"What to do with this inner wound that is so easily touched and starts bleeding again? It is such a familiar wound. It has been with me for many years. I don't think this wound - this immense need for affection and this immense fear of rejection - will ever go away."
While I did not have the luxury of taking a sabbatical from my job, the past year I have experienced an immense growth of self-knowledge and self-awareness. The time, while fruitful and critically important, has not been easy or comfortable. While I have read, examined and written extensively, nothing I nothing I have touched has moved me more. It is as if a man gone for 33 years an I inhabit the exact same words, feelings, thoughts and dreams. They are my complete understanding of my essence. Nouwen and I are the same, we are both
For my first 64 years I lived under the optimistic but ultimately misguided belief that if I worked hard enough or was patient enough I would be relieved of my wounds because I believed they just were a response to a garden variety character defect no different than other that any one of us might bear. I heard I was just too thin skinned. I was just overly dramatic. I was just impatient. I was only insensitive to the sorrows and sufferings of others because I was too self-centered to see beyond my own nature. I thought somehow I would grow out of these things. I expected to learn to anticipate when the hurts were coming on or when the sense of rejection might pop up and take me by surprise. Unfortunately I did not grow out of or get used to the wounds from ancient unknown injuries. I still cannot easily venture beyond myself to notice and embrace the hurts of others despite how greatly I wish to have the ability to be empathetic.
Sorrowfully, the wounds have worsened and have cut closer and closer to my most sensitive hidden places. The bleeding happens more frequently and from nicks that are even less and less serious. A lifetime of accumulated experience has left me more sensitized, not less, to real or imagined offenses whether such offenses were intended or completely unintentional. The vast majority, of course, were purely figments of a misguided brain.
Like Nouwen, who was the exact age I am now when he reduced his thoughts to writing I had to wait until age 64 to get any perspective on the true nature of my sorrows. Perhaps it has takes a lifetime to understand what is essentially beyond understanding. Shakespeare might call them the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that are directed toward all humans but seem so personal to me. Reduced to the simplest terms, all that has happened to me is life, no greater and no less than the life anyone else has lived. The life I have lived is my life, the one I was meant to have and to fulfill. I should be able to dress myself with clothes fashioned from my experience and see I am not any different from anyone else.
This summer I experienced anger, even rage, to be shown that ADD and RSD are real things and they have been my things my entire life. I don’t want them. I don't want to seem cowardly or immature because of how I may react to even the most minor stimulus. It does not serve me well because the people closest to me, those who matter the most are the ones how have to endure and suffer when I lash out in the blink of an eye with little or no warning. I have tremendous appreciation of them. To stay close to me when I can be so unpredictable is something I can't repay. It is the immeasurable grace the people placed in my life receive which they, in turn, share with me that sustains me.
After stating his belief his wound never go away he went to say, "It (the wound) is here to stay, maybe for good reason. Perhaps it is gateway to my salvation, a door to glory and a passage to freedom!"
Reading this reminds me of the first time I heard someone gleefully pronounce at an AA meeting they were a "grateful alcoholic." I about gagged at hearing them be so gleeful for something so awful. After some time I came to understand how they felt and I almost share the emotion except I have never quite been able answer the call to be grateful about being alcoholic. Grateful to have recovered and to live in recovery, absolutely but to be grateful to have been cursed with the disease is a little more than I can choke out even on the best of days.
Hypersensitivity does not seem to be something that could be gateway to salvation. In fact, it seems more likely to be the exact opposite, a locked gate. Perhaps it really has nothing to do with salvation at all and is just burden we (I) have to bear. Nouwen, I have discovered has tremendous insight into the human condition. I have not read a single sentence he has written with which I have any issue so I have to pay attention to what he says here and see if I can learn from it. If he can describe the condition so perfectly, perhaps he can offer an equally perfect understanding of how we can benefit from the same condition.
In the next paragraph he continues:
"I am aware this wound of mine is a gift in disguise. These many short but intense experiences of abandonment lead me to the place where I'm learning to let go of fear and surrender my spirit into the hands of one who acceptance has not limits."
Well, then, here it is. This is exactly what I have been yearning to achieve. I KNOW the countless stabs of fear which plague me are meaningless and serve to irritate something that only my false self believes to be real. I KNOW that if I can simply do as we learned as young adults, to believe in the trust circle, I also should be able to just close my eyes and lean back until I fall into the arms of God, my God who is deserving of all faith. When I am in the moment despair, I can’t do it. I just cannot do it. All that I can do is simply wait it out and hang onto to the knowledge the bleeding will stop on its own and it always does.
In the past year, however, I have come to understand there is more than just waiting out the moment. Nouwen concurs:
"I am deeply grateful to Nathan and my other friends who know me and who are willing to bind my wounds so instead of bleeding to death, I can walk on the full life."
Like Henri, I have people in my life who, whether they know much about the intensity of the affliction, like my wife, or if understand little about the volume of the noise in my head, bind my wounds. Sometimes it is just a sentence or the right word that slows the bleeding. Other times it takes much more to bring me around to a sense of having been found. These peoples are hero's to me, they are the face and heart of the living God who knows all.
What am I am to make of all of this? If Christ can suffer through his suffering and death on the cross for me, is it not possible for me to offer this up as a suffering to help me to know him better?
I suddenly see an answer. As death came near, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" This, of course, is the first line of Psalm 22. In that moment we believe Jesus, the man dying a horrible death, felt abandoned forgotten by God. It is a little curious I never see my wound as being having been abandoned by God. I blame the people around me for opening the wound that leaves me in a state of abandonment and rejection. When that happens, the pain erupts like molten lava from a volcano and the heat consumes me completely and so quickly I can't imagine there has been a time when I was not feeling like I am in that moment. Is that how Jesus felt? How awful. How terrible. How indescribably profound. In this moment I glimpse just a hint of what empathy might feel like.
Psalm 22 begins as a lament of perhaps greater intensity than any other. From the terrifying first words it builds even to even greater and greater torment verse after verse and then, suddenly, the psalmist is delivered from torment. The cries of anguish were heard and answered. The fear of abandonment and defeat were only imagined. "He has not spurned or disdained the misery of the poor wretch. Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out."
Nouwen seems to have reached a point of acceptance beyond mere resignation of, what shall we call this, an affliction? Condition? Challenge? Whatever. I have no choice but to accept it as well. The challenge for me is to embrace it as a gift because the fact remains I always survive long enough for the bleeding to stop every time it starts. It is gift because my suffering is for things that do not exist and can't really harm me and that every time I complete a cycle without causing harm to others, I can be grateful and appreciative. I can give testimony to the truth of Psalm 22. I have not been spurned or discarded. None of us ever are forgotten by God even if the torment is real.
What remains is the question of how to manage when the sense of being unloved or rejected emerges for me to keep perspective during the experience. So far the answer eludes me. I suspect there is no answer beyond just focusing on the hope, and it is only a distant hope, that the bleeding will once again stop. I hope that grace will be enough. More than I pray God's will be sufficient for me. It was for Paul who wrote in the second letter of Corinth that God responded to his prayers of relief that for Paul, God's grace was enough because God's strength is made perfect in weakness.
This poignant point also binds me tightly together with Henri Nouwen, if I dare make a comparison to gifted writer and myself. What gifts we both have to share come, not from our strength, knowledge, or knowledge but from the hurts we cannot see in truth with clarity. Our strengthen does not come from our wholeness but from our brokenness. God, we must remember, will reduce to nothing those whom he will use for his purposes.
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