2016.04.10 break
I went to bed last night depressed, and woke up depressed
this morning (worship at CtK Lutheran this morning helped lift the fog -- when I say that I go to worship to avoid losing my sanity, it is not hyperbole). This has become more and more frequently my experience. Only now,
it seems, am I realizing the enormity of what I lost when I lost Debbie. I am
currently dating a new girl … I think that dating someone dredges up a lot of
negative feelings about missing Debbie. I do my best not to compare, but it is
hard not to feel like my life has taken a huge step downward and backwards.
I suppose economic insecurity adds a lot to my anxiety and
depression. It seems like that has been my lot for my whole life. For the last
2 or 3 years, all of my energy and effort has gone into my work, and trying to
make it work. I am almost there, but there is still no security. They can take
away my classes on a moment’s notice and give them to full-time or tenured
faculty. Nevertheless, teaching is one of the few truly bright spots in my life and gives me what little sense of meaningfulness I have in my current situation.
I also feel like a keep on losing friends. Phil recently
married and is moving to Palm Beach Gardens. Amanda is moving to North
Carolina. Evelyn is hit-and-miss regarding her availability. Most of my other
friends were based on salsa dancing, or academia, and now that I no longer have
time or desire to dance salsa and have finished my PhD, they have moved on. My
married Christian friends (local) distanced themselves from me after Debbie
died. It was hurtful at first, but it is what it is, and it is a normal
experience that most widow(ers) go through. Now that I am no longer involved in
“ministry” or ACM, many of those relationships are growing distant (thank God
for the reader’s group!). My kids are great and love me, but they are all
gradually moving off into their own lives. I cannot expect them to continue to
orbit around me.
An additional thing that I woke up thinking about this
morning is my repeated pattern of making a significant “break” with my
worldview and social networks. I was raised in a fundamentalist “holiness”
context, but broke with that at age 17/18 and became a hippy, leaving behind
many of the fundamentalist Christian friends I grew up with. At age 23, I made
another break, after becoming involved with Debbie. I forsook my radical-secular-hippie
countercultural perspective and came to faith in the context of the
Discipleship movement (which at the time, seemed very avant-guard and
innovative to me). Again, I left secular and liberal friends behind and moved
on into a different social and ideological environment.
My time in the
covenant-discipleship movement stretched out over almost 30 years, most of my
adult life and most of my life with Debbie. I defined myself by my missiological
and ministry commitments and as a faithful married man. After I started into
academic studies (2004), I came back into contact with secular (and often
liberal) people and began thinking more critically about the assumptions of my
peer group. My friendship with Dr. Sam taught me to look for reciprocity in
relationships and commitments, which was not always forthcoming in my ministry
circle. All of this led to a growing list of incongruities and anomalies that
became apparent to me in my ideological and social context. Eventually, under
the increasing pressure of Debbie’s condition I was forced to reexamine my
priorities under the duress of terminal illness. This led to my third major
“break” with my primary social group in 2007 and a gradual break with my theological worldview thereafter.
The theological and ideological
fallout of that break has taken another nine years to process. When Debbie went
into the grave, it felt like everything else that defined me also went into the
grave along with her (ministry, friendships, worldview), but it took me a
couple of years to realize it. Once I started to slow down from my frenetic
partying, salsa dancing and drinking, the pain set in and has not left.
After several years of deconstruction of my belief system,
only this past year have I felt my worldview and faith being reconstructed in a
way which is both theologically orthodox but also “modern” (a "generous orthodoxy"?) and myself being
reconnected to the body of Christ in a liturgical context. Thankfully, I have
been able to hold on to a handful of life-long friends through that daunting
process, although all of them are geographically
distant from me.
Now, my depression is more constant and pervasive (although
less sharp or intense) than it was at any time during her illness or
immediately after it. Monday through Friday is not bad because of a highly
structured work week (thank God for my work which I love!). However, many
weekends I find myself setting alone on my patio for countless hours, grading,
prepping classes and smoking cigars, and feeling quite depressed.
How shall I view this? Has my constant moving on into new ideational
horizons, breaking with past social and ideological structures been a good
thing or a bad thing? Has it been personal growth, or confusion? Is this just a
part of normal life? Another way to ask the question is, am I a pioneer? Or
just unstable? Sometimes the loss of fellowship and the necessity of
reprocessing my beliefs “one more time” leaves me feeling like I am losing my
sanity. But on the other hand, I am SO glad that I am not a ‘holiness’
fundamentalist living on a farm in Ohio. By the same token, I am glad that I am
not a secular or liberal radical with no spiritual commitments or sense of
mystery.
Before the Buddha experienced enlightenment, he grappled
with the terrible suffering of the world and a sustained demonic attack for a
month. Jesus wandered in a desert for 40 days and again before he went to the cross he sweat drops of blood in the garden and
felt abandoned by God. If there is something good on the other side of these
seemingly unending wanderings in the desert? Or am I just fucked? I guess I
will find out one way or the other.
There is more I could write about my life-long tendency to
live with a positive vision for the future, and a hopeful “project” to work towards (perhaps another self-medicating drug?). I
have not had that since Debbie died, I learned to dance salsa, and I finished
my PhD. So, I end up feeling adrift, just living a succession of days without a
direction towards something. I have some ideas about how to remedy that, but
I’ll save that for another journal entry.
I would love to send this to someone to share my feelings
with, but to who? My mentors and older brothers, such as Frank Dawson, Dow
Robinson or Michael Cook are mostly gone. There are others who might try to
“instruct” or fix me like Job’s friends rather than just sitting with me in empathetic
silence or sharing the pain. I don’t know anyone who has gone ahead of me on
this same path.
So... there is really no one to share this with. I am walking this path
alone (I know, my dear hypothetical reader, that you will say that Christ is
with me. I understand that “theologically.” I pray St. Patrick’s prayer almost
daily (Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me….), but
experientially, I am alone. To quote Jesus: My god, my
god, why have you forsaken me? (don't answer that, you might have good reasons! ja ja).
