May 3, 2008

My Lamentations

I’m feeling like this nagging guilt has come over me – maybe it isn’t guilt, but it is so palpable, it feels like a ton of stones that I am carrying around. My gut feels a mild nausea, like that the nervousness one feels in anticipation of some pending doom. It is like a cloud that is following me around that I just can’t walk out of.

Over 6 years and it seems like he is more removed from me than ever. It feels like I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me. It’s as if we’ve become strangers whom we once new and had a connection with, we maintain a familiarity, but it is only because we do share that common bond which at times I wonder if he remembers. Really, it feels like my existence is a mere convenience that could be discarded at a whim if it were not for that common bond. Does he miss it? Does he need it? Does he have a void he is trying to fill? Is it for him that one spot, unfulfilled, maybe where most of us don’t want to go because we don’t want to feel? I’m desperately trying not to feel it. In trying so hard, I feel like I’m walking through mud. Each step a labor, each step a drain. Each step feels like one doesn’t get anywhere because we refuse to see it for what it is. We don’t dare dredge it up because of the intensity of the pain we fear. There seems like there is no resolution – at the very least, we go on trying to learn to live with it, we learn what it is like not to feel those deepest spots, those wounds.

I am so saddened by what I maybe could have done – what I should have done! I am aching with a quiet despair, so subtle, but so desperately annoying I want to scream! I can’t believe that I could have allowed it to come to this! Am I a coward? Have I been so lame and so conformist so as not to upset the way things are that I have let so many potentially significant moments slip away? God, why?????? Is the guilt, that nagging thorn that’s reminding me of how I could have done so much better? Where was I???

Yet, I’m reminded that we all have a choice - all of us. It is not like he couldn’t have chosen differently. I was not directly responsible for his actions even though I would take all the responsibility in the world if it would make the slightest difference! He has to own his own actions. I can’t make him do or don’t do anything – that’s not the way it is. God gave us this thing called free will. It is what makes the choice to love the sweetest and most beautiful thing, and the choice to sin the most heinous of acts. Without the will to choose, actions are meaningless. Life becomes meaningless.

God gives us the amazing gift to choose. He knew that even though His desire and intention was for us to love Him, this would not be love if the choice wasn’t freely ours. He had to be willing to witness pain and suffering in order for there to be love – especially for us to love Him back. The irony of this is incomprehensible, yet we would never otherwise have love.

This last week I experienced one the more memorable revelations – it smacked me right in the face so unexpectedly I could hardly drive. I was reminded earlier having coffee with my friend, a special gift I received in my last moments with Dad. As I was leaving his bedside telling him that I had to leave to go home, I picked up my backpack, walked in front of the bed and told him that I loved him. What was so vivid for me was hearing for the first time in so many years, perhaps since I was a young boy, “I love you too”. His eyes looked right at me, he said it as if he always said it. His face looked tender with emotion, yet composed with assuredness, almost as if he didn’t have to pretend that things were going to be alright anymore, but that he was finally revealing that loving inside that was most surely always there. It was a side of him that I didn’t remember ever feeling directed to me, but it was a side of him I saw while he was with others. Perhaps, he was finally relinquishing his life to God. Getting off the I-696 service drive at Evergreen, I all of a sudden heard a whisper telling me “it was I, Jim, I love you”. Wham! I burst into a torrent of tears – I just realized that God had been there . . . and he is here, it wasn’t only my Dad reassuring me, but my Abba, Eloi, who was reassuring me of His love for me!!! I couldn’t control this rush of emotion as I cried, barely able to see where I was driving, feeling the depth of the emotion, the truth that He has always been reassuring me with, and I being too blind to see and too stubborn to feel.

It is love. Love.