Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, a bad dream clinging to me. Outside my window, there's a truck idling, and I can't seem to lure sleep back.
A lecture I attended earlier this week has me thinking about control. "Doubt," Dr, Wengert told us, "is not the enemy of Christian life. Control is. Our desire to fix the problem is where the devil gets us."
It's the darkness that usually pushes us to terror, the nothing, the void that makes us want to grab something and hold it, cling to it, control it.
A few summers ago my friend Michael and I made our way by flashlight down a narrow path in the wilderness of Vermont, until we reached the sand of a lake. It was late -- we had left our friends huddled around the fire, sipping beer and watching the sparks go up. Michael sat on the shore and lit a cigarette; I shed my clothes and waded, then swam, into the dark of the water.
Floating on my back, the only sound I could hear was my own breathing. The night was clear, the stars above me reflected in the water. It was dark. The horizon was invisible, and the red glow of Michael's cigarette, now distant, was the only way to identify the shore.
I floated between water and night, suspended between the beginning and the end. It took my breath away, to know the darkness would hold me, to trust it to balance me on the fulcrum between the womb and the grave.
We make our lives on that fulcrum, daily dyings and risings that keep us oscillating sometimes gently, sometimes violently, between death and life. I spend a lot of time fighting it. Trying to control it. Trying to push my life toward something or find something that somehow, in my mind, is linked to happiness. Only that happiness was never the goal. The seam between death and life, that's where transformation occurs. Happiness is static. Transformation is painful, joyful, dynamic.
The thing is, when I can manage to trust, manage to give up enough to let that in-between place hold me, the fear vanishes. The terror dissipates and I'm left held between the night and the water, trying to tell the difference between them.
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