through a glass darkly
From 1 Corinithians 7:33-8:4 in Papyrus 15, written in the 3rd century. The original text is written in Koine Greek. The New King James version:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child;
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
The 1560 Geneva Bible translated the phrase as "For now we see through a glass darkly," without the comma, which I infinitely prefer. I like the headlong rush from mirror to darkly, without pause, without drawing a line in the sand between what we see in the mirror and the existential pain of the word darkly.
I don't know if I think things were so simple when we were children--perhaps it was harder to step away and look at oneself experiencing the world, a world that was not simple, often not kind, and filled with challenge. But I have not been able to stray far from the phrase "through a glass darkly"in the last month or more when I have found myself plunged into darkness and fear. My oncologist remembers me struggling last winter, as do some of my friends who watched me turn inwards, but this feels different than anything I have experienced before, including the fall from blessed naive grace when I first got my diagnosis.
Perhaps I have never really experienced depression before--the tears have fallen so freely and frequently that I worried the twins, even as I tried to will myself to put on a good show for them. Somehow having all six of my children home made me endlessly fretful about the future: how do they stay connected to one another in the world without me? how do they create new traditions just as the older kids really launch themselves into their futures? how do the older kids stay present for the younger ones, still at home? and my heart falls apart when I imagine all of it. It's self-centered, sure--I look around and see the resiliency of people I know who lost a parent not to old age but to disease or accident or crime. But when Elijah asked me if he had to go to school on the day I die, I could barely get the words out, so choked with sadness that my throat seemed to close. No, I told him gently, probably not for a few days. I won't be able to go for a whole year, he said, I'll be so sad.
My darkness is so creative that when I felt angry at myself for wasting my precious days with tears and this churning anxiety I cannot seem to quell, I would find myself instead thinking of people who died under much less favorable conditions. I wept when the two children died at the border where the crisis is humanitarian and the response is not. I spent some time worrying about Babi Yar. Babi Yar, the dark ravine in Kiev where German forces and Ukranian collaborators massacred the Jews of Kiev. In two days in September of 1941, 33,771 Jews died at that ravine. The largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust to that date, surpassed only by the Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in the following month.
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem "Babi Yar" to protest the Soviet erasure of what happened in that ravine.
No monument stands over Babi Yar,
A steep cliff only, like the rudest
headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, there are a variety of memorials to different groups of victims: Jews, Roma, Ukranian nationalists, and priests--but the memorials are on the side of the highway furthest from the actual murders. Ukranians sit on the edge of the ravine, smoking; mothers push strollers along the park's winding paths. Or so I read during this period of through a glass darkly. And who am I to tell them how to behave? How can I feel self-pity in the face of the enormity of the slaughter of innocent, living, hopeful people, with their babies and their toddlers and their brave six-year old twins? What really scares me, of course, is the question of where was God? Where is God? Do I see through the glass so darkly that understanding the meaning of something like Babi Yar, never mind my own traitorous body, is just beyond the pale for me? Or is there nothing to see after all?
I can't deny my fear of death. Someone told me to think back on the time before I was born. Nothing scary in that, so why fear what is next? That's a little comforting. I read a book about near death experiences, and all of those souls are absolutely sure of a loving God and no end to consciousness with the death of the body. I find myself jealous of those friends who were brought up with a strong faith tradition--it is hard to overcome my Aristotelian skepticism and dread that this is all there is, that I will simply disappear.
As luck would have it, I was reading Charlotte's Web during this time to the boys at night. A wiser woman would have switched to The Boxcar Children, but I love this book and have read it to all six of my children. But when Charlotte died, alone, in the empty fairgrounds, and no one knew she had died, I felt a pull towards that murky river of sadness that I couldn't brush off, as I could, when a younger self read the same book to my older children. Death was for people in their 80s, or 90s--I was sure I would live to be 100.
Not to worry fair friends, I am doing all of the right things, and I do mean all. Yoga, healthy eating, energy healers, massages, long walks with the dog, swimming at the gym. I saw a psychiatrist associated with the oncology department and received a prescription. I started with a new therapist. And of course, I continue my burgeoning work with the California integrative medicine doctor.
