Where Am I? -Making Connections

Where Am I?

Escaping knowing myself to experience connections

Written by Dan McDonald

 

                I wrote a blog earlier this week.  When I wrote it, I thought it was one of the better pieces I had ever written.  Two mornings later I withdrew it from my blog site, substituting a paragraph acknowledging my error in having written the piece.  I am now staring at my keyboard.  I am wondering where am I?

                As I sit at my keyboard I realize, that for me in this moment of time, it is more important to ask “where am I” than who am I?  I move from the obvious to the unknown.  I am in the lower middle portion of a large nation, sitting in the upper half of a far larger world, in a universe which no one has yet fully discerned how large it is.  That means there is a lot around me.  It means I am not the only creature or being that exists in this universe.  It means there is more for me to discover in this universe than for me to understand within my own mind.  So where am I is perhaps more valuable for me to ask than who am I.

                To be honest I actually depend on this universe.  If my last connections with this creation are dissolved I die.  That is no hyperbole.  It is plain cold hard rational reality.  I derive my nourishment from this universe surrounding me.  I need something of a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats, dairy products, a little bread and some pasta, a glass of ale or an occasional nice drink of wine for me to exist.  Okay I snuck in the ale and wine.  They aren’t needed, but they help me enjoy all the other foods all the more.  But I need food or I die.  I need some sort of connection to the creation surrounding me or I fail to obtain food and I die.  My need for food is instructive.  I need food for survival.  I haven’t gotten so far removed from creation that I have given up eating.  But like a lot of Americans I eat too much so I am obese.  But it would not be surprising if within my obesity there were several varieties of vitamins and nutrients which weren’t in accord with the guidelines for ideal bodily health.  In fact a large number of Americans, because of bad food choices are both obese in weight and undernourished in various minerals and vitamins.  But more than our bodies need fed.  So do our souls, minds, and inner beings.  I think my inner being has become simultaneously obese and malnourished.

                I have heard the sort of thing that happens when a person passes through the stages of starvation.  At first there is a gnawing hunger felt by the person who has not eaten.  The hunger pains grow in intensity but not forever.  The body tries to draw upon fat reserves to make up the difference from what is no longer sustained by food intake.  But then the health of one’s body begins to crumble, slowly at first.  Strange phenomena may take place in the person with the food deprived body.  Eventually both the afflicted human spirit and his body begin to fail.  Instead of hunger pains there is lethargy.  The starving person becomes listless.  The person’s body and soul begins shutting down in a seeming last movement towards death.  If a physician finds the person in this condition the victim may no longer feel hungry.  At this point the physician will likely need to feed the person intravenously until they recover enough strength and appetite to desire and to digest normal food once more.  I wonder how much of that is similar when we struggle with matters of depression.  I have grown to realize that on days when I am not working I am listless and lethargic not because of a lack of food, but I suspect from a lack of making connections with the universe around me.  As a result I have this look of simultaneous obesity and malnutrition in my soul and inner being.  I have fed my mind with intellectual materials.  I have tried to figure out who I am.  But other connections that can be made in this creation have been neglected.  My inner being is being forced into starvation when everything it needs is in the creation surrounding me.

