As I've started Christmas cards (only about 1/3rd through....they may be pre-Lent cards), as I've started to write the annual report for the congregation, I've recognized that I'm not so sure how to sum up this year without giving away too much.
It's been a hard year. Not stuff to write in Christmas cards. Not appropriate to share all with the congregation. Oh, they'll hear some, that pertains to the community life, but neither my own faith/personal struggles nor those things that have been the most difficult for me at work....particularly certain ways I've had to be involved in some individuals' lives.
Attached to my faith struggle has been a yearning to hear some direction for my life. Yearning to have something in some arena of my life so completely clear that I would know to head in that direction.
If you read past blog entries, you'll see it. And, it has been the reality of my life in 2008.
What leads me to anxious moments - to those times when I wake up from near-sleep to worry - are those times when I feel I am not enough. Nights are always harder than days. But, that period when I'm almost asleep is often when self-doubts start to wheedle their way to the front of my thoughts. My house isn't clean enough, I feel ugly (my current hair cut has been bothering me of late), I spend too much time at work, I failed a particular person in a particular way, my finances aren't in order....etc...etc.
The one that woke me up last night was the clean house - which is pretty ridiculous, because I believe my house could be company ready with an hour's notice.
I've been reading the "Space" trilogy by C.S. Lewis lately. I'm in the 2nd book - Perelandra in which "Ransom" the main character of the trilogy is sent to Perelandra - or Venus. It is a world at the beginning of its existence and there is one man, the King, who I have yet to meet in the book, and one woman, the Lady, who is "getting older" - or learning more and more. Maleldil (God) has forbidden residence on one piece of land (aka, forbidden eating fruit of one particular tree) and "the Enemy" in the form of someone that Ransom knows, has launch a logic-assault on the Lady. The Enemy is continuously in conversation with her, only stopping when she sleeps, to try to convince her that Maleldil really wants her to make her own choices away from him - but he can't tell her that because then it wouldn't be her own choice. Ransom is doing his best to stay awake and be present throughout this assault of logic - to try to combat the Enemy's arguments and convince the Lady to not go against what Maleldil has said.
Last night, after rationalizing myself out of my worry about my messy house, I picked up the book where I left off and read 2 pages before I came to something that brought me to tears:
"Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest of places. Thus, while one part of Ransom remained, as it were, prostrated in a hush of fear and love that resembled a kind of death, something else inside him, wholly unaffected by reverence, continued to pour queries and objections into his brain. "It's all very well," said this voluble critic, "a presence of that sort! But the Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Maleldil's representative?
"The answer which came back to him, quick as a fencer's or a tennis player's riposte, out of the silence and out of the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed Blasphemous. "Anyway, what can I do?"babbled the voluble self. "I've done all I can. I've talked till I'm sick of it. It's no good, I tell you." He tried to persuade himself that he, Ransom, could not possibly be Maleldil's representative as the Un-man was the representative of Hell. The suggestion was, he argued, itself diabolical - a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania. He was horrified when the darkness simply flung back this argument in his face, almost impatiently. And then - he wondered how it had escaped him till now - he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy's. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle."
These paragraphs and others in those 3 pages I read spoke to me. I was in tears - recognizing some of that communication for which I long.
It almost feels a little foolish to say that this was God - and yet, I believe it. I'm thankful for it.
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