The Stripping

You almost gotta hand it to nudists.

There's something really remarkable about the ability just to be naked.  It goes against every instinct of the will to cover up and be socially appropriate, to just stand there completely exposed.

I could never do it.  And even if I could, there would be a bastion of my appalled Baptist-raised relatives at the ready, hastening to throw something over me. 

It's not the only way to make yourself exposed and vulnerable.  We now have social media, which I have often used to be brutally honest, and have enraged and embarrassed others (without that intent). But that's beside the point...if there is one.

This dark night journy, says Sandra, is largely about stripping us, removing the pillars we have too hastily built ourselves upon, so that we can ultimately be rebuilt on God alone, as he actually is and not just what we've made him out to be for our benefit.

I definitely feel this is what is and has been happening.  And it's so awkward.  It's an in-between, an unsettling.  I want to arrive and be settled. But I instead awake to each new day wondering why.  I hope I can make something even slightly noble out of the hours before me, or I have not done the day justice and am failing at one more thing.  I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing specifically (other than keeping two children alive and well) and yet the freedom to do what I want feels selfish, and would you believe just cleaning my house doesn't appeal terribly as the thing to do with this time, as badly as the piles demand it.

I've gotten back to reading the last couple weeks (Jeremiah, Dark Night Journey (Cronk), and Letters to a Diminished Church (Sayers).)  It's good, taking out this quiet time in the morning, but my soul isn't necessarily quiet.  It wants the reading to mean something.  To solve something.  To lead to a direction.  To inspire a social media post, which gives me the semblance of purpose and tangible results for my time.

I want solid when it's all liquid.  I want fixed when it's all flowing.  

In my better moments, it's irksome; a lot of the time, though, I'm grumpy, short-tempered, and despairing as a result.

I'm stripped of everything Sandra predicts, and I hate it.  Nothing I have historically relied on is reliable.  She promises this is a re-centering, but if so, I have a long way yet to go.  Now it just feels like I'm standing here naked and the overwhelming urge is to grasp for clothes, a towel, anything that will cover me.

I do appreciate the context, though.  She gives me hope this is for something more than just awkwardness and embarrassment.  In this day and age where talk of "deconstruction" is so popular, it makes me wonder a lot if many people just got lost in this dark night journey and wandered completely off the path, without a guide like Sandra to say, "Press on.  This is where this is going."

I don't know.  There's so many reasons for the deconstructions, and I'm honestly pretty tired of the word.  I don't want to get into the debates.  I sometimes find entire Instagram accounts dedicated to one's "deconstruction" and I think I've found a soulmate, only to quickly find it's just yet another person who became destabilized and threw out their former self and rebuilt a new self just as hastily with the entire opposite persona.

That's not what this is about.  It's not about just switching.  Switching means you're just trying to appease people who don't agree with who you've been.

This is about re-centering.  Sandra says the stripping is a call to "radical dependence on God.  All the outward props which we have associated with our progress in the religious life are pulled away.  We enter the dark night.  Outwardly we lose our former avenue of service through illness, opposition, or some other cause.  Inwardly, the experiential sense of God's presence and direction recedes.  It looks as though our hope for a life committed to God's service has disappeared. When we are left in poverty and emptiness, without any finite thing to rely on, the true meaning of that hope can be realized. Our life is finally in God's hands, not our own. God leaves us in that condition long enough for a deep interior restructuring of our being to take place." (Dark Night Journey, p. 90)

It's so uncomfortable, I'm squirming even now as I type.  I am being stripped, but I'm not in the place where I have been restructured yet.  I have to stand here naked and believe, even as most of my belief has also been stripped.  I have to field questions from concerned onlookers who just want to throw back on what's been stripped so that I'll get back to normal, when I am never again going to be "normal," since normal means busy and productive and naively optimistic and having ready answers and having ducks in a row.

I am unraveled.  Often depressed and despondent.  I have no answers, only questions, and I'm growing weary of asking.  I have no pastors, no counselors, no direction.  I'm in a hallway of locked doors in a world where progress and results are demanded.

Even now as I type, I'm trying to find a place of resolution and accomplishment.  Instead, I'm so agitated, I want to scream.  I can't stranglehold a blog to give me meaning.  This is a season of falling, not landing.  It's a season of I don't know.  It's a season of trusting what I cannot see, even as I cannot trust.  It's loose ends, not pretty bows.  It's an undoing.  It's the formica being ripped off, not the granite countertops being laid.

I'm even grasping for metaphors.  The stripping reveals so much: my need for meaning and purpose and attention and concrete positioning. I grapple with these daily, and honestly feel like garbage most of the time.  If the rebuilding is coming, it's undoubtedly worth hanging around for.  But it's messy and excruciating in the process.

I watch this metaphor from my seat, the leaves, such a pretty hue, now dried up and falling, and I know something understands.