                I am not thinking primarily of prayer, Bible reading, or even the mystical participation in our faith’s offer of sacramental grace.  All those connections to God are important, but we have a more basic and universal relationship to God to be discovered in the creation around us.  It is something a Christian, a heretic, a skeptic, and an ardent atheist might discover.  It is why sometimes very faithful men and women lack something that very unbelieving men and women have already appropriated from creation.  There are connections to the creation around us that are extremely vital for the health of our minds, souls, and inner beings.  Think of this earth for a moment from a truly Christian perspective.  This earth is described as God’s handiwork.  When you go to a lake to swim in its waters you may never give it a thought but you throw yourself into the waters to enjoy the handiwork of God.  There is a connection between you and God when you play in a lake you love.  We get all uptight about a non-believer saying they know God more from being in nature than in church.  Maybe we haven’t connected to nature like that person, and maybe we haven’t been to the same churches he has visited.  The point for us is not to deny his experience because the Psalmist himself discovered that as he tried to run from God, God’s presence was everywhere.  We are like the tale of the person that cuts off his nose to spite his face.  We imagine since some men worship the handiwork of God rather than God, we should therefore imagine there is no connection to God when we are in relationship to God’s handiwork.  I am gradually realizing nothing could be further from the truth of natural reason, but also nothing could be further from the truth of Biblical revelation.  The Bible merely assumes we are men and women with appetites for connecting to the creation around us.  To not be that way is to court mental insanity from a Christian perspective.  When we work and play and contemplate God’s handiwork we are participating in a world he made for us as much as we are participating in his world when we go about doing the task of taking care of the earth as God’s garden that he has given to us to cultivate and to eat from to our heart’s content.  When we look at a beautiful natural scene we are appreciating a piece of artistry imprinted upon an earthen canvas for us to admire and study and love.  If we move into our sterilized cloisters and cut ourselves off from such connections will we reach and obtain a higher state of grace or merely cut ourselves off from the connections to God that will keep our minds, souls, and inner beings balanced and healthy?  I suspect that cutting ourselves off from normal connections to creation deprives us to a large degree of the humanity with which we were meant to become mirrors reflecting the image of God in God’s creation.  The Bible, wonderful as it is, points us to a life in this world which discovers God and which sees this world as his creation, as his handiwork, and as our home.  To not make connections to the universe in which we live is as much the characteristic of insanity as one who buys a house in which to live and never opens a shut door to see what is in the rooms behind the closed doors.  Would we not imagine that soul estranged from a natural sense of reality?  Why buy a house if you are unwilling to enter the doors of the rooms that were left closed by the homeowners who lived there before you?

                Here is the problem I discovered in myself as I woke up following my realization that I needed to take down the blog in which I had first taken so much pride and had to create a whole different kind of blog for my next writing.  I realized that I had allowed myself to drift away from what were important connections to God’s creation.  I saw the signs of hunger and starvation in my inner life.  I had reached in some areas of my life the lethargic and listless stage where one is losing their appetite.  With a sense of shock I began to realize that this sort of depression is the sort of experience that can, if left unchecked, open the doorway to some sort of insanity.  Perhaps insanity, more than we realize is connected to a breakdown in our ability to make connections to the creation in which we were created to live.  My mental state is healthier on days when I am involved in those connections I do have towards God and his creation.  On days that I am scheduled to go to work, or to attend the church liturgy I tend to cope adequately with my responsibilities.  Other days I may seldom leave my house and fail to address the basic matters of maintaining house and yard.  I seldom explore the world around me except as it might happen to pass through my intellect.  I fear I have become someone with a pot-bellied obese mind and an otherwise malnourished inner being.  I live in a universe that I have rarely looked at.  I have limited the connections to that world to some abstract Bible devotion, or a literary reading, or as interpreted for me on a computer screen.  Should it be surprising that finally I awake from my slumber disoriented to the point that I cry out “Where am I?”  It seems a far more reasonable question for my state of being than being forced inward once more with the question “Who am I?”  No, I must not let the question “who am I” keep me from finding this other answer.  “WHERE AM I?”

                I have awakened from my coma of lethargy and listlessness to realize I have a kinship with the John Nash portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind.”  My situation is not as severe as his, at least I don’t imagine it to be, but I think we were both in a similar situation.  Somewhere he had lost his ability to connect with others.  His mind compensated by providing him imaginary persons whom he envisioned seeing and hearing.  His mind projected them outward from his mind so that he saw them as part of reality and no longer as fictional characters to be described in a work of fiction.  The two fragments of his life had to be reconnected.  He had to build bridges and connections to the real world existing wholly outside of his own human body, while learning a way to contain his mind’s imagination so that his mind could once more decipher reality from imagination.  We deal with a great insight that modern man struggles with in our day.  It would seem that human beings come with a sort of baggage even at birth.  We have predilections.  One person is born with a tendency to be impulsive.  He may fly off the handle so much more easily than a person who seems to have been born with a bend toward being laid back.  The latter person may take confrontational moments in stride but also may be hard pressed to force himself into an industrious mode.  Our predilections help form the personalities we will become and tend us towards certain gifts, opportunities, struggles, and temptations.  Nash seemed to have had two of these predilections made part of his life that brought together forged a recipe for potential disaster.  He had the tendency to find it difficult to enter ordinary human relationships.  On the other hand he had a mind capable of seeing realities no one else saw.  That is what gave him the potential to be brilliant scientist capable of winning the Nobel Prize.  It is also what gave him the potential to see personalities from his imagination as real that were perhaps the projections of a mind responding to a soul’s hunger for companionship.  Fortunately Nash’s story is not a tragedy.  He was able to piece together a realization that he needed real relationships.

