Returning To The Scene Of The Crime

I thought for a long time that my faith was dead, rotting to the point that I was able to loosen the knot it had tied around me. Then, for some unknown reason, I found the rope again, clinging to my leg like a frayed piece of cloth, and decided to follow it back to the place it started, presumably the very place I had formally been so entangled. At first, I thought I knew exactly where it would lead me, so I intentionally meandered back for fear that I would get to the end too quickly and the journey would be over. But I soon realized that I was lost again. Maybe the rope I found at my feet was not the same one that I had previously unraveled. But why this compulsion to return to the scene of the crime.

Nouwen writes extensively about love and he has definitely given me a greater appreciation for its importance but at the same time, in my opinion, the phrase, 'I understand you,' spoken truthfully, fulfills me more deeply than the more commonly sought after, 'I love you' because one can love, quite genuinely, in spite a lack of personal knowledge whereas there is no such deficiency with real understanding. In fact, love and understanding could be seen as mutually exclusive. Love is an act of faith while understanding is an activity of the mind. It is very close to the distinction between sympathy and empathy; while a sympathetic person can hold you, an empathetic one will be able to walk with you.

I look for love, because that is what I been conditioned to do, but I long for understanding naturally. Perhaps my search for purpose is really a quest for understanding. If there is a great plan of which I am part of, then once I realize my place in it I become one with the designer. I am fulfilled by fulfilling my role. A square peg can find both its purpose and its truest counterpart within the emptiness of a quadrangle void.

I had resigned myself to a life lived in the avoidance of pain. I had packaged it up in eloquent monologues and even I bought the lie that mine was a deep and tortured path only a few would dare tread. I realize now that my path is a crowded one, trafficked by a host of others seeking the very same through personal freedom and financial independence. But if the avoidance of pain--the tolerable life I speak so often of, has truly been my goal, then I have utterly failed by all accounts. But now, instead of focusing my hate on others, I loathe myself because I have been one of them. Here I defer to the words of St. Paul, 'Oh, wrecked man that I am, who will save me from the body of this death.'