recent reflections

When you are haunted you feel ill at ease, and nothing seems to ring the right bell. You are always aware of what is at your back, what has passed on, what should be gone from your mind. What follows you, follows you through the dimly lit alleyways of the everyday, through the murky corridors of human connection, is not a ghost. It is instead the overwhelming sense of not having lived your life the best way, of not giving your full measure of humility, of honesty, of love. 

These past few years have haunted me. In earlier years I lived for the sublime, taking moments and collecting them in my mind and heart like photographs in an album. I lived for those highlights, but I also took an old man’s advice and tried to live always in the glow-lights, in the moments that veer away from the sublime and into the mundane, that may not capture the luminous quality of a sunset but instead give off the glow of a full moon on a night when it is most needed. In recent years I have not lived in anything, for anything. There is no real effort in anything I do, and when I fight it is for ground not worth standing on in the first place. 

I am at this moment in a hotel suite overlooking the Cape Fear River. Several miles from here is a place where many years ago men built a large seawall to protect their military interests, and if you stand on that wall at high tide you may well be washed into the surging sea. The waves hit the wall, one after another, surging over it and into a multitude of barnacle-covered boulders only to fly backwards into the sea again. And so it goes. The sea gives, and then it takes away. It is like anything else in this life. 

The waves in my life, waves that carry in their foam all that I have wanted in this life, needed in this life, they continue to crash into whatever strength is left in me. I can’t be sure but I feel that soon the time will come when those waves will have to return to the place they came from, and I will have to learn again how to give, to love, to no longer care about what I need but provide instead for the needs of others. My namesake, Saint Francis, is famous for having prayed, “Let me not seek to be understood but to understand,” and if I should truly need anything in this time, in this place I have found myself in, it is to make this prayer my own once again. 

Perhaps in doing so I will find myself in another Franciscan story, as the barren tree that the little Saint implored to speak to him of God, which then bloomed large and colorful in the midst of the grey, haunted winter, perhaps I will find myself to be something growing and alive once again.