Vocation

“Darkness such that haunts my soul.
Desperate longing for an absent God
The torture and the pain I can’t explain
My heart cries.”

-the Liturgists

These lyrics were sounding through my headphones as I walked through the dining hall Tuesday afternoon. Several years ago, the Liturgists, an experimental art project spearheaded by Michael and Lisa Gungor, created a messy liturgy for Easter weekend. They featured songs with various well known artists, and the spoken word by popular authors and speakers Amena Brown, Rachel Held Evans, and Rob Bell.

This song, Teresa, was for Good Friday. It captures the emotions and experience of Good Friday very accurately. It captures a total loss of control, and it captures a death of a sort; the song captures a deep, spiritual death. The hellfire burns through the foundations of the soul and leave dark, lifeless, ashes. It captures the death of God.

It captures the cross.

What a year. What a week. What a few couple of days this has been. Last weekend, when I wrote about mustard seeds and my career, I experienced a harsh, draining tension as I saw the current course of our nation in the midst of what was a fairly pleasant weekend. And my heart wrenched. It still wrenches. It’s been wrenching. I have no doubts it may wrench in the immediate moments after writing these words. And as I press on forward, I find myself facing the dark nights in my own existence. I find myself at loss, longing.

I often catch myself living existence with a naïve optimism and yet I also find myself facing and embracing the dark nights. What an experience, those dark nights. What an experience it is to feel lyrics that Michael Gungor sings and live the words: “My heart cries.”

And yet, we must press on. All of us. I am well aware that as of late, my heart isn’t the only one shrouded in darkness.

Every human being is said to have a God-shaped hole in their hearts.

I see it more like there’s this pedestal sitting in a well lit room in the middle of a large building sitting in the ethereal plane of our hearts. And on this pedestal, we put many things. Sometimes, it’s people or a person, sometimes it’s money, or success, or fame, or politics. We put something there, and what we put there is not God, and so it doesn’t work apparently. And since the thing or person we put there is not God, it becomes destructive. Because, apparently nothing on that pedestal can fulfill that role like God. So, some of us put God there.

But this God we put there fails us. Or this person or thing we put there fails us. It all fails us. And in the midst of this, we face the flames. We walk through the hellfire. Our ethereal journey becomes stormy. We walk through the dark, stormy weather holding our umbrellas at an angle to shield the candlelight we carry from the wind and the water. And then the wind continues to pick up. And things continue to go wrong. The soul’s seasonal climate shifts from autumn to winter. We fight a losing battle for control.

And then it comes crashing down, we wrestle the angel in the dark valley of the dying sun, fighting to hold our objects on those pedestals, and we lose our sense of control. We grip onto reality and shield our lights from the storms until we hit a limit of despair.

Despair.

And then the candlelight we protect is blown out. We fall onto the floor defeated in the wrestling.

And it is at that limit, that moment, where the greatest fear of our soul lies: the fear of what happens when the parameters of our soul approach zero and when it is all let go.

And then it happens, the soul hits that limit. The parameters hit zero. We face it.

And then when we think it cannot fall any lower, it approaches an asymptote and continues to rapidly press lower past zero, becoming negative. Or at least it appears negative; the parameter’s absolute value increases. Negative numbers are negative based on a contextual reference point and the formulas the parameter is plugged into. If we change the context, perhaps it is not so negative after all.

And then we find that, without the candlelight, our eyes have become more accustomed to the darkness and we can see again, and we can see more than before, and the landscape is beautiful. We didn’t need to fight for control of our existence after all.

And the pedestal doesn’t hold the objects perhaps because it was never meant to hold any object. The pedestal, the room, the building, and the entire ethereal space is God. In losing the fight, in falling below the limits, we briefly see the face of God.

And in the midst of this death, we find hope again, and we find life. We can then relight our candle, and notice it’s warmth and let it shine as we continue walking through the storms, courageously knowing that if it is put out, we will see the beautiful landscape again, and we will be okay; the landscape around us is beautiful, and our light we carry is simply a part of the beauty and not the object that brings it. We can stand back up again.

And then we may find that spring follows winter, where we may have a sense, or even put our identity in, the ideas of the last song in that project, Garden, where Aaron Purdy sings

“‘Love’, you said
Poured out like wine
Broken like bread
Waken us
Enliven our minds
Unearth the dead.”

And this resurrection of a sort fuels a hope in us. These experiences force us into reality. We come alive.