                It should be a spiritual lesson to all of us how John Nash gradually recovered his sanity.  At first when his mental state observed by others was described to himself he could not believe the insinuations and attack being made on his own sanity.  His perception of reality was far too intertwined with the projections of his mind upon reality.  But then one day he found a way to distinguish the characters of his mind’s imagination from the people who truly lived outside of his own body.  The real people grew older.  The imagined people remained static and unchanging.  Real people with real life grow older, look pretty or handsome and are probably lean when they are twenty and get fat by the time they get to fifty.  But the little girl and the college aged friend of Nash’s mind were unchanging.  Therefore they weren’t real.  The realities of man created in God’s image are imposed upon this world not as identical in God’s image but projections with their own freedom and life to be and to become.  God is spirit and unchanging but he casts his shadow upon the earth in the form of human flesh that grows and becomes.  This is how Israel was warned about idolatry.  The prophets poked fun at the statues created to show God that had eyes that could not see, ears that could not hear, noses that could not smell, feet that could not walk, and a body that did not breathe or move or speak.  Man is changing constantly and we imagine that as such man is a poor reflection of God, but look again.  The unchanging idol cannot reflect God’s image because it has no life.  The changing man, exploring and discovering his creation lives and in life is where we are meant to show forth the image of God.  It is this life which the Psalmist describes as being drawn together, fearfully woven and put together in a mother’s womb.  From that point life progresses until one is wrinkled and being drained of faculties little by little like a drink offering being poured out on the altar.  At last the body is sown into the ground as an offering to be raised to life on the last day.

                Whether John Nash understood the spiritual implications or not, he had discovered how to distinguish the real persons in the world from his mind’s artificial ones.  The real ones grew older.  That is true for every human being that has life.  That is the danger of our idealized conceptions of the world.  We replace the human beings living outside our bodies with theological concepts of human nature that sit on a page of a textbook never to change and never to breathe and never to live.  We imagine that these concepts are real and we begin to look at real human beings by the tags we think describe them and we even think of ourselves as a list of tags that represent us.  So we sit around and ask what sort of Christian am I – liberal, Conservative, Progressive, existentialist, traditionalist; and then we try to fit ourselves and others into the packages suggested by the label we like best.  Are these real people, the ones who live outside our bodies or are they simply the projected still caricatures of our sickened minds?  Once he could distinguish the real ones by their growing older Nash could begin to make connections to those persons he knew who grew older and to contain back into the boundaries of his mind and imagination those persons who never grew older.  Perhaps in at least a symbolic manner we have to learn to do the same.  We do not know a real person by labels political, social, or spiritual; that is how we know caricatures of real people.  Real people are the ones who like all sorts of different things, laugh, weep, eat, and have some really strange ideas about some really strange stuff and yet usually upon truly seeing a neighbor having a heavy load will ask if they could use a hand.   Nash had to do two things after he realized how to tell the difference.  He had to sequester the imagined people back into his imagination; and then get to the business of connecting with the real people.  Understanding the nature of how John Nash clawed his way back to a semblance of humanity helps me to forge a blueprint for my building of connections to the creation outside of my own body upon which I am dependent for my nurturing and for my sustenance.

                I have begun to realize that depression, for me, is probably part of the package deal included in the tendencies with which I was born.  It may be a struggle for me for all of my remaining life.  But I am realizing that the disease can be at least minimized in its effects if I am connecting more with God’s creation outside of my body and less with the concepts and imaginations of my mind which I am tempted to view as real rather than summaries of reality.

