I am away. I am apart.
It’s a weird mindset that I can only truly get into when I’m away from what I call home. For me it was first felt, full weight, when I was sent away to camp as a kid. It was not until the night pressed hard against me that I felt the vastness of the emotion; the realization.
Even as a kid I knew there was something more going on than: I miss mom, or I miss blankie. Those are the concrete terms. The icons of a privileged childhood. No, my mind didn’t settle for that.
I wish I had known the significance then, I wish it could have changed how I was then – at that moment. But I needed to feel it more than a thousand times more before I could enter into the feeling like finding a single, unfinished birch door set against a starless horizon.
Yet, I felt it – there – so many years ago, full weight.
And I guess the blame was due in part to the comically tragic camp I was sent to. The tragedy was the humanness and downright shabbiness of the whole camp. The comedy was that it claimed the name of Jesus – Lord and Savior; King and Priest. Not that I was turned off to Jesus by the camp. No, if anything it was the great meeting of tragedy and comedy that stirred in my heart the revelation.
I am away. I am apart.
The crickets chirruped in an endless dirge outside the window. And I stared up at the ceiling. At the intensity of my stare the cedar paneling above gave way, and each chip of wood burst into dazzling white and became a solar system. Billions of burning, spinning, empty nothings stretched vast above me. The vastness of the cedar expanse spoke like music to the vastness of the expanse within me.
And so I knew, even as a kid: I am away. I am apart. Not just here; everywhere.
I was and am a vastness separate and yet connected with the uncomfortable bunk bed I was lying on; with the flimsy chair I sit in now. At that moment at a painfully underfunded, evangelical camp I caught a glimpse of a truth so sharp and deep, it put my body on pins and needles. A real bildungsroman moment; a sharp knife of spiritual reality crashing loudly, silently into my consciousness. A sharpness not matched by the words of any counselor or preacher.
Had you seen me lying on that bunk bed, wrapped in my stained sleeping bag, you would not have even guessed the wide-eyed kid staring at the ceiling was traveling through space and time. In reality I was a kid at camp, missing home, staring at a poorly-constructed cabin ceiling. No mystical light was surrounding me; no trumpets were sounding from the heavens. It was just me, silent; in my lonely world. It was me living deep within my inner lostness, beyond any preached words. And that is what put my soul in the birth pains of the realization.
I am holy, desolate.
Holy: I am a kid wandering in an open, cosmic field. Apart from all others by my very nature.
Desolate: I am an open cosmic field that is broken and decaying with every defiant breath.
And so is every other person I know. We are these things together and separate. Inseparably separate.
But this deep sight was only momentary for my growing mind. And in my simple child way, its revelation came to the surface of my life as anger; as mistrust of others. As a feeling of incurable loneliness and hatred. I couldn’t see how this loneliness and brokenness was actually the connecting tissue between me and every other person in all of humanity. I couldn’t stay, and be present in who I was and who all those around me were.
Instead, I ran.
I felt that if only I could escape or negate the lost inner me, I’d be cured. I’d be better. I’d be over the sickness that it appeared no one else was suffering from. “It,” that terrible, stupid “it.” The “it” that was felt in that second of realization: that this is life, and there is so much more, but I can’t get a hold of “it.”
There it came up from the depths of me like a confusing mass of nothingness. I hadn’t entered into the realization of how connected I really was to everyone and everything. I avoided it as if it were a deadly vapor that would kill me if I so much as took a breath near it. I hated it. Even though it was a tall door set before me beckoning. I avoided. It would be a stupidity that would paint my life for years – and to be honest, the same stupidity is still the undertones of most of my days.
But now, I am growing into acceptance. Accepting, and being willing to admit that I am set apart and broken – just as every person who has graced this planet was and is.
Now that same realization which set my spine afire sets my mind at ease.
The strangest ease. Because I have not arrived by any means. But it’s an ease of knowing that these two opposing things are what make me. My loneliness and all the brokenness is not something to be cured, but to be lived out of. Like the shabby camp and the name of Jesus. I am holy and hidden within myself, but still so unforgivably human it hurts. And that is more than okay, that is how it is. That is precisely how I am connected to others. It’s the same for everyone, whether they see it or not. That is how I can live out of my brokenness and speak from it into your brokenness, because you are in the same boat as me.
Trust me, it is something that can set you at ease, this acceptance of our collective and individual brokenness. That is where we can see a path toward healing, a path toward wholeness. The hope that is so close you can taste it, taste the cosmic ease. And not just an ease free of all tension, but one that revels in the tension of our lost-and-found selves.
I had to meet the Nameless Shadow.
Let me explain. I like to look at this cosmic ease like finding shadows in a vast, burning desert. There are many separate shadows produced by the dense, burning pillars of holiness and desolation. The intersection of their most prominent shadow is where I now sit to cool myself.
I have a name for the shadow; it has only one. You know the name too – but to say it aloud is to bring about the same comedy and tragedy of a painfully underfunded, mediocre camp for children, trying as best it can to lift up and sell the name that needs not be sold. Convinced it is the number of times you are herded into a small chapel building and preached at that does it. But that is not where the shadow is met. It is rather the connection with others, the realization of our shared broken, holy state. Me speaking into your brokenness, and you speaking into mine. Us, as children, wandering in a cosmic field together. That’s where the shadow, this Nameless Shadow, is met.
The Nameless Shadow is in all forms the same as us, yet it is so beyond us. It’s an entity that has traversed the wilderness of that nanosecond of realization – the “it” that I can’t get, has been gotten in that shadow.
I am holy, desolate. The Nameless Shadow is in between the two, transcendent yet present. Lord and Savior; King and Priest.
It is in that shadow I sit – in that dividing comma I rest – drinking in the cold darkness that is now to me the most brilliant and replenishing light. This is the same light every separate solar system shares. And we, in all our holy, desolate humanness can share in the same healing, renewing light together.