Sometime ago I wrote a post on existential despair and what Albert Camus has termed to be the "absurdity" of life. I was at a point in my life where I was just fed up. Life seemed dull, mundane, and bitterly painful in the area of relationships.
Things have now come full circle, and I again am experiencing the same troubles and hurts. Life really is absurd. Unlike a year ago when I visited this topic, I did not have to stand and watch a good friend walk down the street as he ran away from home, but I nonetheless am becoming familiar with life's absurdity once again.
I'm 250 miles away from home on the side of a remote mountain with no really close friends or family within a five hour drive. I'm alone in a strange new world where I wake up every morning, go to classes, go to work, go to classes again, then do homework, then finally sleep, only to repeat the cycle all over again. My university learning experience has reduced from a starving hunger for knowledge to a boring drudgery in order to maintain the necessary honors program 3.5 gpa (which might not be possible thanks to BIO 200).
My friends from home and high school are now scattered all across the country, some never to return to sleepy Dallastown, PA. There are some very friendly peers here at Liberty, but I have yet to connect with anybody in a deep, long lasting friendship. Many students here already know others that they spend time with and stay in their own little "cliques."
Worse than anything I have experienced thus far in my life, however, is how I still cannot seem to find that one meaningful relationship with a young lady that I so desperately crave. I thought I had it. I thought my future was secure, my life set in place, and the perfect best friend that anybody could ever ask for by my side. I turned out to once again be sorely wrong.
I expected that when somebody made a promise, they'd keep it. I kind of had this thing where if somebody said something, I kind of took it for granted that he or she actually meant it and would abide by it. I never in a thousand years imagined that everybody is the same. I sincerely thought that some people were different . . . one person in particular.
Now I'm left with all the shattered pieces of my broken heart on the floor. I'm left with a soul merged and fused with the soul of another person who is through with me. Like a festering wound in an arm or a leg, I need to amputate that part of me out before I'm wholly infected with a disease that can kill me. The hard part is, I cannot do it myself. The universe was created in such a fashion that something about a deeply attached relationship actually does fuse the souls of two people together. The process was created by God Himself, and it was never meant to have to be torn apart. Man cannot do it himself. It takes the strength of God to undo something He created to be.
It's so hard amputating that wounded part of soul out of me, because the only way it can be done is if I allow God to work at it over time. It can't come overnight unless there was never anything fused together to amputate in the first place. God is the only one that can do it, and all I can do is sit back like a helpless, wounded soldier in war and watch the Master Surgeon work. Like an infantryman who must just lie there and endure the pain of a limb being sawed off, all I can do is sit back and endure as God is at work sawing a festering, wounded part of my soul off.
Healing is going to take some time. It is a slow, gradual crawl towards normalcy. I find that my problem, though, lies in actually letting God do the healing. My heart is in pieces on the ground. I try to gather the fragments up in my hands to lift them up to God to let Him work, but my hands are too weak. They shake so much that all the pieces quickly slip out of my hands and spill back onto the floor again where they came from. When I can actually get all the pieces and lift them to God, some part of me at the last minute wants to hold on and do it myself. I know it will never work, but I can never seem to make my head knowledge apply to my heart and my actions.
I do not change my originally presented view a year ago that absurdity and pain are meant to stir us to search and desire something deeper. In the long run, all I can hold onto in my loneliness is that any earthly relationship is ultimately merely a Platonic shadow of God's love for me. It's the only thing that keeps me going and the only reason I'm still here.
I have, however, finally realized after a year of thought, reflection, and experience what exactly it is that causes life to be so absurd and painful in the first place - sin. It is like a disease that has slowly worked its way through the cosmos. Everything it touches turns to dust and crumbles to the ground in decay. From dust we are made and to dust we return. It has even left its damaging impact on earthly romantic relationships. No earthly relationship is ever going to equal or substitute God's love and desire for us His creation.
One thing I have come to realize about God more than anything in this past year of ups and downs is the nature of God's relationship with us. I credit this discovery almost wholly to the genius of Mr. Cleary, but I am sure he would say (and probably correctly) that the idea existed long before he was aware of it. The idea is this: that God's relationship to each of us is like a romantic love relationship.
In Eden, God and man were in perfect unity and fellowship - God and man were quite literally married to one another (in fact I would argue that the earthly version of marriage between a man and a woman is another Platonic shadow of this original form). When man sinned, he was unfaithful in marriage, and was forced into divorce from God. The rest of scripture then is the love story of God trying to woo back His unfaithful bride once again. Israel is His chosen people, the group through which He would work to eventually woo back the entire world (or at least try to). Christ's death on the cross is the ultimate show of romantic love ever experienced in the created universe. Indeed, it is the greatest possible display of romantic love ever, everywhere.
His bride spit in His face, cursed Him, exalted herself above Him, and He does the last thing one would expect of an abused husband - He gives His life in order to provide hope of reconciliation to His wayward beloved. He is that obsessed and in love with humanity that He paid the ultimate price in order to restore a degree of union and fellowship once again.
That is what's keeping me going anymore. I have nothing else. I'm alone on a mountain with 10,000 people who mostly don't even care that I exist. I've been left by the one person who had meant everything to me, my absolute closest friend; my family and other friends are a five hour drive away (providing I don't get lost in the dark woods again with a dead GPS and a dying cell phone - there's some absurdity if you're interested in that story). I have nothing or nobody except for God Himself. At least I can say that there is no better lover, and there is nobody who has done more to show me His love than God Himself.
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"To live without hope is to cease to live." --Fyodor Dostoevsky
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~Insense
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