                I believe the worst time of life for my suffering depression was not this week but more than forty years ago when I was in high school.  Those were the days; the days of despair and suffering that made me wish to escape what had become of my life.  I promised myself then and have never broken the promise; I have never told anyone that their high school years are the best years of their life.  I fear I would not have survived high school if I had actually believed that.  I hope if you are reading this and are prone to tell that cliché to high school students you would stop and think of what you could be doing.  Imagine a high school kid that is suffering severe depression.  You go and try to cheer him up by telling him, “These are the best years of his life.”  And what happens if he actually believes you?   I feared that high school would be my best years in life.” Tell him the truth not a myth; tell the high school kid that these are important years to be built upon throughout life.  That is no empty cliché but a vision for life.

I spent my high school years wanting to escape my life either in my bedroom or by taking my dog to our back pasture.  My dog and I would walk past the cattle.  Sometimes they would begin following you, the entire herd.  I wondered if they were going to suddenly stampede us.  Eventually I realized they were curious creatures wondering why the dog and the kid were cutting across their pasture.  We would treat them like neighbors later on and say hello as we passed by our cattle friends.  I would make my way to the place where our back pasture started and our middle pasture ended at a gate near a row of multi-flora rose.  There was a large rock there.  There are not many large rocks in Illinois.  If you wanted to dig a post hole, you could pretty much dig down for at least a foot without striking any rock.  But at the beginning point of our back pasture was “the rock.”  I would think there, daydream, imagine myself as a hero, or feel myself a heroic dying figure all the sorts of things a kid wanting to escape from his own life would imagine.  I began to pray there at that rock.  My prayers were probably strange prayers.  I had rejected agnosticism because I had read the Old Testament and agnosticism didn’t make any sense if someone had come to grips with the claims of the Scriptures that God revealed himself.  Either God was real or he wasn’t.  Agnosticism sounded nice for skeptics to decide they could avoid trying to figure out whether God was real or not real, but agnosticism was a nothing position that said God might be real but couldn’t be known.  But God could reveal himself if he so cared so that was a nothing position.  So at that rock I began to pray and ask God to reveal himself.  I prayed in several ways, three ways especially.  I prayed first like a sweet little boy willing to do anything he wanted me to do if he would reveal himself to me.  There was no answer.  I then grew a bit more desperate.  There was no answer.  Then I grew angry.  I figured then if I had to get him mad by hurling obscenities at him and getting mad at him then maybe he would come down if nothing else to put me in my place with his wrath.  It was later, out of the blue that I learned a bit about the message of Christ and gradually it made to me all the sense in the world.  You can say that my prayers at the rock failed.  You can also say that if God was answering them he was doing so by making me intensely desirous of an answer and then after I had lost all hope and imagined he was uninterested he answered so as to show that he was not in any way forced to answer my prayers whether as a sweet, desperate, or angry boy.  You may think that is a horrible way for God to answer a prayer.  But somehow within the mystery of faith I believe that is how it is supposed to be.  We need to know that God loves us and reveals himself to us because God is free to do as he pleases, and what pleases him is to love us.  That is a wonderful lesson.  I would hate to think that the only reason God loved me was because he had to because I had prayed to him.  I suppose on the other hand that another reason he waited so long to answer my prayer was to allow my desire to know God to be internalized into my being to the point that I was ready to be destroyed by God if only I could know that he existed.  But he had to let that emotion rest until the right time when it came in a more or less peaceful time of my life.  This is part of the meaning of grace; God draws a person to love God freely and God loves the person freely.  There is no coercion to which either party in the end is oppressed.

                For the most part none of my forty years since high school have been as difficult as those four years in high school.  I would say that not one year in high school was as good as my worst year in the last forty.  So to say that my life has been strictly depression is not accurate.  But what I have grown to realize is that because my life has made only a few connections to creation it has been a life where the blessings of more connections to creation could not be realized and enjoyed as if they had been connected.  Perhaps I wasn’t ready for the connections.  Perhaps I just did not understand my need for them.  But then I woke up and realized I had this question of “where am I?”

                So let me now begin the final phase of this article.  How will I move forward to insure the connections are made to the rest of creation?  I hope my experience is bigger than my trials, for I am sure these struggles are somehow common to man.  So I offer my plan hoping that others afflicted similarly will be able to likewise profit from what I have to say.

