You know that feeling you have when you recover after being sick for a while?  That sense of giddiness at actually being well, at being able to do more than obsess about when you can next crawl into bed, or find a bathroom, or how in the world you’re going to get through the work day?

That’s how I’m feeling these days.  There is definitely a physical component to it – great relief at having my lungs at full capacity again and my stomach unsquished from within and my heart not doing double time.  It’s glorious to do so much with ease!  Tie my shoes, for example.  Stand up.  Roll over.  Walk.  Glorious!

But the feeling is much more than physical.

Those of you who’ve gone to seminary or studied semitic writings probably learned at some point about chiasms – literary devices used to order texts and, in many cases, give emphasis to central themes.  Chiasms are mirror-like arrangements of the pieces of a text or story.

Here’s an example:

(a) I got up to feed the baby.

     (b) I noticed baby’s diaper was really heavy.

          (c) I took his diaper off to change it, confident his insides were completely emptied out.

               (*) HE PROCEEDED TO PEE IN MY FACE.

          (C) I realized his insides were only now emptied out.

     (B) I cleaned us both up and put on a clean diaper.

(A) I fed the baby and went back to bed.

It’s the statements or stories in the middle of chiasms that writers are typically trying to emphasize.  To those trained to recognize them, the mirrored elements become arrows, pointing ever at that core.

Anyway, I’m saying all of this because I feel like my life of late is working on a chiasm.  A real-life one.  A chiasm whose final parts are a wellness beyond any physical state.  And I’m newly pondering the lessons planted at its core.

Here’s the basic layout:

(a) Much of my life I lived feeling tremendously responsible for the world around me.  Who knows how much our religious devotion dictates our compulsions, and how much our compulsions dictate the nature of our religious devotion, but pretty early on the two became one inside of me.  My drive to be superstar savior best friend best daughter best girlfriend best wife best leader of this and that club and this and that committee and this and that initiative to solve world suffering completely, forever – well, let’s just say it all got colored by who I thought God was.  By what I thought God wanted from me.  I earnestly, conscientiously tried making God proud.

(b) The more I worked to live out my faith, and the more deeply I sought spiritual understanding, the more my faith’s foundations gave way.  Truth got very wobbly.  I proceeded to enter into spiritual crisis, which turned into identity crisis, which ultimately ripped away my reasons for getting up in the morning.  For doing anything, really.  I was profoundly disillusioned.  Depressed. Nihilistic.  What’s the point of anything?

(*) I pulled almost completely out of the public arena.  I started therapy.  I read widely.  I began to write.  I stopped trying to save anyone but myself.  And peace descended.

(B) So here I am today, at this point in the chiasm.  Here I am feeling newly alive, newly awake…and a new kind of nudge to become more mindful of where I’m at spiritually.  What do I believe?  I’ve had a wonderful break from any need to define this – a necessary break, and one integral to my healing.  But I want to understand this part of me better now.  Or rather, understand this part of me at a more mindful, conscious level (there are more ways of understanding than just these).  Not in a frantic, grasping way like before.  Not because I fear that if I don’t, my world will grind to a terrifying halt. 

No, this is the flip side of that.  It’s about freedom now.  Freedom enough from my demons to be able to imagine a spiritual life that nourishes and heals and affirms what I trust needs affirming.  Freedom to say no to what deadens and silences and sucks away life without my “no” itself sucking me into bitterness and defensiveness and cynicism.  It’s about discovering in these years of dormancy all kinds of nourishment for colorful, fragrant fruit.

And here’s why I want to do this work:  I have a sense that a big part of my personal legend (to use Coelho’s language) – a big part of my place in the world, and the things my soul most aches to be and do – continues to connect deeply with spirituality.  Mindfully understanding my spiritual self, at least in a provisioinal, un-petrified way, feels like an important part of my pursuit of this legend.  It feels like an important step in helping me know what kinds of actions I want to take, and the quality and purpose with which I want to infuse my actions.  For example, in this season, my primary task (apart from being a wife and mother) is novel writing.  But even this can be infused, or not, with a sense of purpose, a mindful knowing of why I’m doing it, and how the task connects with what I sense I’m on this earth to do.

(A) I’ve a hunch that as I do some of this work, this naming of who I am and what I want to be about, the me of my past that was so involved in public life might find herself alive again.  Not in the same way as before, thank heaven.  Not with the same fears and compulsions and drives to please some tyrannical God.  But alive.  Truly.  In the best sense of that word.  I’m itching for her resurrection.

As I write all of this out, two thoughts come to mind.  1) Don’t rush through these last two parts of the pattern.  Done well, they’ll be a wonderful coming home, a spiraling back to old parts of myself, but in new ways, with new health and wholeness.  Rush through them too quickly, and roots from that central core – that piece the chiasm asks me to pay most attention to – won’t have the time they need to burrow sufficiently down and in.  To become the tremendous and foundational source of nourishment they pulse to be.  2) YIPPEE!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Motherhood, Healing, Psychology, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.