The last month has been rough enough to be considered a ground shattering quake of earth. And beautiful enough to almost be on the same level as those glorious sunsets. The kind you want to bottle up and hide, lest it be tainted by the unsavory blemishes of reality. Reality...man, reality sucks. I keep ruminating on the possibility that reality and gravity are the same figurative substance, pulling us closer to the ground and shoving our faces in the dirt when we try to climb too high. It's not like I'm trying to fly to the moon. Maybe I just want to see the clouds. Maybe I just want to feel the air rush through my mass of tangled hair. No matter how small our hopes, we can count on reality to drag us to the depths and shovel the dirt on top of our graves while we lie paralyzed and silently screaming for escape.
That was the unfortunate part of these last few weeks. The beautiful part came after the suffocation. After the last vestige of sunlight was taken from my sight by the muddy earth being piled on top of me. I died, in a sense. At least, part of me did. The part of that cared too much for something that shouldn't have mattered. Once that was gone, there was all this strange expanse of space. There was this huge section inside of me that was vacant. The tiny part that remained, that was unadulterated by reality, started to grow and fill the vast emptiness. I began to think clearly, to see clearly, and to love clearly. I try to stay away from talking about religion sometimes, but when it's essentially inseparable from my being, it's kind of impossible. God didn't "speak" to me. I didn't have some enormous revelation or realization that all of a sudden whisked my problems away and gave me a clear purpose in life. All I did was stop caring so much about those stupid, petty things that took up so much of my existence.
My heart is burnt, ashy, deformed, hardened, and so easily broken. I'd been squeezing so tightly that it had stopped beating. One day, I looked at my clenched fist, at the blood seeping through my fingers. My brain told my hand to open. It sent out neural signals to my muscles, begging them to loosen. And I couldn't understand why I was unable to relieve the pressure. Basically, I let myself build so many walls, mortar so many bricks, that I couldn't remember where I'd put the door. Or if I'd left room for any door at all. I knew that what I needed to do was give my heart to God. That's what was going to begin to fix the ugliness and the despair. But I couldn't give him all of it. I could only show him pieces sticking out through the holes where other people had tried to break through the walls. Where other people had tried but had failed. Had gotten tired and left.
Since I've been back at school, I've been going to Mass and adoration frequently. Praying for God to take my heart, to make it his and do whatever he wants with it. I've been begging him to make it better. To bandage it up and stop the blood from gushing. But I wasn't really letting him. I was still holding on to things, and to people, that I desperately needed to be free from. It wasn't until that final "shove" of dirt in my grave woke me up that I figured it out. That I understood. God is preparing me for something amazing. He lets the hurt and the horror happen to my heart because He knows something even greater will result from it. I was finally able to give Him my heart because I realized that even with Him holding it, it's still going to bruise. He's not going to magically make it impervious to pain. But He's going to do a lot better job of molding it and healing it than I ever will.
I tried to give my heart to God out of desperation. Because I had tried everything else and had failed at everything else. It wasn't until I offered it to Him with my new-found understanding that I was able to actually give every piece over. He holds my heart gently and lovingly. I know that suffering will endure. But I know that in His hands, my heart will remain open to the love of life, the world, and of Christ, instead of violently removed from everything inside the cruel cage I had starved it in. In the last few weeks, I went through a lot of plain ol' shit. And I found exceptional beauty in God's love for me. In suffering, we are brought to a new level of intimacy with Christ. God loves me so much that He allows me to be hurt so that I can know what it means to love Him even more deeply. I finally let God hold my heart, and for the first time, there is no caked blood on my fingertips. No inescapable pressure in my chest. My heart and soul can breathe again. For the first time in a long time, I can feel the pure and simple beating of a living heart.
