Pulled out a seat at Think in the upstairs loft, looking out across the street and into the most beautiful green scaffolding that obscures one of what I guess to be thousands of ongoing construction projects in the city. This morning’s catch is a trippio trimmed to the top of the demitasse lip, served speedily by the summer-gripped ginger girl in the Mets cap.
Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.
Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.
The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?
In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.
In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons — I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.
I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?
It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.
On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.
I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.
I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
I can recall explicitly when I appreciated this belief enough to embody it. Readying for the early mornings of Spring, preparing to rise with creation, as much happens in the rhythmic rising I forfeit by the sleeping late, by the rising slow, and by the ales that help me into that. And the redemption of this space is to help me to keep covenants much like this one. To assist me in the awareness that what I have written is not only what I — at one point — have wanted and believed, but rather what I shall continue to believe, what I shall continue want, and the ways in which I will continue to behave that express these beliefs, desires, and renewing inclinations.
In the coming months, I have decisions to make (and I always do of course — decisions are how we are active, moral beings). And the point is not to consider these as with less levity than those preceding, but with as much gravity; with as much opportunity as it provides to be more myself by, in increasing and greater measures, denying myself. Denial of my own pleasures, that which protects and preserves and gratifies me, in trade for what impresses upon the community, provides to the community, and what strengthens and makes it less than simply a collection of parts and more clearly a unified whole.
This process is slow. But at least I’m finding some sort of patience as a replacement for despair. The last year I not only had little vision for this, but I even came to points where the last desire among mine was to find the vision for this — to understand ethics specifically in light of the coming Kingdom — and rather how I might be able to live bereft of its gigantic, effective reality. A journey in humanism! I found that while it was a new process, and one that allowed me to see reality in some different light than what my upbringing and the decisions of my early twenties might have protected me from, I came to see that the results were my own isolation, my own attachment to habits self-gratifying, and a personal climate of self-full-ness. And that light which I might have come to find was no less than the cold shadow of laziness and of self-seeking (and the means through which I might worship to that end).
When we come to a clearer and more sober estimate of our own limitations and responsibilities, that makes it possible more genuinely to love our neighbor.
Last night, the most Silent Saturday, I went to bed early with the express purpose that I could be with with the sun as it rose, to experience what This day has meant and means as the Centerpiece of History, and how, somehow, in spite of the ways which I am able to be and to do terrible, I am being made into something beautiful, which is a thing I must remember & and I must rehearse. And by keeping those covenants I lay here, I lay down my self.
Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.
Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.
Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.
