The Joy of a Hypocrite: God Breaking Glass Walls

I've had a journal entry pulsating in my thoughts like breath through lungs for weeks now:

What is wrong with me? 

...I'm such a hypocrite. 

Like a starved and travel-worn beggar, I was given the food and shelter I so desperately longed and called for, and the second such comfort, companionship, and safety is known, all I want to do is flee. 

Like a cave-exiled creature so bereft of the light of the sun that its eyes have glossed over with blindness. This lack of sight is so intense that once sunlight, the warmth of what is truly good and true and beautiful, reaches those seeking pupils, the creature shrieks in agony and scurries back into its hole. 

I've tried to journal about this for weeks, but I can never get past the greeting of the entry. I always freeze up, and throw the blank pages across the room. 

Hypocrisy in one of its truest and most acute forms is that hypocrisy which lends itself to questioning that life we begged to receive, but once it is at last handed to us, we panic and are paralyzed. 

There can be some pardon given, I suppose. If a wanderer has been denied any substantial food for an extended period of time, the last thing that beggar will be able to do is to stuff themselves with all the food they can get their hands on. Their body wouldn't be able to handle it. 

Which is where all these cryptic and symbolic images make sense: that which I have longed for my entire life is also the source of more crippling fear and consuming hope that I can hardly comprehend its existence, let alone its reality in my life. 

But this is more than just the realization that there is life outside of your cave, that true reality can, and does, function outside of that cave inside yourself. And what's more--to realize in one fell swoop that this said cave is not a cave at all. It was never a true shelter for you. Nothing more than a haphazard shelter from the rain, you took to it out of fear and loneliness, out of a lack of any other abode or place to call home. It was never meant to be your home, but you were never taught to tell the difference. So you stayed there.

And then the storm cleared--the whipping winds and pelting rains of a storm that lasted for years--and you were inexplicably drawn to the valley just beyond your line of sight. Flowers and new grass surround its small, trickling stream, and you run your hands through its calming, healing waters, and you bathe in the warm rays of such a beautiful sunrise before you comprehend that you've left your 'cave', that pathetic overhang, without a second thought. 

A twisted knot of emotion envelopes and strangles the life from your limbs, and something you never thought would happen--a fervent and earnest desire to return to that overhang--chokes you with its potency and force. 

You never wanted to live there. You never wanted to live (if that can be called living) in such a way, beyond the light of human or Divine sight, apart from community, communication, and joy. But now that your sensitive skin has felt such warmth of sun and cool of earth, and your shaky heart and shrunken lungs breathe true, clean air for the first time in many long years, you don't know which is worse: the lack of it, or the taste of that which will never stay. You taste the ecstasy of freedom, and fear its removal. Voluntary slavery is better than forced. Or at least it is to your terrified mind. 

But you can't go back. From the expanse of grass you collapsed on, you can just barely see the outline of the rock that once held what you thought to be your entire life...and the overhang is no longer there. It must have been the movement of departure that shook those ancient rocks from their shelf and rained them down upon the very perch where you were just sitting. You try not think what may have happened if the earth inexplicably shook and you still sat there. 

So now what? There is no shelter out here; just a rolling stretch of green grass and golden prairie, the little insignificant stream the only sound to be heard above the wind rustling those leaves of grass. Sitting atop a hill nearby is a towering oak tree, comforting and authoritatively keeping guard over the valley, and you retreat the cool shade beneath its leaf-layered branches.

Why are you out here? 

What brought you to life out of your stupor so suddenly, so directly, so irrevocably? 

Nothing else ever woke you up, or drew you so far from your overhang with such purpose, such intention, such direction.

Were there false alarms before? Imitations of the authentic reality that brings one back to life with a plastic promise? 

Yes. But the overhang still remained with each false alarm, with each 'reality check' that sent you running back to the cliff's edge in tears. 

This time, the cliff's shadows disintegrated with a mere movement of your feet away from the wall. In the flash of a moment, it was gone. 

And yet, as terrified as you are...you are overjoyed. 

That stretch of a few inches of pitiful rock, that chipping and cracked pebble you used to depend on, was the greatest of torments to you. And now it's gone. It is enough to jump up and celebrate, if you weren't so paralyzed with crippling terror. 

And it is there, in a moment of realization, that the source of such alternating, and already conflicting, emotion that you see it...You know, in the pounding depths of your heart and soul, the source of your fear, your joy, your anxiety, your adventure, your courage, and your doubt. 

