Humor me for a second. Before I tell you what this post is about, I’m wondering if you can think of something you believe all the way to your toes. Like something really important. Maybe that your family loves you, or people are fundamentally good, or we’re living in the midst of unprecedented social change. That God exists. Think of whatever it is, whatever thing that you almost don’t need to talk about you know it’s so true, but maybe simultaneously can’t help talking or thinking or writing or preaching about. Just picture it. Hold it here for a second.

Now. Picture someone giving you the irrefutable news that that thing is not true.

I think of John Nash in Beautiful Mind in that scene where he’s been hospitalized and the doctor is talking to his wife about what it must be like to learn and comprehend that you’re schizophrenic, that those people in your life who are real like yourself, real like the ground beneath your feet or the sound of your own mother calling you by name—those people don’t exist. No one else sees them. Only you. What can you trust anymore, if this fundamental thing, this thing that helps you make sense of the world, or your life, or your work or marriage: when this bedrock thing itself can’t be trusted? I imagine very little.

Or rather, I don’t have to imagine. This was the experience of my early 20s. No, not being institutionalized for schizophrenia. Mine was the experience of pulling a thread, a little snag of something in my religious worldview, and watching the whole thing unravel, row after row, until much like that lamp I wrote about last time, only piles were strewn all around, wiggly threads freed from the straight lines and geometric shapes they had made only moments before. My world was pulled apart, and it confounded me that life itself kept on going, kept on turning like the earth was still in orbit, like the sun hadn’t just exploded and every means I knew of sustaining life and hope and meaning hadn’t just flung off into space along with it.

Not everyone loses something so important. Just like not everyone has a lover cheat on them, or a child die. Not everyone has awful memories surface, or gets a terrible disease.

But many of us do. And I guess I want to say a word, or a few, for how long it takes to recover from these kinds of losses. How working through the shock and the anger and the numbness and the disorienting, debilitating pain can take years, decades even. How learning to trust again—anything, let alone what’s associated with the thing that was taken away—often can’t happen in strides, but comes, if at all sometimes, in tiny little breaths, tiny centipede steps sometimes, and that anyone who tries to force it on us faster can make it come more slowly.

It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime, to trust again. A long time to honor the thing that was lost. And I think it takes a longer time yet to have eyes to see the things that weren’t lost, things that maybe just got hidden behind what was. To grow a stomach that can actually be filled on these things, a tongue that can taste their sweetness, even when the lost things still remain lost.

I’m standing among shards and threads of many colors, weaving back together my insides, my heart, even as I weave and build and search and find a life that has meaning, that once again feels filled up with God.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Healing, Psychology, 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.