“For this reason, some of you are sick, while others have fallen asleep.”
How do I know that I am leaving this world? I don’t know with mathematical certainty, as one would know 5+7=12. But you would be confident too if you had had my succession of experiences.
My spiritual sickness has been long in the making, but the symptoms – the awareness – would only emerge at the beginning of my physical illness. Prior to its vigorous onset, I began to utter strange things that seem to come from a forgotten place in me soul – things like, “I don’t love God like I should,” just before falling asleep in our hotel bed at the foot of the Alhambra. Weeks later would come the flu-like pains and crushing despair, followed by the myriad of symptoms mentioned in prior posts.
An awareness of a wasted life began at the most acute phase. Over the next few months, I would frequent doctor’s offices, which would do no good other than to make my suffering seem psychosomatic. But running parallel to this was the awareness of one spiritual failure, followed by two, which became four, and so on.
When four became sixteen, the insomnia set in, followed by the discovery of an illness so rare and so symptomatically right in all the wrong places that it could not be ignored or rationalized away.
Sixteen would become two-hundred and fifty-four during an unplanned retreat with a newly acquired spiritual director. By the end of the week, for the first time, I was aware that “in me dwells no good thing”. I was operating out of a toxic prison, propped up by social relations and obligations that masked the deep hopelessness that emerged in the acute phase of the illness. My devotion a farce, my lips miles from my heart, uttering, “I am empty!” as I wretched in a panic attack – one of many to come.
The worse my physical state seemed to get, the worse my spiritual state seemed to appear.
But why draw the conclusions of judgment? Of wrath uncorked? What does God’s work have to do with this besides the awareness of sin? (if that weren’t enough) And why not hope in God’s mercy being “greater than all my sin”?
Among my idols were hobbies that I had been at work on for a decade or so. I was putting such items in a safe place before leaving on a trip, only to hear, “you won’t be needing those”. It was not audible. I would bet my life’s earnings that it did not come from my own mind, simply because I’ve never had such a thought press in on me from such a place; as if it came from just behind me and passed through me. In the moment, I didn’t fully grasp what had happened.
A week or so later, I was taking some supplements, in the midst of a very strong generalized anxiety (historically, my anxiety has been object/thought specific, and not otherwise), the same voice said, “those won’t help you.”
A month later, I discovered the existence of this horrible illness, and it all appeared as if woven from a single thread.
I know. It is an impossible story. I can scarcely believe it myself, but a worthy alternative has yet to present itself. And so I remain convinced.
In subsequent posts, I will divulge key passages in my retreat experience, which are among the darkest in all of scripture.
SDA
Last Things 