The Way Out

The following is an introduction to a book I have been writing for many months. it is an allegory but true. Consider it a confession, from the 'one who wanders'.

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My life was forever changed one morning when I awoke to discover I did not know how to be. This is a difficult problem to describe to those who have never experienced it. Being is a capacity that most never find the need to consciously express. It comes with the territory of their life, and like the sky above them draws little attention. The longer I pondered this discovery, the more I realized that every answer I had easily at hand did not fill the hole this disappearance of the sky left in my reality. Each of the standard responses to this question of how to be seemed to create a prison from which escape was impossible. As I went about the tasks and interactions of daily life, the world seemed changed, and where there were once things, there instead were shadows. I felt as one imprisoned in a great pit, a slave mining away the ground under their feet, who comes at long last to his senses, but is unable to convince his work-fellows of the need to stop digging. This sense of alienation grew day by day, and in time it dawned on me that here was a real problem to solve. I had not stumbled merely into the chief struggle within my own character, but into the great problem of the age.

Another vision soon pressed itself into my mind, that of being in the same prison, but for no sensible reason, ascending vertically out of it on a pillar of invisible light. The other prisoners debating with great vigor in two camps, one firm in the belief that I had indeed ascended out of the pit, and the other equally firm in believing I had pulled an illusionists trick, and ought to be summarily ignored. Neither camp was at all interested in ascending themselves, I felt sure that they could if they merely believed it possible, but they were concerned only with the opportunity for debate and division created by my ascension. In my waking life, I stumbled between friends and churches, work and prayers, feeling as one who has awakened from a lovely dream, one he knows he cannot re-enter, but nevertheless closes his eyelids and tries, only to find a racing mind incapable of sleep.

I still had rules, I still had duties, and I still had a life, it appeared. But living this life, fulfilling these duties, following these rules, that was no longer important to me. I had to find the way out, the hidden path of ascent in my vision.

There was not any longer a world and me. There was the world, an Other, and me. This Other was life, it was joy, it was meaning. It was the sparkle on dew, the bigness of mountains, the laughter of children, the knowledge of ‘my homeland’, the feeling in the word ‘kiss’, in short, everything that had gone from my life that fateful morning. When I was even more honest with myself, I realized that beforehand, I had only a shadow of 'the other' in my mind: the memory of beauty, the definition of the word ‘kiss,’ and a story of what it had once been like to feel dew under my feet in the coolness of morning. The other had left me, and I could not live until I found it again.

I was instead trapped in a provisional existence, could produce vital signs, but only in the medical sense, was dead, but alive without the hope of rebirth. Worse I had been baptized. I had been inducted as an adult into the venerable Bark of Peter, I attended church, prayed, adored, fasted, and confessed. I even discerned a vocation to religious life, although inconclusively. I had a ‘relationship with God’, as modern Christians say, at least I had not abandoned that relationship on my conversion to orthodoxy. But despite my best attempts, I did not really feel that ‘I’ believed what I believed, though I knew it to be true. I was haunted by the suspicion that somewhere in the murk of my past, I had told myself a terrible lie, and this lie had become my whole world, my prison, my pit. And I was still digging…

In time I did find the lie, buried in a passage of Nietzsche that some years before I had amusedly dismissed as the ravings of a madman. That lie was that I was interested in truth. I was not. I had not really read, studied, written, and taught for the sake of truth, I had done so for the sake of certainty. My conscious self had believed it was working to know the truth, but when I counted the lies, the half-truths, the word-games I had told and played on myself in pursuit of that feeling of certainty, I could not name Veritas as the goddess to whom my labors had been dedicated. I suddenly understood my long habit of reading spiritual autobiography. These books were of all books my favorite to read and re-read. I felt keenly every stab of doubt, every night of despair. Through them I vicariously climbed the Seven Story Mountain, endured the Dark night of the soul, was Surprised by Joy, Confessed my sins, felt the punishment of my Crime, and Confessed my faith. It was (I now realize) the same erotic affectation that leads some to read romance novels leading me to these books again and again. And unconsciously, though not as unconsciously as my pride would wish to be known, I began to tell the same story I had read so many times with my own mind. I pretended to have the same journey of faith, I acted out their conversions, and worse, I believed that I believed. At first I was seduced, and in time I was the seducer, not of other souls but my own. All this I did not through a pure and unadulterated love of truth, but through an equally powerful habit of mind, the love of surety. And God had rewarded my efforts with His greatest trick for thinking men,

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

I was now at war with the Almighty, I had taken His truth and made it a buoy against doubt, a crutch, a shield. And He would not let me. For his ways are Higher than my ways, and His thoughts higher than my thoughts. I recalled the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the modern world, “No man on earth has anywhere left to go but upwards.” The ground beneath my feet had been unmade. I could not even dig. There was only one way left, the way of faith. I knew then that the abyss of modernity, the oceans of despair, the gnawing of doubt, in short all that I ran from and feared, had been all this time the voice of a God who would not be any longer ignored, the song of the ‘Other’ I had lost sight of, breaking in on my certainty, offering that simple but devastating invitation, ‘Come up higher with Me.’ And from the pit of the known, the sure, and the solid, where men ever dig for the final hard rock bottom of reality, though it never be found, I ascended into the cool, clear morning light of Being.

And I awoke, and behold, I still dreamed!