Reorientation: What is my Purpose?

Chagall's "White Crucifixion"

I used to love you like the world would end

I used to love you like a child

He was a dream to me. Soft around the edges and tender to the touch. His smile was easy, and it always touched his eyes, crinkling them slightly at the edges. His eyes were one of my favorite parts of him. Their dark brown vastness would grow distant with thought when he read his books on theology. I would look up from my own book sometimes and get lost in his own lost-ness. And yet those depths could get turned on me with such focus that when he listened to me speak it was like I was the only person in the room.

The thing about people is they change

When they walk away

He was a dream to me. But like all dreams, his time in my life came to an end. And where there had been softness, there was, instead, the harsh reality of loss. Where there had been tenderness there was something much more firm and unyielding – a boundary between us that I could not cross. Where our eyes had matched in their crinkled laughter, his eyes were now vacant and mine spilled with tears.

I thought love would make it easy

I didn't see failure in the cards

Love. So often all that is associated with Love is that dreamlike softness that I experienced. I was convinced the fullness of Love was encapsulated in our relationship. The warm feelings that I felt had to be the height and length and breadth of what Love could mean.

Life before him had made me hardened with skepticism. Life had not been kind, and so I grew calloused in mind and heart. I kept my distance from people, only ever revealing what I wanted of myself. It was safe, and it was predictable. Of course there were times when the nightmares of my past would shake me out of my waking-slumber and I would be overcome with emotion. But I only let the emotion catch me when I was alone. I would not, could not, allow myself to fall to pieces in the presence of another.

Life after him, though, was oh so different. He made me soft again. He put his hands on the rough parts of my soul and smoothed out the creases left by past hurts. He rubbed balm into the cracks of my heart. With his patient and steady gaze, he saw my skepticism and worked tirelessly to make my heart impressionable again. Slowly, like rust coming clean of long-forgotten gears, my heart began to beat again.

I didn’t realize what he was doing until it was too late. I didn’t realize how soft I had become until the night I found out my Great Uncle, Talmadge, had died. I had retreated to my room, but I wasn’t alone for long. Soon enough, he stopped by my dorm like he normally did after his last class. He entered my room, and I entered the warm circle of his arms. I wept.

The safety of my masks dissolved in my tears. His shoulder soaked up my heartbreak and he kissed the streaks on my cheeks. I had told him before that moment that I loved him. But I knew in then that I would always love him. He had changed me without me knowing. I had become soft-hearted once more. He had coaxed a vulnerability out of my very soul that, in that moment, I gave over willingly. Taking the step into his embrace that night was taking the last step into opening myself to him. And opening myself to Love.

Each time the river bends, we're farther from the start

I didn't know love would make it hard

When he left, I went numb. I didn’t cry at first. I couldn’t. I could barely speak. Or move. Or even think. All that went through my mind was the mantra, “He’s gone.”

They tell me there are stages to grief. That it’s natural to experience denial and move increasingly toward acceptance. There will be bargaining, of course, and eventually anger. Oh yes, and depression. They tell me that too will come. What they didn’t tell me was the pendulum-like nature of grief. They didn’t tell me that I would swing wildly from one stage to another and then back again with fresh waves of agonizing emotion that would strike out from my core as if it were the first time all over again.

When I was calloused and hid behind my masks, I was safe. Grief had no hold on me, for it could not scale my walls. My heart was a stone-walled castle. He was my drawbridge. And before I knew it I had let him in the gate. When he slammed the door shut again and his presence was gone suddenly, I felt the stark emptiness that comes with loss. It was as if he left a vacuum in his wake. There was nothing but a void where so much fullness had previously been.

I didn’t know love would make it hard

Love made grief possible. Love opened the door, knowing that the door could be slammed shut again. Love broke down walls, knowing that it left me open to attack. Love softened the callouses I had developed, knowing how it make injury possible.

I blamed him for my pain for a long time. I felt it was his fault that I had become soft and vulnerable. He was the one that left, after all. So it was his fault that I laid in bed for hours on end and yet never slept. Eventually I stopped blaming him and blamed Love itself. I vowed that I would never love again. No, that’s not quite right. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t ever love again. It was that I couldn’t love again. My One and Only, my Best Friend, my Dream… was gone. And Love? Love could go to hell.

But, you know, that’s the thing about Love. Love did go to hell. Love was whipped and beaten and scoured and eventually nailed upon a cross. Love took a ragged last breath, and Love died. Love descended into hell.

Much ink has been spilled concerning what happened when Jesus commended his spirit into the hands of God and died upon the cross. I’m not here to debate those theories of atonement or talk about sacrifice. What I am here to tell you is the simple fact that Jesus was indeed killed. He was crucified and experienced agonizing pain in the long journey toward death. But it was not only physical pain that wrecked him while he hung on the cross. He felt the fullness of abandonment as those he loved turned and fled.

Love made grief possible for Jesus. Love made his inner pain a reality. If Jesus hadn’t opened himself up to the vulnerability of Love, the rejection and abandonment would not have pierced him the same way the spear pierced his side.

It was in turning my gaze to Christ crucified that I finally found purpose again. I saw my pain nailed to Jesus’ own cross. I allowed Jesus to cry out on my behalf, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His broken body cried out the same way as my broken heart. His blood was spilled just like my tears that spilled from my eyes unbidden for weeks on end.

Love made grief possible. But through grief, something else became possible. Yes, it’s true. Love died. Love stooped down and felt the excruciating depths of pain and walked among the souls of those who had made hell their home. But Love also pulled forth those wretched souls from their graves. Love overturned the powers of Death and said that Pain and Heartbreak and Loss would not have the final word. Love came alive. And Love bids me to do the same.

The grief of losing him left me shaken. And it has taken years for my heart to finally settle once more. The acceptance I have reached has been more or less consistent as my pendulum of grief has slowed and finally stilled. Now I realize I have a lot to thank him for. He made me soft again, and opened me up to what love can look like. But in the end, it wasn’t him that taught me what Love truly is. No, a different Person did that. It’s true he opened his arms to me and let me soak his shoulder with my tears, but Jesus opened his arms on the cross and soaked the ground with his blood so that my pain might be redeemed. Jesus descended to the depths of the hell I had constructed for myself, and pulled me from the grave of my own heartache.

Jesus calls me daily to rise from my self-dug grave and live in Love. To live soft and tender hearted. To live open and vulnerable. To live, knowing that grief may come. But even that will be redeemed.

What is my purpose? To live in Love as Christ did. The scary thing is that Christ calls me to Love in such a way that I take up my own pain, my own cross, and carry it. I am called to follow in the way of suffering. But I take heart knowing that the path of the cross has already been paved by Christ’s experience of pain and death. Jesus has gone before me, even to the depths of hell. But Jesus has also risen and redeemed even the worst of the pain experienced in this world – even mine.

Love makes the pain possible, but it also makes the healing possible. Love suffered, and Love died. But Love also came alive. And Love calls me onward and upward into new life every moment of every day. My purpose is Love. Yes, Love will make it hard. But Love makes me alive.

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Italicized lyrics are from Mipso's "People Change" and "Didn't Know Love".