So, then: Even after all that impenetrable darkness and the long, bruising fall, he would live, and emerge gulping and incredulous into a world painted over in a flat coat of muted gray.
In the old happily-ever-after version of such a tale, a man in the grips of blind despair would be saved by an angel and delivered into the loving arms of a family and a community of which he was an essential and irreplaceable member.
There are, though, only humans in this place we still insist on calling the real world, but some of them –and even perhaps most of them– are from time to time provided a moment of difficult grace that allows or compels them to perform the sacred duties of angels.
It happens. It has happened, even if the realities of the present require that a man in the grips of despair be first conscripted to a version of bedlam that is both humiliating and harrowing. Such a man must live through a dress rehearsal of dying on his journey back to life, and he must be able to see in bedlam a mirror as well as a sort of fractured kaleidoscope of the world he lives in.
He must recognize that he lives in, and belongs in, all versions of that world, and must learn to believe that the terrible and terrifying things he has seen and experienced are gifts just as surely as are the wonders and the wild happiness and the heavenly days he has been allowed. The man has to learn that he is who and where he however helplessly, however reluctantly is, and that is all he has, and it is a precarious –and precious– gift.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply