In the Open

So I said goodbye to the boy and in simultaneous joy and relief I've said goodbye to another thing. It was a sort of fantasy I've harbored for way to long. You know the kind, shameful and inappropriate and the sort that threatens to ruin every joy that you've managed to acquire. That's the silver lining in it all. The boy helped me get over the fake thing while I was faced with the possibility of a real thing.

So I find myself in the open unnameable, where I don't know anything, but am asked to hope. I'm taking up a cross again and it hurts. I wonder if I can hold on to my own revelation that Jesus is in this insufferable open with me, the place where his heart resides. The fantasy took a lot of time and space to navigate, to keep it from actually poking its head into reality. But now I'm again in the space of total dependence, in total need of mercy for a real and holy thing to show up.

I know my track record for filling in that open space for latching on to something that I can name and handle and settle for. I find my heart pleading with myself and with God, "not again, not this time, not another few years of misguided, tainted hopes."

Last night I was naively hopeful that something holy and new would come along, but it was all thwarting and strain and me looking around asking "what's going on?" The words of the Pharisees I read yesterday, in that book I carry around with me, came to mind. "Didn't this man come from Galilee? Isn't the Christ suppose to come from David's family and from Bethlehem." They knew all about what was suppose to happen, they where so sure and in that sureness they where actually blinded to the real thing when it did come. I wonder if I am so sure I know that I am set up to keep missing it.

This morning I tried to relay the tension I was feeling to a friend. Someone who has never handled me in a way I like, but when you start to feel desperate even a smile your way can lead you into folly. I tried to relay that I had an odd and disappointing evening, that there was so much expectation on my end and then it was stopped over and over.

She came through the way she always does."Well we don't always get what we want," she said then left me there, as if that was the greatest truth in life. Momentarily I spiraled back into a lonely isolated feeling, still looking around for a commiserate companion, for some one who knows that the "valley of trouble is the door of hope," someone who knows that it's the same place where the devastated "will sing" again.