First, I don’t say get rid of Facebook.  I know that some might advise people like me to get away from social media.  That hasn’t been the answer for me.  If anything social media was how the good physician fed me with an IV until I was given back my hunger for the connections that I had gradually forsaken as I more and more withdrew into my own little shell of a reclusive life.  Facebook has been used to encourage me to begin making connections from the reclusive quiet of my own home to gradually seeking to go out in to the world of the creation to build those friendships and connections. 

Facebook has especially been helpful to me in seeing normal people taking full advantage of living in this creation.  I have seen joke sharing, serious concerns, expressions of grief, and even clichés and platitudes that have their place even if sometimes they are sappy or simplistic.  I have realized through such postings on Facebook that I was not fully connected to expressing some of the normal joys of life.  Facebook exists for today’s humanity much like how we older folks used telephones.  Both are wonderful instruments to share news with people separated in location from us.  Ultimately no one wants these devices to take the place of seeing someone, embracing them, laughing with them, eating with them, and working with them.  There is a limitation to all social media. Still, when a soul is downcast, weary, lonely, and the telephone rings or a Facebook message comes to their inbox it is a pretty nice thing.  Facebook has been an instrument in helping me see where I need to make connections.  Facebook has especially helped me to learn to hunger again for more varied connections to both God’s humanity in creation and to the world of creation we describe simply by the word “nature.”

Facebook has helped me see some friends I hadn’t seen in years.  We came together not just for a nostalgic look back at the lives we once shared but after reading one another’s posts we had something to talk about when we did get together.  So the friendships that had almost been lost were picked up and are becoming friendships to move forward into the future.

I have also been surprised to discover that once you begin making connections with people that it becomes surprising what voices might prove to give nourishment to your soul.  I have had a very entrenched conservative traditionalist approach to the Christian faith, yet I have read blogs which nourished me like few pieces of writing have ever nourished me that were written by people who identified themselves by the descriptions “feminist, progressive, Christian.”  Five years ago I would have said we have nothing in common.  But today I am surprised how much some of the people who view themselves by those descriptions actually had a great deal to say to me in my humanity.  That has forced me to review my own understanding of the Jesus of the Bible I love.  Let me explain.  What people did Jesus refuse to reach out to in his own ministry?  There was the Syro-Phoenician lady, but ultimately he did not refuse her so much as he drew forth her expression of faith for all to see.  I cannot think of anyone he did not seek to reach while he was on the earth.  So why was I taken by such surprise when I found Christ and Christian issues truly expressed in blogs written by feminist, progressive Christians?  Did I imagine that his desire to speak to all sorts of men and women only lasted the one generation he was on earth, and since then he has decided to marshal all his time on a single kind of conservative traditionalist Christians?  Or perhaps I had listened too much to the people creating and using labels to reduce living people to stereotypes.  In politics every particular party tries to convince the voters that the other party is stupid, evil, and corrupt.  H.L. Mencken would have said far more, but that is the reality of political speech.  A political speechwriter is not interested that you would see an opposing party’s humanity, only those peoples’ stupidity and corruption.  But that is mere humanity reduced to caricature.  Politics employs the use of character assassination for the purpose of acquiring power.  Jesus spoke even more clearly and briefly about these things saying, “Love your enemies.”  I wonder if behind every group of enemies there haven’t been the wagging tongues reducing the enemy’s humanity into a mere label and stereotype.

I have begun to learn that I need a good variety of friends.  There will be friends that are our friends because we have a lot in common with them.  But there will also be friends that we have that will be our friends because we have at first glance very little in common with them and so they represent a part of the experience of life and humanity to which we have never before been connected.

