Penance and Purgatory

In a couple of weeks, I will turn 25.  As I stop and survey what has been my first 24 years, it seems my life breaks down neatly into two sections.

The first section of my life is marked by the three primary sins of my first 18 years–lust, selfishness and pride.  I think of the way I lived then.  I think about how my life was, and why I did the things I did.  Egotism was my only motivation.  I sought to learn so that I could show people up.  I sought relationships so that I could use the relationships for my own benefit, both physically and otherwise.  I sought contacts in important places, anxiously awaiting the day I could use my connections to unleash my vengeance on those people around me who had hurt me so deeply.  I, in turn, hurt people as it pleased me to do so.  I think often of the trail of tears I left behind me in those first 18 turbulent years.  I think especially of the carousel of girls I dated in my junior and senior years of high school.  I chased them, made my use of them, and then sent them away.  It didn’t seem to be that simple at the time, and there WERE feelings involved, but looking back on my thought processes, it seems hard to tell the story another way.  I was wrong.  I tried for many years to place the blame everywhere but on myself, but really, all the blame falls on me.

I think about the anger I felt at the world and everyone in it.  Everyone was to blame for my predicaments except the real source of them–me.  I lashed out at the people I cared about the most, blaming them for my poor choices and insufficient emotional IQ.  All the wrath I planned to pour out, all the careful hours planning misfortune for others, all the sleepless nights spent raging over unchangable facts of life and existence–all for naught.  They rotted my soul from the inside out.  And the world reaped what it had sown in me.  The anger nearly choked off my existence, my only respite from it the nearly Epicurean striving for my own pleasure and enjoyment.

And then, as my 19th year dawned, the truth of my previous 18 fell on me like a landslide.  Suddenly, I saw myself for what I was, with every mirror condemning me for my selfishness and pride.  It took a good woman to do it.  I saw my reflection in her gaze, and realized that what she saw wasn’t who I was, but only the image I sold her to make her want me.  The accusation from my soul ravaged my life, and in guilt I acted irresponsibly and hurt several people.  In the aftermath of that disaster, there was a trial in my heart and I found myself guilty of all my crimes.  The sentence?  Penance in a prison the size and shape of my own overdeveloped sense of retribution.  The revenge I once plotted on those who had wounded me I now saved for myself.  I refused myself the things which I had sought for pleasure.  I avoided everyone who I cared about and felt kindred to.  I shut out my loved ones and my closest friends–and then blamed them for abandoning me.  I buried myself in books, waiting the day when I could use my increased knowledge to condemn myself to yet a harsher fate.  I refused myself the forgiveness I was so quick to offer everyone else, under the premise that I should have known better.  And I suffered on.  The prison had become my life.  Physical illness for two years crippled my body.  Spiritual illness coupled with that physical illness for much of that time.  Still I carried out my duties, the momentary feeling of happiness in truly serving others the only true joy in my dry, arid life. 

For more than 5 years, I suffered in that crypt of self-loathing.  For five years I wallowed in the ashes of the life I burned around me.  I pursued poor relationships with women who were caricatures of everything that was wrong with the relationships I had in my first 18 years.  I sought women who were clingy and needy.  I sought women who were fiercely independent.  I sought women who were promiscuous.  I sought women who I found unapproachable.  I sought women who I knew would reject me.  I sought women who I knew wouldn’t reject me.  In short, I spent 5 years pursuing impossible relationships to avoid having a real one.  In that time, I had a couple of short lived relationships, more to right past wrongs than for any real emotional reason.  I continued to pursue an education at a school I disliked, among people who, for the most part, I disliked.  My time at UW-W was for another form of prison–forced to listen to theories I disagreed with being taught as fact.  I was forced to read literature I found lewd and repugnant.  I was forcefed ideas which I knew to be untrue.  I was given a toolbox to refute sound logic and reason by simply shifting definitions.  When I called my professors on the carpet, both they and my classmates chastized me for my impudence.  “Nevermind the truth, we like relativity better.  Forget what the author intended, what does it mean to YOU?  There is no history, there is no ultimate meaning to anything– make it say whatever you want it to say.”  And in that maze of relativity I lost my bearings and began debunking everything, for fear that I would accept falsehood. I vomited the education of relativity out of my system, nourishing myself only on the scant truth I could perceive for myself through the Word of Truth itself, but even then, the dry heaves of response to anything solid only lead me further afield.

My friends and family in that time were my only relief.  Their tolerance of my moodiness and shiftlessness amazes me.  Right now, as I sit here, I wonder how they dealt with me.  I’m certain my pessimism was like a cancer on their lives.  Cynicism’s first casualty is love and meaning.  Where there is true cynicism, there can be no true love or meaning, as the true cynic denies both.  Their patience and longsuffering amazes.

At the end of 23th year, I found myself in a new geographical location, the locus of all my escapist dreams since I was 14.  Yet, when I arrived, I found that the 1000 miles I’d traveled only increased the weight of the prison.  Clearly, only destroying the prison would do.  And so I set to work, continuing the progressive awakening of my spirit through that five years in my self-created hell.  Lessons from the five years in purgatory started to connect and form themselves into a better understanding of myself and the wounds I’d inflicted on myself.  As I learned the wounds I’d been levying, I stopped inflicting them, and the healing began.  As my 24th year dawned, there was a sunrise coming, and I feared it.

Shortly after my 24th year began, it started.  I returned to my old haunts for a month long break and realized the comfortable prison I’d built for myself I no longer wanted to enter, and that created in me a strange reaction.  It is a strange feeling to be a free man from a prison of your own design with no real idea how you came to be out of it.  If you read my diary from last December and January, all the talk of feeling like a marked man was as a result of my being free from my own

cynicism and trying desperately to hold onto it.  I ached for an excuse to return to it, and I found nothing, only encouragment.  I returned from my break unsure of what to make of my new found hope and scared to death of my optimism.  Both came in the form of a person to whom I had no real connection, but wanted one desperately.  Despite my best efforts to be cynical, I found I couldn’t overcome the newly acquired desire to relate to people.  And the sun rose.

I am free from my purgatory, set free by a gracious God, loving family and friends, and a couple of very special people, one in particular, who refuses to see the worst in me, even when I attempt to give them no other alternative.  “My chains fell off, my heart was free…I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”  Life is beautiful, ladies and gentleman.  The sun has arisen, and the day has come, after a long, dark, cold night.  I’m glad to see the sun again.