March 19, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
Today I need to wrestle with a couple ideas floating around in my head. My hope is that the process of writing will help me break through and understand something. I’m not entirely sure what, but here goes.
I’ve been experiencing a general sense of anxiety recently. Nothing too painful or difficult, but a general baseline of anxiety nonetheless. Over the course of the last year I’ve generally learned how to handle my emotional ebbs and flows. I’m optimistic that this phase will pass, ideally with some new learning. But I’ll admit I’ve found these last few weeks to be challenging.
Is it seasonal?
One idea that I’ve been wrestling with recently: life is more seasonal and cyclical than we recognize. Western society in particular has adopted an idea that time is linear: we work toward something, life progresses. In this view, time builds upon itself via human effort, and things generally improve over time (albeit chaotically).
What I am coming to appreciate is the cyclical nature of time. We do experience seasons, and these seasons do carry meaning in them. Winter is a time of death while spring is a time for birth and renewal, for example.
The seasonal nature of time hit me particularly this winter. I found myself grieving this winter, feeling sadness and a sense of loss as the days got shorter and darker. I remembered how Christmas replaced a pagan holiday meant to celebrate the days finally getting longer; for millennia people have experienced an onset of sadness and grief with winter, to the degree that we set a holiday specifically meant to give folks hope and a reminder that the days would get longer, brighter, and warmer, and that we would experience life and joy and abundance again.
And then I noticed, with some remove for the first time, how Americans work ourselves into a frenzy during the Christmas holidays. Work invariably increases as folks prepare to take time off, school effort increases as we finish a semester not only with exams, but also with performances and other forms of celebration. And of course, for the Christmas holiday itself we either plan travel or hosting responsibilities. We decorate. We plan and execute a large feast. We buy and wrap presents. Watching it all this year, I couldn’t help but wonder: to what degree do we work ourselves into this frenzy to avoid feeling sadness and grief during this season of darkness and death? Don’t get me wrong: celebrating holidays together are wonderful. Giving presents, feasting together, decorating, singing, and performing are all critical rituals to the human experience. But I sense Americans so obsess over Christmas precisely because we have a shared cultural aversion to sadness, grief, and death.
Spring, of course, is a time for rebirth and renewal. What I’m noticing is that the transition from winter (darkness, sadness, grief, death) to spring (birth, renewal) is not instantaneous. I sense at least some of my anxiety is wanting to accelerate the end of winter and firmly reach spring.
Is it spiritual?
I also wonder how my involvement in my spiritual direction group (which started in September, and runs to May) impacts my experience of the seasons, and this season in particular. We’re less than two weeks from Easter. Easter itself is a time for celebration, as we honor Jesus’ resurrection and celebrate the new relationship with God the resurrection brings us. But Lent, the season that immediately proceeds Easter, is solemn. For me, one inescapable conclusion is that, in order to get to Easter (the resurrection), we must first experience all of the elements that preceded the resurrection: the trial, hanging on the cross, and even the sense of dread Jesus felt at his impending betrayal and death. We are reminded of humanity’s worst impulses, how we could mock and betray and torment and kill a source of almost unimaginable light and love and joy and healing. I’d never previously observed Lent with purpose or intention. This year I read scripture and pray, which I find brings a sense of unease, a desire for Lent to end quickly that I might experience the renewal of Easter.
Or is it relational?
For most of the past year, I’ve carried a visual image that I was going into a cave to heal myself, knowing that I would eventually come back out of the cave to reengage with the world. That image has correlates in some of my earliest visions. In the first I wrote about, after encountering Jesus I started on my path. I stepped into darkness and faced a demon representing my fear. Then I faced multiple demons representing others gripped in fear. Even my very first vision resembles a healing descent into the subconscious. What I didn’t capture in my notes from that day was a distinct sense that, on the return journey, I would heal relationships around me. This relationship healing loosely resembled healing concentric circles, with me at the center, your mom as the first ring, my parents as the second ring, proceeding to other loved ones (friends and family), then acquaintances, strangers, and even including ‘enemies’ (those folks with whom I carried a negative charge). I even recall continuing on to facilitate the healing of relationships between groups that didn’t include me.
This gets me to the part where I’m feeling a bit stuck at the moment. Yesterday I wrote about fear, and how fear keeps us turned away from our light, our path, our purpose, our wholeness. These days I encounter examples of people stuck in fear seemingly everywhere. Your mom, folks at church, friends I visit, on the news, in the podcasts I hear…I sense fear everywhere. We probably are more fearful than we used to be, but the bigger difference is I am now more aware when others are stuck in fear. Of course, no one stuck in fear wants to be told that they are fighting shadows; we would experience such admonition as infantilizing. So I am struggling with what to do with my newfound awareness of all the fear I encounter.
My sense is that this period of preparing for the resurrection, of following Jesus to the cross, gives me some clues for where to look. Sensing Jesus’ dread in the Garden of Gethsemane, empathizing with his plight at trial and on the cross, I find my capacity for empathy increasing. My ability to sit with unpleasant emotions and physical sensations remains limited, but improves slowly through my meditations. My sense is that I am called to engage those stuck in fear with empathy and compassion. To the degree I sense openness, I sense a calling to share my light, that others might discover their own internal connection to God. To the degree I sense others are committed to their fear and remain closed, I sense a calling to move on and proceed on my path. I feel when other are in pain, and find the experience deeply unpleasant to a degree that I feel compelled to try to help. Thus, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of moving on from someone stuck in fear. I must remember that God is available to everyone, always. Put differently: others will find the light when they are ready. And what if they are never ready? That is not for me to know. I wish it were, but it is not. Reluctantly, I must humbly stick to my path, and trust that others will find theirs at the appropriate time.
Forgive me if this has been a rambling note. Indeed, the act of writing has in fact helped me piece a few ideas together, and have given me a clearer sense of my path forward. I appreciate the two of you serving as my audience in these letters, and hope you find them useful in due time.
I love you both.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 