Guilt and Promise...

Rich’s words are how I often feel  ~ tears fall ~ oh “…exquisite fragility…” emotions unleashed ~ “Jesus wept” ~ shaking and paralyzed by vertigo of the soul…I am not as strong as I think I am ~ I need to drink from the cup of grace… we are all broken ragamuffins ~ I quiver in guilt and memories, “…bring to our (my) wounds the balm of acceptance and grace..”

Salvation through embracing forgiveness…

“That a person wants to sit and brood and stare at his sin and is unwilling to have faith that it is forgiven: [this is] also guilt in that it is a minimizing of what Christ has done.”  ~ Soren Kierkegaard, JP, §4036

 

“For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God. “

~ Paul

In my life, this week in particular, I came to a realization or has it been a mystical revealing of something true about me. I am not sure.  Yet, this reality, this truth about me has caused me to sputter and stall and think about what it is I am doing in life and why? Then in light of why - ask now what?

I have been blinded by pain and imprisoned in liminal space. In my cell of stone and cold I scratched at the walls to create something real, to feel pain in my fingertips, to watch them bleed - to know that I have not fully died. My scratching, my yearning for help has only been muffled by the prison of isolation within my own thoughts, I attempted, “…to scream without raising my voice…” – polite insurrection and compliant subversion within my prison.

What is this prison, this construct of escape and perceived safety?

Guilt…it is guilt…a most unkind task master, dark warden of my will.

My thoughts have been inverted in their focus while experiences incessantly tumble from past to present and roll to a stop in this ever present moment of incarceration. I run with arms flaying in fear and going nowhere chased by distraught madness. Disequilibrium, vertigo of soul, a black hole of guilt that is my tower of self aggrandizement to deflect my unwillingness to be set free. My running has been in vain for I have gone nowhere. I am, "Running forward into death..." as Heideggar wrote.

I run to be noticed by others, to be something in their eyes, to set myself apart, to be special so I can feel good about myself. This I do to assuage my guilt for all that is in past, all that has made me what I am. Afarid of myself and the shadow of my being. All the while not knowing what it is that I want to be…I run dizzyingly drunk and hallucinating like a night of Absinthe consumption – green dreams of ethereal serendipity, phantoms of promise that die in the mist of consciousness.

So, my guilt…in whom I am as a human being eats at me, my cancer of being. Rotting rancid gangrene flesh on the floor of my cell, suffocating on plans I continually make but never realize. 

My plans...all attempts to be what I believe others want me to be, to be something in others eyes that I am not in my own. An actor, a hypocrite on the stage of life, speaking in a staccato of lies and denial. In all of my doing the guilt is not vanquished and what was once only a trap is now my gallows.

In this place I find myself, I know it is a denial of Jesus, a denial of the resurrection, as I live as though I am dead, in a grave while I still breathe.

I yearn to be free, to see more than glimmering light through the crack in the wall that is my window – I long for a kiss that will heal me, a touch on an arm, an embrace so authentic that there is a release, an exodus, a liberation that will be like a surreal suspension of time infused with warm love as cleansing as a spring rain.

My drug, my addiction, is attempting to prove I am something I am not – I am "…running to stand still…" I feel the "...needle chill..." each time I am praised for something I am not and pride fills my veins as the needle drops to the floor and I become numb to living once again.