Someone asked me why I have a blog last night and I said I originally
started it when we found the tumor to keep people updated on my journey to
physical recovery. Well, I guess now I should keep you updated on my journey to
spiritual recovery.
Last December began the hardest year of my life. Don’t ask
my why; it was like a switch flipped and my mental health went haywire. I had
never struggled with anxiety like this before… I was profoundly afraid to be
alive. In the ensuing nine months, I would also have a series of manic,
depressive, and psychotic episodes (I have been diagnosed bipolar since my
freshman year of college). At first, I read my bible and devotionals
compulsively in a futile attempt to fix my head. Then I started taking my
Adderall (prescribed legally) late at night because nighttime made me so scared
and I didn’t want to face those last fading moments of consciousness before I
fell asleep (for some reason, those were the scariest moments of the day for
me). So I’d read, fueled by synthetic energy, until the wee hours of the morning. I also began drinking a single beer before bed because
I noticed that it made the intense nightmares cease. But eventually I was
drinking four blue moons a night just to face the darkness. By the way, I’m on a score of psychoactive drugs
that all say: DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL. I wasn’t even fazed by the reckless
nature of my actions.
The next admission I am afraid to make. I’ve been thinking
about this blog for weeks and about whether I should even mention it. But,
alas, I figure it might relate to somebody out there in the world. Another form
my reckless avoidance of the pain and emptiness of life has taken is sexual
promiscuity. I won’t go into detail, but I used men just like I used Adderall
and alcohol (and they used me too).
I take full responsibility for all of my actions. It was,
after all, me who was acting. But I began to hate God. I was the friend that
people looked up to in their walks with God, I was the devoted one, the
sexually pure one who hadn’t even dated all through college becaue I was
waiting on the man of God of my dreams. I prayed everyday for months for
strength to be sexually pure and to have godly integrity. Why did God give, or
allow me to have, this awful disease of the brain that literally drives me
crazy?
Then, the big, grand questions started arising: why does God
cause or allow suffering all over the globe? Why did God create individuals he
knew wouldn’t choose him and would thus suffer an eternity of hell? And,
finally, why did God create me? I so very much wish I wasn’t created, and it seems
like you should ask someone’s permission before you thrust them into the cruel,
dark realm of conscious existence.
Basically, I had two main questions for God: 1) are you
kind? and 2) how are you involved in our suffering? (do you cause it, or just
allow it, or something in between?). It seemed that everything else about
loving and knowing God depended on the answers to these two questions.
I was pondering these queries one day when I remembered a
story I heard about one of my friends while he was on a missions trip to
Kosovo. A woman who had been working with them unexpectedly died in the
hospital. My friend sat with her newly mourning husband for hours, and trust
me, those first few hours of acute mourning are chaotic, intense, and
confusing. “That. That is how I am involved in your suffering. I am present.” Evelyn
Underhill on the Advent of the Godman writes, “The depth and the richness of
his being are entirely unknown to us, poor little scraps as we are! And yet
unlimited life who is Love right through-who loves and is wholly present where
he loves, on every plane and at every point-so loved the world as to desire to
give his essential thought, the deepest secrets of his heart to this small,
fugitive, imperfect creation-to us.”
Karl Rahner wonders, “Is our grief taken from us simply
because you wept too? Is our surrender to finiteness no longer a terrible act
of despair, simply because you also capitulated? Does our road, which doesn’t
want to end, have a happy ending despite itself, just because you are traveling
with us?” #IgnatianWisdom ;) I believe our answers to these questions can
change everything for our lives. I sensed the God who I tried so hard to hate
saying, “It all comes down to a choice. You can choose to believe I am good or
not.” Kierkegaard called it a “leap of faith.” I immediately knew my answer:
I’m in.
But now that I’m in, what does that mean? I still pray
everyday that I could love God. I ask him to help me love him. I engage in
loving others because I am choosing to believe that God is love.
Coming to the end of this fateful and terrible year, I am
learning to love God again. But I sense it is much different than the first 7
years that I spent loving him. I describe it as a weathered love, a slower
love.
I now see myself more than ever as the sinful woman of the
streets in Luke 7:36-50. She enters the Pharisee’s home and uses her tears to
wash Jesus’ feet, she anoints him, and then wipes the evidence of messy
devotion with her hair. Normally after reading this passage, I’m like, “yeah I
would do that duh but like I’m glad Jesus doesn’t force me to because that
seems kinda gross aka my hair is too important for that.” Today, I considered
how I shower before I go on a date with a boy. I use my nicest shampoo to make
the smell of my hair irresistible to them. Today, I KNEW that the first chance
I get in heaven I am taking my hair down and washing Jesus’ nail-torn feet with
it. I understood taking the vehicle you used for some of your greatest sins
(the sinful woman most likely knew many men and would have normally used the
perfume to make them intoxicated by her) and rendering it back to Jesus. It is
profoundly intimate and abandoned. It’s how redemption works.
Finally, as I read the aforementioned passage by Evelyn
Underhill, I came across a phrase that arrested me: the Awful Privilege of the
Cross. Tears instantly formed in my weary eyes. Could it really be that, for
the joy set before him, Jesus valued the privilege of loving us through the
Cross? Oh, what wonder. How could I not love a man like that? You see, Jesus is
not only present with us in our suffering today; he participated in it himself
2000 years ago by entering our measly and upsetting yet full of potential
existence himself and completing it on the Cross. Oh, how could I not love a
man like that?
Pertinent links for some of the topics discussed in this
post:
Alcoholics Anonymous (also, Narcotics Anonymous)
National Alliance on Mental Illness
Luke 7:36-50
A song by Olivia Dyer about returning to God after pain and
sin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpg8WjYn2f4
