a common occurrence over our high school years). I remember describing myself as a "passionate person," in the sense that I want to fully experience whatever I am feeling in the moment. We talked about the pros and cons of that, and decided that intensified negative emotions like sadness, or anger, or jealousy are outweighed, overall, by immense joy. Yes, we were crazy kids who enjoyed dissecting our psyches too much.
This story came to mind because the idea of living in the moment seems almost beyond reach right now. In the second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book, Lena describes feeling too stretched out. In various books, characters have the feeling of watching themselves from afar as they do things. When I feel detached from reality like this, it's akin to the color seeping out from the scenes of my life and leaving them in grayscale. I'm walking on a stone street by a river in a city I don't know, stuck in black and white; I sit on a bench, and the rain falls all around me, but I don't feel it. Maybe I'm the indifferent heroine of The Postal Service's song, "Clark Gable."
This entry is disconnected and wandering because that's how I feel. I've already missed my family much more this year than I did last year. I miss Seattle too, that feeling of autumn with the smoky air and the misty rain. I have a boyfriend who'll remain 3,000 miles away from me until Thanksgiving. And tonight my mom called to tell me that my Grandpa probably won't make it through the night. He's been deteriorating for a while, and we thought he was close to death earlier this summer.
Death is an odd phenomenon. The ultimate gray, if you will (Tolkien's "Gray havens"), death seems a place of mossy, quiet decomposition. Even in the Bible, the Hebrew 'sheol' evokes images of a shadowy underworld. Rocky Votolato wrote, "I'm going down to sleep on the bottom of the ocean...there's a secret place that I know, and if I could I'd dig a grave and then climb underground for good" ("White Daisy Passing"). This summer, I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Before that, I'd never read anything explicitly about death.
Dr. Glyer said (and I believe she was paraphrasing Lewis) that death is one of the strongest clues we have to the fact that we are eternal beings. It's so unnatural. When someone gets ripped out of our lives like a picture from a magazine, how can we read the page? The edge is jagged--raw--and the torn remnants of the page are left to be creased and crumpled as the rest of the magazine goes on living, unscathed.
As Shauna Niequist reminded the student body of APU at chapel on Friday, God brings life out of death. We often want to forget about the death part and skip to life. But before He resurrects us, we have to die.
The last week was one of death for me; death of idolatry, death of self-pity, death of absorption in my struggles. Missing someone, dead or alive, is a feeling that makes each of those things--idolatry, self-pity, absorption in my struggles--far too easy. It interferes with how I live in the moment, for the thought of what or who I'm missing invades my studies, my work, my eating, my waking.
Here, I'm throwing out more lyrics, because this song came to mind. It's one of the few songs that hit me the first time I heard it. Jon Foreman wrote this:
"And I said, 'Please,
Don't talk about the end
Don't talk about how every living thing goes away'
And she said, 'Friend,
All along, thought I was learning how to take
How to bend, not how to break
How to laugh, not how to cry
But really
I've been learning how to die'"
If I were to choose one biblical connection that's floating around in my head right now, it would be from Hebrews 11.
Verses 13-16,
"All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country--a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them."
Then, verses 38-40,
"The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect."
We can grasp bits and pieces of this death-to-life concept while we're here on earth, but we cannot grasp what we hope for--Whom we place our hope in. We will die hoping. We will long for a better country. We will wander. Perhaps this is why we miss people; perhaps God wired us with those emotions to remind us to long for something, someone.
But one day, we will be made perfect. The author of Hebrews gives the children of faith the eulogy that every human on this earth wants: "The world was not worthy of them." We want to be made for something more. We want to exceed our surroundings.
When I don't know how to feel alive--when the color is gone, because it sometimes is--I declare my life anyway. Job said, "Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him" (13:15). I am a daughter of the Living God, raised with Christ, and so I rejoice in Revelation 21-22, and maybe sing something like what The Afters wrote,
"My heart is in You
Where You go
You carry me
I bleed if You bleed
Your heart beats
Inside of me
You're keeping me alive...
You're like the morning air
Before the light arrives
No more lonely and
No more night
No more secrets to hide"
"I will extol the LORD at all times; His praise will always be on my lips. My soul will boast in the LORD; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Glorify the LORD with me; let us exalt His name together."--Psalm 34:1-3
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