And we can then embrace our existences and the empty pedestal and the experience of our travels in the stormy weather.

What a year. What a week. What a few couple of days this has been.

We can embrace this tension, and choose to find a hope in the midst of despair. We can find significance in the insignificant. Our acts matter on our Pale Blue Dot. Every action, shaping those around us, and shaping our world. The broken cycles can be resisted.

What a year, and what a week, and what a few couple of days this has been.

We can embrace the tension and keep working through it. Our hearts will keep beating. When the candle goes out, we press onward and we can reignite our light again sometime further on.

And we can face it all. May we choose to see the absolute value of negative infinity and may we press through the darkness.

I was originally about to write a blog post about my dreams and goals. I was going to reflect on what I really truly genuinely wanted to do after college, and whether or not I felt happy in my degree program because that has been pressing on me more and more lately.

But, then I saw the news. I saw the executive orders and my eyes opened back to the world around me, and my viewpoint widened past what was immediate in my own life. My eyes focused onto the current state of our government, and then everything fell backwards. All of it came crashing down onto me like a massive, massive wave. Again, I noticed the implosions in my life and in the lives around me; I was not walking on sturdy ground.

How can one see this all and not feel afraid? The whitehouse.gov website spontaneously lost all of its pages on immigration, LGBT rights, civil rights, climate change, and healthcare. It’s been practically a week. One week. A single week. What happened? Should we not care about the hurt that so many minority communities are experiencing right now? When will enough be enough?

And the environment? Sure, I understand that our economy is important. The economy drives our nation, and with all of this new energy we could encourage so much growth, which would increase our GDP, and help our economy. And, if we improve our economy, that would help us all. I get that, I see the numbers.

But, that’s exactly it. I see the numbers. Climate data? What about those numbers? I don’t understand how we could ignore the data. What economy can survive in a dying environment? Is not many of our societal behaviors towards the various resources in our world projecting towards a Tragedy of the Commons? Don’t we need to change before the sinusoidal behaviors of nature become more sporadic, and then our environments become less suitable for our complex human societies, and then the need for change becomes forced? What about our grandchildren? What about their children? We can’t run on autopilot forever and assume it will all work out, believe me.

And then I see a post from my friend who goes to MIT, and how her sorority sister from Iran went home for winter break, and how she was recently denied access to her flight back to Boston, despite her student visa. How could this possibly be okay? She’s an active member of my friend’s sorority and a hardworking member of the MIT community. And beyond all of that, she’s a human being like you and I.

And then, there’s all of the language used surrounding immigrants from Latin America. All of last year, I had to listen to every statement made about Latin American immigrants. Actually, no. I have had to spend years now listening to this. Ever since I was very young, I would often have to listen to the offensive sentiments towards people from South and Central America, and the jokes, and the sentiments from classmates, from friend’s parents, from teachers, and even from people who were apparently friends of mine. And, there’s this pressing feeling of, well, what made my family special enough to apparently become a part of this nation? My parents’ were not educated or super-special in any way when they got here; it is arguably chance that gave my parents and older siblings citizenship. Chance.

As I heard my friend’s father two summers ago continuously demonize immigrants and argue against their safety, I softly reminded him of my family’s Colombian origins, and pointed out to him that there is very little, if anything, that explicitly separates my family from that of other immigrants. I watched him feel uncomfortable, I saw the emotion pour into him for a brief moment as he realized his words were denying the humanity of large swaths of people, and his words were even slightly chipping away at my own humanity. Then, I saw his heart harden again, and off he returned to his rant about immigrants. Every inhuman, hateful word denying the humanity in the other, and when you deny the humanity in others, you deny the humanity in yourself.

I just do not understand these sentiments, and I especially do not understand how these sentiments could make their way to the top of our nation’s government. I do not understand.

I do not understand.

Something needs to be done.

We all need to play our parts, and we cannot forget the progress we have made. We cannot forget. Whether it’s letters, or rallies, or protests, or writings, or discussions, or any of the many other ways we can influence our society, we cannot forget, and we cannot stay inactive and run on autopilot. Our societal systems are human systems, and the functions that influence these systems depend on the individuals within. We all play a role in defining the variables and changing the parameters of these systems. All of us. Every little act, every little sentiment, every idea, every move and  every investment of time and energy changes not only the course of us ourselves as biological systems, but also our societal systems, even if it is ever so slightly. Every change, even if it is a small change, matters.

Because anyone who has ever seen a mustard seed is well aware that tiny things can become very large.