If our Christian faith teaches us anything at all it teaches
us that real dialogue should or could be restored. We should be able to talk to
one another. We should be able to talk to one another about what we honestly
experience. We should be able to talk with depth with one another. Yet, often
this is not the case.
If we feel as though we are on some edge and we express what
that edge feels like I would hope there are folks out there or in my life who
understand that feeling and feel the sharpness of that edge.
If we feel misunderstood we should be able to talk with one
another about that misunderstanding with out it being a big ordeal; without
being labeled or judged as being “off”, crazy, negative or lacking faith. In
other words, if we feel misunderstood there should or could be people in our
lives who have felt this pain to a common level that they get it and they help
us out of our own self pity.
If we share with others a general feeling of being alone even
as we live and breathe with friends and family and belong to different groups, hopefully
there are those in our lives who can join in and share in our loneliness and
our “not-at-home-ness”.
If we feel as though we belong in another world and this
present world does not make much sense, then I would hope we could talk about those
feelings and try to understand, together, why that feeling just might be true. Ironically, that feeling of some deep
homesickness could be our common ground as “He, (God) is the great homesickness
we never shake off.” Rilke.
If we feel tired of trying to play a game that really does
not resonate with our souls we should be able to talk about that uneasiness and
perhaps together, as small communities, we can agree where, how and to what
extent we are to engage in the world and yet be salt to the world.
Lamenting about the fact that we live on this edge could be
a common experience among those of us who believe. Jesus spoke of the blessed ones as being those
who mourn. In fact, grief could be the foundation of our spiritual experience with
one another. Rilke the poet understood how we waste the opportunity to grow
from pain and yet it could be our foundation with one another, “How we squander
our hours of pain …though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark
evergreen, one season in our inner year-, not only a season in time-, but our
place and settlement and soil and home”.
If we feel as though “it has been our lifelong longing to be
reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off” and that we
have “always wanted to be on the inside of some door we have only seen from the
outside” then we need to know that this is “no mere neurotic fantasy but the
truest index of our real situation,” (C.S. Lewis) then we should be able to
talk about that feeling of being on the outside of some place at such a depth
that the very place we stand together, even on a narrow edge, is a place of
togetherness, foundation, community and “home”.
I choose to experience what I experience as what I
experience without trying to change that experience just because it is lonely
or difficult. I don’t want to distort my experience because if I do, I may be
distorting reality itself and the truth of our real predicament and others who
might be feeling the same experience and trying to find such a community, will
not be able to find their way “home’. .
I put forth this reasonable request for dialogue. Anybody
out there on the edge? Anybody want to
talk about it? We can stand together on
one of those narrow carved out places we call rivers.
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