Hard Shapes
“Weakness invades my bones, My steps fail beneath me.” Book of Habakkuk
I’ve had time and opportunity to ponder, in recent months, the means by which we continue on the course we’ve set when we feel beleaguered and besieged by forces working against us. You can feel on fire with a sense of purpose and clarity when you see the opportunity laid out before you. The peace that comes with clarity and certainty is an enormous blessing, when you can accomplish it, particularly for those of us who prone to more fatalistic complacency. I am a man who has found his own peace in a sense of inertia; knowing how and when to move and act, but always doing so within a set of acceptable preconditions that have been etched upon my bones. There have been moments, thankfully, throughout my life, where I have acted and moved beyond those preconditions, as we all must, to find our way into something that speaks deeper than the markings and machinations of other within us.
It turns out that the beauty and poetry of creation, faith and endeavour can cut deeper than you ever thought. Yes, there are designs and desires of others, black ink upon your bones. But in all honesty, one can find the truth that brings life to the marrow, the sinew, and you’ll feel pulled and drawn - called, to be precise - beyond the confines of the boundaries that you’ve been given. For some, this is a relatively simple process of taking one step, then another, to whatever calls you, whatever sustains you, as the deeper yearnings do little to conflict with the design that others had set for you.
For others, the process of following that call can be more challenging, confronting and ripe for conflict. It doesn’t marry with the conceptions of right conduct, viable lifestyle, due respect, established familial cultures and secular notions of limiting life, limiting discomfort, limiting inconvenience. You fall out of step, out of alignment with the world - it seems - but you eddy and turn amidst a new construct that is as old as time itself. There is a process of pain, like moving and working joints and muscles that you’ve let atrophy - but that pain does not speak to folly. The pain speaks to newfound strength. There is a process of labouring, of deliverance, that must be a torture of sorts, if you are to to render something so utterly new and beautiful that it requires a break from the atrophied forms that already existed. Forms perhaps, and structures, that you never really questioned or considered disrupting.
But you can be called beyond them, into a life that seems madness to some, but a wondrous necessity for yourself. A pertinent example: As we’ve endeavoured to live out the Catholic conception of love, family and marriage, we’ve made choices that appear at odds with the ‘common sense’ of the secular society around us. I write of the broader societal realm, rather than the notion of communities to which we belong, as a number of these communities in our life are founded in our shared faith and pursuit of Christ above all else. But beyond these, to welcome children into your life, with a loving, reckless abandon, seems to be it’s own form of insanity. To resist the workings and wonders of your own biology, your natural capacity for love, for communion with your beloved, and the children it begets, seems to be an unquestioned underpinning to modern life for most in the secular age.
We live at odds with that underpinning, but our lives are imbued with a sense of the grace and presence of God, amidst the tumult and turmoil, which is certainly challenging, to say the least. But these challenges: the odds stacked against you; the temptation to despair; the accusations of madness, of irrationality, of irresponsibility; are the hard shapes, the sharp crevices by which we feel our way in the darkness of our own confusion. There is a path laid out before us. There is a will; His will, which will triumph over anything and everything set against us, if we allow it.
When Elijah awaited God upon the mountain, he knew He was not in strong wind that shook the mountain and shattered the rocks. He was not in the earthquake, nor the fury of the scorching fire. When came the gentle breeze, Elijah “covered his face with his coat” and “stood at the entrance to the cave.” It was in the gentle breeze that God spoke to him, guided him. We can be tempted to seek His hand in the tempest, the fury, the fire, but we’ll be misled. Make your way to the mouth of the cave. Feel your way there, by the barren, hard surfaces that beset you as doubt, detractions, distractions. God will be there, in the murmur of the gentle breeze, to guide you forward, to guide you onward, without fail.