Waking in The Dark

I was seven years old or so and falling asleep in the thick, tropical air was proving difficult. I stared at the ceiling and listened to my little brother’s breathing in the bunk beneath. His quiet breaths soothed my mind and I rode their rhythm over the edge of wakefulness into the land of dreams. While I dreamt, a dog crept beneath my outside window. When all was quiet, drowsed by the thick air, he gathered up his lungs and barked as loudly as he could. I am convinced to this day that the dog removed the panes of glass in the window in order to lean in and bark directly into my ear. I have never heard a Mastiff bark, but I am sure the dog outside my window was the largest dog that ever chased its tail.

The bark woke me with such a start that I remember only two sensations: hopelessness and terror. The sudden clap in my brain was so great, it paralyzed all reason. I remember nothing but the bark. I do not even remember being comforted, though I am sure my parents tried. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. But the bark was in my brain, and I was disoriented. I cried out in terror and then I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. For many days thereafter, my world was darkened by the bark of the dog outside my window.

I am older now. I am wiser and more rational. But my shoulders lock up as I recall this episode in my life because I am still afraid. The bark still reverberates in my mind and I know that it was a foreshadow of things to come—other barks—thicker air that chokes the lungs, darker paralyzations, other sudden thunder claps that leave me trying to gather myself like Humpty-Dumpty—a futile task with or without all the king’s men.

That bark was a hint of worse barks to come. I have faced some of those barks since: a little painted coffin on the kitchen floor made for family friends who lost their little girl; a demolished car sputtering and smoking on the side of the road after I turned prematurely in front of oncoming traffic and saw my sister’s face sprayed with glass as a 4×4 pickup smashed into her passenger door; Julie, one of my many mothers who have “adopted” me over the years, snatched by heaven long before the rest of us were ready. And as I walk the corridors of memory, I see my little girl—three years old— unable to breathe. I remember the powerlessness of watching my daughter gasp for oxygen. Though she opened wide and tried and tried, air would not come. I remember her on the hospital bed. She looked smallish and lost, hooked up to innumerable tubes.

There are too many barks in the darkness to list.

There are many more to come.

 

“Pain is the megaphone of God” (C.S. Lewis).

I can hear you now, O God.

 

“The pedagogy of God is pain” (John Piper).

God, teach me. Speak into this bewilderment. Unravel the barking in my brain.

 

At thirty-three my body stopped working. One month prior I was varsity boy’s basketball head coach, I was head deacon at church, I was a full time teacher, and I was father of four. Then I had a migraine attack that burned so hot, I burrowed my head into the snow on the back porch. My five year old son found me and called for help. I was disoriented, broken, for several days after. I tried to go back to work, but I was living with crossed wires, and each attempt to return left me more broken than I was before. Within a few short weeks, I could not stand for long, I could hardly feed myself, and I could not read. Well, I could read, but anything more than a Dr. Seuss book was too heavy to lift and too difficult to understand. My mind was bewildered and I tripped over simple words, simple concepts. I wept. I wept a lot. I would sit outside in a chair and let the snow fall around me. Sometimes I screamed at God in my head. Sometimes I only whispered repeatedly the three words I could understand at a time: “God help me. God help me. God help me.”

I was not always angry, but “…sorrow was within me like a convulsion” (Augustine, Confessions). Then I lost the migraines, but I developed a tremor in my limbs and in my head. Early on, I thought my neck might snap for loss of control because of the tremors’ viciousness. The tremors would haunt me through the night and I would awake with them. Slowly, they have eased, but even now, years later, my body does not work sometimes—like today—or rather, it works in a way I cannot predict. Specialists cannot explain this trembling of my head upon its shoulders. It was curiosity for a time, then a fear, now an annoyance to those who love me—like a tickle in the throat. Doctors cannot tell me how or why or when. They guess. They do not know. It is not chronic at least. That is some comfort, perhaps. Everything has changed and my life is now calibrated to this different, unnamed thing. My life plays to the beat of a new metronome.

Still, I am fatigued by the tremors that have no name and I feel embarrassed by the questions behind people’s eyes. Some people, friends and strangers, are brave and ask, and I am unable to provide satisfying answers. Most pretend nothing has changed and I pretend with them. I like control. I like to get things done. But sometimes I cannot move my hands, sometimes even my legs, but my head will nod or shake depending on the moment. If I focus all my energies upon it, I can hold the tremors back for a time like a boy with his finger in the dyke. I hold a brief conversation with someone to whom I would rather not show such strange behavior as head tremors, but the dyke will break, the tremors will storm the fortress of my ego, and I will be worse for wear.

Why all this trouble? The heralds cry “Peace, peace”. But there is no peace. I see pain in scores of lives all around me: our friends have been married for three years and suffered six miscarriages. Other friends have been married twenty-five years, but now one of them has a new lover. Still others were married fifty-three years until death came knocking.

Who shall navigate the Marianas Trench with a flashlight?

Let us try, always remembering that “…in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 42), for “though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright” (Moby Dick, chapter 42).

The dilemma that keeps gnawing like a belligerent dog at the back door of our mind is this: “A generous God is fine when things are running smoothly. But what when they are not and darkness is invading? What when trusted patterns have broken down, or we feel too far gone to bother even trying? We dwell at outer limits, and some events in life—loss, failure, stress, sin—remind us of the threat of chaos” (Iain Matthew, The Impact of God).

Shalom.

John of the Cross knew about suffering, about being swallowed. He called it the dark night of the soul in which he shared in the sign of Jonah who, likewise, was swallowed. Iain Matthew, in his book The Impact of God, describes John’s suffering this way: “It was as if the anesthetic which normal life provides had worn off, his inner self had been scraped bare, and he now ached in a way he never had before for a God who was utterly beyond him.”

Such scrapings leave us blackened, compact, hard, like coal. Rembrandt knew how to play with blackness. He was a master painter just like God. Who shall say unto the painter, “What is all this darkness, all this trouble, all this pain?” “Calculated brush strokes,” says the painter. “Look! Behold the light cometh. There, at the other side of the canvas, a face lit,” says the painter.

His mercies are new every morning.

Great is Thy faithfulness.