One of my best friends is a guy I get together with from time to time over a glass of ale at one of the nicer pubs in Tulsa.  I would not likely have sought him out as a friend if I had read the labels that he would acknowledge are true about him.  He is liberal, progressive, appreciative especially of Western European socialism, and a lapsed Catholic.  But drinking our ales, we talk politics, but much more than politics we talk life.  He had a background in journalism as well as in history and so was accustomed to listening for a story to be told before writing or speaking about it.  When he discusses politics he never raises his voice, and expresses perspectives that he has studied, and when you speak you know he is listening.  He will try to build on your contributions to the conversation or he may quietly voice his disagreement.  It is amazing how often our discussions find a lot of common ground.  I can hardly imagine anyone with whom I more enjoy speaking about politics.  Our friendship is about more than either politics or ale which we both enjoy.  We really, I think, enjoy that in friendship we have formed a connection with part of the creation outside of ourselves and this helps nourish our souls and inner beings.  Politics seems important until you realize that no amount of politics can ever be as important as one good friendship.

I enjoy talking politics, but some of you won’t.  I am not saying if you need to build connections you need to feel like it is important for you to get political.  To be honest I’ve thought about giving up voting because when I get into a conversation and I have a dog in the hunt I can go screwy.  If I don’t have a dog in the hunt I am almost rational.  To be honest I’d rather lose my political voice and retain my rationality than see all my candidates win their elections while I pushed every one away from me who disagreed with my politics.

One other thing I would say is that we need to build our bridges to a more varied and full expression of humanity.  I am moving the subject of building connections by moving from our need to have varied friends in the big topics of life to having varied subject matters that we discuss in life.  I have learned this through an acquaintance on Twitter.  We both write blogs and I made a reply to one of her blogs.  I wanted to contact her to tell her I had responded to one of her articles.  I had to contact her through Twitter, and since I wasn’t on Twitter, I had to sign up to be on Twitter to contact her.  We both signed up to follow one another on Twitter and have become acquaintances.   I have learned something already about connections through how she tweets about the simple things in life.  A tweet will appear saying, “You really don’t know a person until you are stuck with them in a traffic jam.”  She will find herself somewhere and an event will take place and she will give a thirty or forty letter tweet that is pleasant and uplifting even if the event that took place is not earth shattering.  That is how life is.  Sometimes it isn’t the big topic or the expanse of the universe that should capture our attention but the little child wanting the flower (a dandelion) put into a vase on the dinner table.  Those are the things that often impact our lives more truly and perpetually than the current or future president will.  This young lady’s simple tweets have taught me about the sort of connections I need to learn to make.

Facebook has shown me at least one more way I need to build connections with my world around me.  Have you ever noticed how many pictures of nature’s beauty or of nature’s ways are on Facebook?  The fact that I am attracted to photographs of nature ought to help me realize that my soul yearns for connection to the grandeur, beauty, and for lack of a better word the personality of creation.  A few days ago a friend posted some photographs of a trip he and his family were taking.  Suddenly it sunk in that if I enjoyed photographs of nature why was I not going to places where I would see with my own eyes the beauty and grandeur of creation that I have enjoyed seeing in still photographs.  Why should we always settle for images on a computer screen when the real world exists all around us?  I will still enjoy the pictures.  Yes, you can sort of see the proportion of a Giant Sequoia next to a person standing next to one of the giant trees, but I believe the moment I actually stand next to one of those trees and touch its bark something in me will be forever changed.  I believe that.  That is why next year I am planning on going out to California just to see and touch a tree that I’ve always known would be something to see.

I fully believe that making connections into God’s world will help brighten my disposition and introduce me to a new round of spiritual healing.  But perhaps I will prove to be wrong.  Perhaps this thing known as depression is the predilection with which I must struggle all the days of my earthly life.  If so it is my curse and maybe even more my gift.  If that seems strange then let me conclude with a couple of questions.  Do you sometimes wonder how unfair it is that some people have lives so full of pain and suffering while others seem to have much smoother lives?  I think that is a valid question to ponder.  But here is another that should be considered especially by Christians.  Do you wonder if it is fair that some people get to drink so much more from Christ’s cup than others?  Maybe suffering is not so much a curse imposed on our lives as a sharing in the cup of Christ that we may remember him in all our afflictions.  In remembering him we will remember that all things were made through him, and then anywhere we go in the world we will know that there is no escaping his presence and so we will know that our salvation is always near.  So even if I deal with bouts of depression all my days at the ends of the boundaries of the earth, in the heavenly places, in the depths, in the midst of the seas or the expanse of the lands, I know he is there and my salvation is near.