Dear Flounder
The Dangling Conversation
Dear Friend,
I recently went back and found some of the posts from the blog Abi and I maintained in the second year of her cancer walk. I was a little surprised by some of the things I found there, and was especially struck by the common themes this substack and the blog often - but certainly not always- shared. Case in point: This post.
For context, this was written March 3, 2019 or almost exactly three months after Abi died. There is far more God here than I remembered, believing that I was, at the time, on a completely different trajectory, and likely resisting God harder than I would have cared or dared to admit.
It makes me wonder how much has changed, honestly, and how long the pursuit has been going on - I wonder if I was being pursued long before I dared to recognize it, or even to acknowledge it as a possibility.
Like you, perhaps?
Oremus,
Chris
Dear Flounder: The Dangling Conversation
March 3, 2019
Dear Flounder,
For the second Sunday in a row, I went to bed thinking this would be the week that I had nothing to say.
Turns out that just like last week, there might be something after all. I still don’t have much to say to you, per sé. But I have a question. I’m going to try to find the words for my question, and then I’m going to try to listen for your reply.
I woke up this morning before 4:00. I often do.
Usually, I head to the kitchen, try my best not to step on Haley (Abi’s orphaned calico cat) when I make coffee, then come back into the office to write. Write emails to people. Try to get curious. With them. With myself. Often not succeeding. Often just letting the internal dialogue spill out of my head and into the email, not taking the time to do much editing, and just hitting send. I’m fortunate that I have people who are willing to receive these notes kindly. To see past the blather. To know better than I what I was trying to say, or should have been trying to say. Thank God for these people.
People like you.
But today, instead of going right to the laptop, I pulled out the book I’ve been reading for the last few days.
I’m a little embarrassed even to tell you the name of the book. Do you know how some things and some people become so successful that they transform into something they are not? Instead of the beautiful or sublime or breathtaking, they become shorthand for something worthy of derision. They become a caricature of the excess of the beautiful or sublime or breathtaking. They become their own punchline.
And everyone believes they know that something. But they do not. They know the joke. They know the punchline. But not the thing itself.
So it is with this book. So it is with this author, I think.
I am reading Eat. Pray. Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Elizabeth remains a dear and distant friend.
Nate once called Eat, Pray, Love the Nickleback of Memoirs. How perfect is that?
Get past the joke, and Nickleback kinda slaps. Like Elizabeth’s capstone memoire.
I doubt you’ve ever read it, but I want you to. Or maybe talk to somebody. Someone who actually knows about it, and who can get past the shorthand. Someone who has done the work.
I’m nearing the end of the Pray section. And when I woke this morning, I picked up where I left off as I was falling asleep last night. Elizabeth is coming to the end of her time at the Ashram. She has found herself as the butt of a hilarious joke - perpetrated by God or Swamiji or someone or something. She’d decided to become silent. To seek God in silence, and she is utterly denied her choice. I’m not going to repeat the whole story. I’m only telling you to get you oriented. I opened to chapter 64 this morning. But you should start at 62 or 63 for the full context of the joke.
(I have no idea if this particular section even made it to the movie. I’ve never seen it. I think I’m glad that I have not.)
And after reading, I had this idea that I want to bounce off of you. And maybe I’m finally getting back to the discussion that you and I started about God on our way up to Fredericksburg to meet Kylie just before First Descents. I think so.
(And I hope we can continue this conversation in the coming weeks. I think of it as The Dangling Conversation. The one that you and I never quite finished, because I did not know how. I still don’t know. But I feel like I left you hanging/dangling, and I don’t like that. Not at all.)
As I read, I keep asking myself or anybody who might listen: Why do we resist God so hard?
To be honest, that question is partly what the book is about - at least this particular section, and likely the whole thing. So my question really isn’t all that original. But it keeps coming back to me. I can’t get past it.
And you thought Eat Pray Love was about an incredibly selfish woman who just says, To hell with everything! Then sets out to find herself? So did I. It is not. See what I mean?
To me, it’s a book that seeks an answer to this question: Why do we resist God so hard?
A couple of weeks ago, a friend suggested that there are only two real motivating emotions. Love or Fear. She acknowledged there may be some derivative emotions that seem to nudge us toward one choice over another, but even those can trace their ancestry back to one of these two. Like Fear and Love are to emotions what Adam and Eve are to the human race.
I think there is something to this. I hate reductionism, but I love simple when simple is right. I love going all the way back to the beginnings of things. Love and fear feel simple and right, and absolutely feel like the beginnings of things. So I’m going with it for now.
So why do we resist God so hard?
I mean, if we accept the idea of a loving and compassionate God, what is there to resist? Why would we resist, at all?
Love seems to be out of the question. Which leaves us with this.
Because we’re afraid. Afraid that:
We will leave those we love behind, or they will walk away from us, and we’ll be left alone. Alone with God. And somehow, that feels absolutely terrifying. What would we even talk about? What if God doesn’t like us?
We might find out that our ideas of God were wrong to begin with. That God is not quite so compassionate and loving or enamored with us as we believed. And by resisting, by playing it cool, we keep enough distance so that we never become the butt of the world’s cruelest practical joke. A wasted life. Or a life devoted to the wrong God, or delusion, which would be the worst of all.
Even if we have the right God, we might be afraid are not worthy of his love in the first place.
Maybe these are all the same thing, actually. We’re afraid that God will reject us, or that He’s not there to begin with. Sure, God may ask an incredibly high price of us. That we give up so much of what we hold onto in order to meet Him where He is.
But we’re talking about God here.
You know. The maker of the universe and all its galaxies. The creator of Life.
Or however you choose to define Him. But if God is who we think He is, and He tells us that we might need to let go of a thing or two in order to commune with Him, to commune with Pure Love, is there any reason we would resist other than fear?
The fear that God won’t come through on His end of the bargain. That His love isn’t enough.
So that’s the question answer, maybe, Abi. It’s fear, isn’t it? And this fear, in particular. Right? What do you think?
I’ll take your answer off-line. But I’ll be looking for it, just the same.
I’ll be looking for it this week in the books I read and the people I meet and in the sounds of the surf. I’ll be looking for it in the color of the sunsets or the odors of the coffee shop at 7:00 in the morning. I’ll be looking for it everywhere, actually, and I’m feeling pretty confident that you’ll have something for me.
And if you think I’m onto something, maybe you can give me a little suggestion of what to do with that fear. And maybe even release it and give the alternative a chance to weigh in.
Now that’s a big ask. Bigger than yours, I think. Are you up for it?
I love you, and you know who you are,
Pito
There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith”—because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be—by definition—faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be…a prudent insurance policy.
Elizabeth Gilbert
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not (yet) made perfect in love.
I John 4:18
For Kathryn’s Caring Bridge updates, click here.