Ikons

There's a picture above my bed. It's been there for years. I don't even look at it anymore. But it suddenly seemed all too...iconic.

Thomas Eakins. 

"John Biglin in a Single Scull" 1873

An Irish American scholar of Gnosticism aptly described the human race as "an ontologically inferior, morally weak and epistemically challenged creature." We are not God, or even angels. We are flawed by selfishness and fear. And we stumble as best we can through a world that is a mystery to us. And we remain, I suspect, a mystery to ourselves.

I have been driven, my whole life, to try to understand and explain what I eventually realized is beyond either understanding or explanation. I hoped, believed, needed to believe, that if I could find the Truth of things, I would be safe and worthwhile. What relieved me of that overwhelming compulsion was human love, especially the love of a particular man, my opposite in almost every respect: immediate, passionate, aggressive, vividly in the moment. He drew me like a magnet and he terrified me. There were times when I could not tell the difference between being embraced and being strangled to death. But I finally discovered, came to know in my bones, after years of both joy and struggle, that love is perhaps a higher and deeper and more divine way of knowing the truth than all the wisdom in the world. I ceased to be afraid of it,

even though I knew it was ferocious and untamable. A new realm of both ecstasy and agony opened to me.

Although I know God less, I actually trust Him more.

I still look for The Truth. I always will. But I know that because I am just a man, I will only glance at it, never possess it. And I no longer feel the need to. I have learned to live less fearfully and more humanly with the fragments that come my way. It was not easy, but I am now more of the man I was meant to be. 

So I know about fear, about being driven, about loss and pain. But I know that you can survive and, oddly, in the aftermath, be grateful for it. At the moment, having loved "not wisely, but too well", I sometimes wish for an immunity to being touched, to melting at the sight of a beloved face, to aching for a kind of communion I only achieve for a moment. But my messy soul keeps unfolding. 

I wish as much, with apologies, for the other souls whom I love.