Empty, Alone, Silent & Watchful (Redux)

“All of us, I suspect, have times when we’re made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become adept at inventing means of escape…[T]he pain that comes from one’s identity…can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through…”

“…I began to sense that this was exactly as it should be. God wanted me empty, alone, silent and watchful…I was suffering…and had to laugh at myself, wondering if I really were so dense that God had to resort to these extremes to get me to shut up and be still…
The Cloister Walk, p38-39

She won't make a sound
Alone in this fight with herself and the fears whispering
if she stands she'll fall down
She wants to be found
The only way out is through everything she's running from
wants to give up and lie down.
Stand in the Rain, Superchick

Yeah. I'm noticing that I can't escape from this. God isn't going to let me. I've always had a means of escape. Reading. Writing which more recently morphed into role play. I could find all sorts of ways to submerge myself into myself and escape what I was actually feeling.

I actually had a visualization of it; I would pack whatever it was that was bothering me away in a box, the clear plastic kind, and set the box aside on a shelf. Sometimes the box even had a label. I had a lot of things in these boxes--from old or unused rp characters ((player chars I especially loved and non-player chars with potential)), to things I wanted/needed to talk to people about ((from vague ideas to full on scripted conversations)). I even had people in boxes. People who intimidated me, people who irked my nerves, people I really wanted to tell how I felt about them--good and bad...

To this day I have warm, squishy feelings when I walk through the organization department of Target and when I am feeling especially anxious about my life I try to organize things and go for shelving and boxes. It's decidedly odd.

Disassociate, I think, is the word. I mean, from a survivalist’s point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Why hurt if I don't actually have to hurt? What purpose does it serve to actually feel pain if there is a way to escape it?

But...I'm supposed to be more than a survivor, right? There is supposed to be more to this living thing than getting out by the skin of my teeth, panting and dirty and scuffed by the hard knocks it took to get out from under whatever it is that has 'bout whooped me but good.

Lately though, my escape mechanisms have not been working. Hm. Maybe you should read "escape mechanisms" as anaesthesia.

I'm a reader and a writer so believe me when I say I've tried hiding from whatever this is in my books and notebooks, pens and keyboards. For fiction reading, I go for fantasy mostly with a sprinkling of hard scifi for variety. I have a decent sized list of favorite authors and can branch off that list using internet sites comparing similar writing styles and the like. Lately however, it's been a no go. I've stopped reading more books in the middle in the past few months than I can ever remember doing in my entire life. They just didn't hold my interest at all. Don't get me wrong, I have found a few that catch me, but honestly, if it wasn't for the time limit set by the library, I'd have a stack as tall as me next to the bed. And thank God for the library! Yeesh. Even my non-fiction is getting streamlined. I don't just gobble up any saint's biography or book of theology or any random writing/commentary by whichever ECF peaks my fancy anymore.

And then sometimes I can't read at all. I just open the book and put it down. Open it and put it down. It gets frustrating. No. It's more than frustrating, it's absolutely maddening. And don;t let's talk about the swill that I refuse to call writing that has been deleted lately. I can't even work up a good rant about current geo-politics or economics, let alone a decent set of characters and plot arc.

Sometimes the madness lets up and I can find some enjoyment in reading or jotting down some of my crazier thoughts that don't make it to the blog. I call those things Blog Fodder and save them for later elaboration--I don't want to scare anyone.

I've even tried watching movies and anyone who knows me knows that would be a wash. I mean, I like movies sometimes but it takes me forever to finish one because I get distracted by...whatever. I have to really really want to see it to sit through a whole movie at home. I don't seem to have these difficulties with documentaries though. Or cartoons. ~smile~

Anyway, over the last, say, five or six months, I've just been restless. There are moments of distraction that divert me from myself and masquerade as clarity, but the restlessness always returns. I'm simply unable to concentrate on anything except this...not pain exactly...Hm. I don't know the word really. "Pain" is too intense I suppose, but discomfort is too vague and not intense enough. I don't know what the word should be. Whatever the word, it keeps me going 'round and 'round like a cat in a cage. It's always there-- the same questions, the same need for answers, the same cry in the wilderness.

I guess I can't hide from it anymore. As the quote above says, "God wants me empty, alone, silent and watchful". I just need to embrace whatever this empty silence is and watch what happens next. I am tired of trying to run away from it. It's tiring and frustrating and frankly, I don't need anything else that makes me tired and frustrated in my life. Especially something I'm doing that makes me tired and frustrated. There are enough people volunteering for that particular job, thank you very much.

What to do?

Simple. Fall back on the formula: Remember God. Say my prayers. Go to church. Forgive my brother. Keep the commandments. Okay maybe not so simple. But it is a start.

I do not think He plans for this to last long. I don't think He does. But then again I am not privy to everything He has in mind and that's okay. Right now, however, I just have to accept it instead of kicking at the goads. I don't like the idea--otherwise would I be trying to hide from it?--but I think I've wasted enough time trying to make myself "happy" instead of seeking joy.

St Benedict said: ‘Laborare est orare.’ (‘To work is to pray.’) Let us take that in this sense: we work in silence praying. We drink from silence praying the Prayer, the Jesus Prayer.

To be able to deepen the Jesus Prayer, we must turn to God. That is why it is so important to experience illness. So important to experience poverty. Deprivation. Hunger. Thirst. Such things make us turn to Jesus in the Jesus Prayer, to God the Father in the Our Father, to the Holy Spirit; and to depend on them for our very existential salvation. Only thus can we move beyond being buffeted by the winds of everyday life so as to base ourselves on the Rock in faith. And it is standing on the Rock that we pray.

And it is standing on the Rock that we can remain silent and pray, drinking from the silence while we work with our hands, our mind repeating in our heart the words of the Prayer in love of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit. May God be with us.
Orthodox Monk