The boys and the dog keep me honest. I can't really curl into a fetal position and wait for the other shoe to drop. The dog needs walking and I am his true walker. The boys come home, full of news and energy and wanting love. And I want to love them well, all of my children.
For now, I am taking some comfort in acknowledging the part of me that observes me. The part of me that looks at me crying in my tea and says, oh sweetheart, you are really depressed. The part of me that feels my rapid pulse, that feels my anxious belly, and somehow stands apart from it, noticing, noting, remarking. That part of me able to stand away from me is not a child, but a different kind of energy, perhaps a higher energy, but certainly a calmer energy. I think that might be the place where the light comes in, but I'm not sure if that is right, or I am just clinging to any shore that will have me.
Fear is exhausting. And I do know, as a friend or two have reminded me, that I have not always been in this place, and will likely not stay here. Through a glass darkly. I wonder if that is the human condition--that we cannot see all the mysteries of the universe, our futures, even our pasts. I long for those perhaps imaginary days when, as the ancient words go, perhaps we knew fully-- not in part, not shrouded in darkness. Perhaps that is what happens after death. Or perhaps we simply cease to see, and with that, the extinguishing of the desire to see, to understand.
I would like to think that angels
fret over the dark glass through which I peer,
in fear, with dimming hope,
and that God comforts the angels
and tells them that it is not my soul
which is wracked with traitorous cancer,
not my convoluted attendance on the righteous unfairness
of so many deaths,
Babi Yar, lynchings, AIDs, refugees, the murdered runner, left alone in the field,
because my soul is already light and love,
only bearing witness to my sorrows and fears
at the pending loss of the self I think I know.
It's a lifetime, between birth and our death,
and lifetimes are meted out elsewhere.
The spider knows, with her exhausted body,
alone in the corner of the empty fairground,
her egg sac waiting out the long winter,
to begin again, without her.
I'd like to lay my fear down and take up
the possibility of angels, or if not that,
peace with goodbye.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child;
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
The 1560 Geneva Bible translated the phrase as "For now we see through a glass darkly," without the comma, which I infinitely prefer. I like the headlong rush from mirror to darkly, without pause, without drawing a line in the sand between what we see in the mirror and the existential pain of the word darkly.
I don't know if I think things were so simple when we were children--perhaps it was harder to step away and look at oneself experiencing the world, a world that was not simple, often not kind, and filled with challenge. But I have not been able to stray far from the phrase "through a glass darkly"in the last month or more when I have found myself plunged into darkness and fear. My oncologist remembers me struggling last winter, as do some of my friends who watched me turn inwards, but this feels different than anything I have experienced before, including the fall from blessed naive grace when I first got my diagnosis.
Perhaps I have never really experienced depression before--the tears have fallen so freely and frequently that I worried the twins, even as I tried to will myself to put on a good show for them. Somehow having all six of my children home made me endlessly fretful about the future: how do they stay connected to one another in the world without me? how do they create new traditions just as the older kids really launch themselves into their futures? how do the older kids stay present for the younger ones, still at home? and my heart falls apart when I imagine all of it. It's self-centered, sure--I look around and see the resiliency of people I know who lost a parent not to old age but to disease or accident or crime. But when Elijah asked me if he had to go to school on the day I die, I could barely get the words out, so choked with sadness that my throat seemed to close. No, I told him gently, probably not for a few days. I won't be able to go for a whole year, he said, I'll be so sad.
My darkness is so creative that when I felt angry at myself for wasting my precious days with tears and this churning anxiety I cannot seem to quell, I would find myself instead thinking of people who died under much less favorable conditions. I wept when the two children died at the border where the crisis is humanitarian and the response is not. I spent some time worrying about Babi Yar. Babi Yar, the dark ravine in Kiev where German forces and Ukranian collaborators massacred the Jews of Kiev. In two days in September of 1941, 33,771 Jews died at that ravine. The largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust to that date, surpassed only by the Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in the following month.
