But....inside, a marvelous and intriguing transformation occurs! Most people would pass by a thing like this without raising an eyebrow, or even knowing what it was, or caring what it was. Maybe a year ago I would have. Not now though. No way. It symbolizes to me the dark, stunted-seeming world we sometimes find ourselves in, and we wonder why, and there seem to be absolutely no answers forth-coming. And so we dwell in this limited world of black and loneliness, not seeing what is to come, maybe even completely hopeless....thinking we might even have only this for the rest of our lives; this seeming abandonment, no fresh air to breathe or beauty to take in with the eyes.
But let me start from the beginning. We started as the crawling, munching and crunching caterpillar: big, fat, wandering around the earth on leaves and earth's floor, our purpose "fine". Maybe we had a passing thought that life would be much finer if we could soar like the birds overhead, I think we all have had that thought. Flight equals freedom and so forth. Because it does seem from a higher perspective that things come together with more clarity. Bird's eye view means more power. But then we somehow found ourselves instinctively building a house away from the unseen eye, behind a leaf, on a branch no one comes often to, for safety, to go and hide inside for awhile. Before we knew it, we were in this dark, claustrophobic "refuge" but then we began to wonder why. Why were we the only ones in there and why for so long, and other why's we never had the time to figure out before, we now wrestled with inside this place, and we didn't know now if we liked this process at all. This sucked...immensely. No one has probably ever gone through this exact process before EVER, and all such loneliness thoughts we are suddenly bombarded with in waves of self-pity and sadness. (Maybe this is a little too introspective for a caterpillar, but bear with me..if I was the caterpillar, this is perhaps what I would be thinking.) The time in here is for reflections, but then the reflections of how we used to be a fat, happy caterpillar that was well-fed, and green with goodness, and that sunlight shone upon our backs constantly bring us to depression because we know...we can never go back, for look at how we are changing in here! No one would love us now...look how disgusting we have become. Body covered in layers of God-knows what, and not beautiful at all even to one's self! The whole thing seems to be going so slow and there is way too much time to think and mind-screw ones self in here. Alone. Right?
But behold an eye that CAN see all that is going on inside that dark place of drought and questioning. A hand that is at work, a love that sees what the one inside the mess cannot see. Who knows perfectly, has done this time, and time again, with the most elegant of outcomes, the Potter, so to speak, with the lump of unfinished clay on his wheel. And now, it is time to emerge. After so long a time, will we even have any friends? Most probably we will be completely lonesome still. But the emergence is difficult, and we wrestle, and struggle with the almost impossibility of our freedom from this cocoon of darkness. But alas, finally, we crawl out, exhausted, but triumphant, and a little unsure of our place, or even what happened, kind of like a drunk person who has passed out in some strange place and must regain some memory of the night before, but the details are totally shady. We stumble onto the branch above us and realize the transformation that occurred in that place, gave us, magically, majestically, wings! So we try them out, and the view is amazing, and the beauty of spring surrounds on every side with flourishing life and verdant green all about, and suddenly! There are others. Others like you, flying above you, below you, beside you, happy, free, beautiful. You realize you could not have had these wings, this freedom, this spectacular feeling of perfect position, without that ugly, distant, challenging and AWFUL time of solitude. Here is an excerpt from a book called Celebration of Discipline, on the Dark Night of the Soul: "The dark night to which he calls us is not something bad or destructive. On the contrary, it is an experience to be welcomed much as a sick person might welcome a surgery that promises health and well-being. The purpose of the darkness is not to punish or to afflict us. It is to set us free. It is a divine appointment, a privileged opportunity to draw close to the divine center. St.John calls it "sheer grace", adding:
O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
The Lover with His beloved,
Transforming the beloved in her Lover.
What does the dark night of the soul involve? We may have a sense of dryness, aloneness, even lostness. Any over-dependence on the emotional life is stripped away. The notion, often heard today, that such experiences should be avoided and that we should live in peace and comfort, joy, and celebration only betrays the fact that much contemporary experience is surface slush. The dark night is one of the ways God brings us into a hush, a stillness so that he may work inner transformation upon the soul."
And so we LOVE the process (even if we hate it) as much as the outcome. We love the caterpillar stage in us, the chrysalis stage, and the butterfly stage equally. You could not possibly have any one of them without the other. Change is necessary and essential to life. Transformation does not look pretty when it is in the pupal stage. But we can respect the ugly mess that is represented as much as the beauty it will incur. It is vital.
No comments:
Post a Comment