It is not something ethereal; it is not even a 'thing' proper. 

And that is what is so terrifying.

It was not an intangible idea, the running reflection of a presence shining down on your face, to come and then leave a moment later. When all your life you've fed upon rotten muck and moss under rocks, and you're at once thrown fresh bread as though it were nothing but a trifle, you realize (and remember) that you were created to feast upon such food as bread, not the scum that gathers at the edge of puddles. 

But it is still more than that...it is more than just a hunger being satisfied. It is as though a plant were slowly dying, wilting away in the dark cobwebs of a basement corner, and was suddenly placed into the overwhelmingly refreshing and necessary light of the sun and sprinkling of the rain. But the plant does not remain the same after such change in scenery. It does not remain in its stinted state. It GROWS, because that was its original purpose. It was not meant to be stunted, to be frozen in a perpetual state of survival. It is not enough to survive...you were created to thrive. 

Now apply this to the inner life of the person--and you have the growth of a true light of life unlike any ever seen. 

The source of such life cannot be mistaken: God provides the life, because God IS Life. But God does not act simply as a First Cause, 'directly' so to speak. He works through all things, through First Causes, Second Causes, Third Causes, and on. There is no limit to what He can accomplish with one movement of the Heart of His Will. 

And in that moment of self-realization and thought outside of cyclical, self-absorped musing, it hits you like the first drawn breath after being rescued from drowning: God chose to use another. And it is their sudden appearance over the horizon of such grassy knolls, beyond the desolate, remote place of your self-imposed exile, that stirred an interest in life, and its wondrous misadventures, that encouraged you to stand, to force yourself up on shaking feet and to walk. 

Having before been denied the interaction of community or of true self-reflection, and once an un-biased, impartial third party is drawn in, you are granted the undeserved and surprising experience, the utter joy, at seeing another smile because of you. 

You didn't realize that was you. The whole time it was the you you didn't realize even existed. As though you never knew you truly were. 

You're you with that person, come to you in the most surprising of ways. You are yourself with them, and for the first time in your life, that fact doesn't terrify you. 

What does terrify you? Their interest in a person, you as a person, whom you never knew was worthy of interest. You feel ashamed because you await the day when such interest and interaction will cease, and you can shrink to what little edge of that rock cliff still remains.

Not because you want it to cease--quite the opposite. But you don't have any other battle plans, any other strategies of attack. You don't know how to not attack. So you prepare yourself for the worst. 

And yet, day by day, it gets better. It becomes more lovely, more lively, more and more like a waking dream where the question, 'When will I wake up?' pounds in your head a thousand times a day. You never understood such a trope, such a clichéd assembling of words. That is, until you walked in its footsteps and realized, yet again, that all tropes and clichés have their original source, and such a source has swayed your heart when you did not know you still had a heart to be swayed. 

Is this dramatic? Yes. But all such experiences are dramatic. They have to be to shake the dust from the human heart and soul. Beige reality and greying normalcy will not do. Your stomach should feel like it's going to tie itself in half with knots. Your heart should feel like its taken what you thought was a bungee jump, but what you soon realize is much more dangerous--there is no cable to hang onto. It is the call to be brave when all you want to do is run and hide. 

It is the ultimate in irony to realize the greatest battle of your day, of every day, is the battle you cannot wear armor to. This isn't a war won by shields, by the deflections of steel off steel. No--this greatest of all battles is only won by complete and utter vulnerability. By a total surrender of self. Falling in love with God, in His work through the love of others, is a war of sacrifice. 

You get the awesome and terrifying pleasure of surrendering your heart, fully alive, fully beating--a quivering mass of tissue and tendon and raw, concentrated reality of the core of your existence--onto the altar of God's sacrifice. The one completing the sacrifice? The person holding your heart--who also holds the blade, and the authority, to pierce it through and through. Whether that is God Himself in His love for you, or His love for you through another person. 

It is still the most terrifying--and exhilarating--surrender of self. 

And therein lies to the true excitement, the true adventure, the true danger of the journey. 

Do you have any idea where it's going?

Nope. 

But at the end of the day, that grassy hill in shimmering sunlight becomes a home to you, and that tree of canopy leaves is the home that edge of cliff and rock could never be. 

Maybe it's not so bad leaving the cave after all.