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem "Babi Yar" to protest the Soviet erasure of what happened in that ravine.
No monument stands over Babi Yar,
A steep cliff only, like the rudest
headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, there are a variety of memorials to different groups of victims: Jews, Roma, Ukranian nationalists, and priests--but the memorials are on the side of the highway furthest from the actual murders. Ukranians sit on the edge of the ravine, smoking; mothers push strollers along the park's winding paths. Or so I read during this period of through a glass darkly. And who am I to tell them how to behave? How can I feel self-pity in the face of the enormity of the slaughter of innocent, living, hopeful people, with their babies and their toddlers and their brave six-year old twins? What really scares me, of course, is the question of where was God? Where is God? Do I see through the glass so darkly that understanding the meaning of something like Babi Yar, never mind my own traitorous body, is just beyond the pale for me? Or is there nothing to see after all?
I can't deny my fear of death. Someone told me to think back on the time before I was born. Nothing scary in that, so why fear what is next? That's a little comforting. I read a book about near death experiences, and all of those souls are absolutely sure of a loving God and no end to consciousness with the death of the body. I find myself jealous of those friends who were brought up with a strong faith tradition--it is hard to overcome my Aristotelian skepticism and dread that this is all there is, that I will simply disappear.
As luck would have it, I was reading Charlotte's Web during this time to the boys at night. A wiser woman would have switched to The Boxcar Children, but I love this book and have read it to all six of my children. But when Charlotte died, alone, in the empty fairgrounds, and no one knew she had died, I felt a pull towards that murky river of sadness that I couldn't brush off, as I could, when a younger self read the same book to my older children. Death was for people in their 80s, or 90s--I was sure I would live to be 100.
Not to worry fair friends, I am doing all of the right things, and I do mean all. Yoga, healthy eating, energy healers, massages, long walks with the dog, swimming at the gym. I saw a psychiatrist associated with the oncology department and received a prescription. I started with a new therapist. And of course, I continue my burgeoning work with the California integrative medicine doctor.
The boys and the dog keep me honest. I can't really curl into a fetal position and wait for the other shoe to drop. The dog needs walking and I am his true walker. The boys come home, full of news and energy and wanting love. And I want to love them well, all of my children.
For now, I am taking some comfort in acknowledging the part of me that observes me. The part of me that looks at me crying in my tea and says, oh sweetheart, you are really depressed. The part of me that feels my rapid pulse, that feels my anxious belly, and somehow stands apart from it, noticing, noting, remarking. That part of me able to stand away from me is not a child, but a different kind of energy, perhaps a higher energy, but certainly a calmer energy. I think that might be the place where the light comes in, but I'm not sure if that is right, or I am just clinging to any shore that will have me.
Fear is exhausting. And I do know, as a friend or two have reminded me, that I have not always been in this place, and will likely not stay here. Through a glass darkly. I wonder if that is the human condition--that we cannot see all the mysteries of the universe, our futures, even our pasts. I long for those perhaps imaginary days when, as the ancient words go, perhaps we knew fully-- not in part, not shrouded in darkness. Perhaps that is what happens after death. Or perhaps we simply cease to see, and with that, the extinguishing of the desire to see, to understand.
I would like to think that angels
fret over the dark glass through which I peer,
in fear, with dimming hope,
and that God comforts the angels
and tells them that it is not my soul
which is wracked with traitorous cancer,
not my convoluted attendance on the righteous unfairness
of so many deaths,
Babi Yar, lynchings, AIDs, refugees, the murdered runner, left alone in the field,
because my soul is already light and love,
only bearing witness to my sorrows and fears
at the pending loss of the self I think I know.
It's a lifetime, between birth and our death,
and lifetimes are meted out elsewhere.
The spider knows, with her exhausted body,
alone in the corner of the empty fairground,
her egg sac waiting out the long winter,
to begin again, without her.
I'd like to lay my fear down and take up
the possibility of angels, or if not that,
peace with goodbye.
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