Dispatch 001: INFERNO, PURGATORIO, PARADISO

Blue waters dark as fallen angels, cold as the bones of the unburied dead, and vast as the depths of the soul stared at me with answers to questions I did not know how to ask. Fear of swimming into that unknown ocean paralyzed me, drowning the gifts of grace. I was overwhelmed with the obscurity of reality.

Where my perceptions, emotions, and thoughts on life were suppressed. No. Worse. They were altered for survival. At any given moment, the rules could be replaced so that what was once good had become evil. In that hour, I moved from being loved to being hated to being an outcast sent to the wasteland of shame in isolation as I stood amongst a crowd on the pier. A captivity held within the recesses of the mind that cannot be broken but will shatter the spirit.

I saw a way to escape, a crack in the boundary, a light, and I moved beyond it to enter into that Holiness, but the rules changed as the earth rotates. A list of sins was brought before me again, with the new infractions added. They are never forgiven or washed clean in the rivers of baptism, but used as weapons whose ammunition never ran dry as the black coffee from my cup splattered over me. A way to kill the spirit for good. To kill the soul so that any life which remains can be molded into their image.

Still, I fought the oppressive heat of hell, the sun overhead, with an air so thick it impeded all movement. I could never move to better myself, pulled down into their grips, as if death held more life than the one I was trying to live.

How can the mind be so weak, fragile, and culpable to the coldness of evil that the warmth of the moon comforts the soul? Finding a way out of the depths demands a change of mind, no longer feeding the disease, the demon, the evil.

Let it rot into the hell from which it came. Let it die into the darkness from which there is no light. Let it vanish into the nothingness from which it does not exist. My mind and soul can no longer slip into that abyss from which it drags me. There is life above, life to explore, life to love. Yet, the darkness remains, tainting the pureness of the light.

I struggled in the in-between. Can I shed the armor required to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, surrendering to that warmth of light radiating truth? As Dostoevsky asked, "Is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?" I asked that of myself, of the void, of the torment, of the despair.

In the eleventh hour,
you knelt in prayer,
wept for salvation,
atonement for sin,
for mercy to flow.

In my misery, God spoke. It was not words I heard but His grace upon my soul. He communicates for many reasons, particularly when we are about to receive a heavy cross. A cross that causes a simple cry to Him. A cry for Him to let forth the dam of baptismal rivers to the wounded heart.

I resurfaced not into the light as the flow of the baptismal rivers came as a waterboarding session within a dark room at an undisclosed desert location. I had not learned to let those healing waters flow over me. I thrashed about them even though the Lotus Sutra states,

Living beings undergo constant suffering and anguish,
benighted, without teacher or guide,
not realizing there is a way to end suffering,
not knowing how to seek emancipation.

I never sought emancipation from the suffering. I endured with faith. A faith that Wisdom was found within it. But to suffer alone, to suffer without sacrifice, brings nothing. Only suffering received and offered with Christ can become salvific.

Erik Varden writes, "To be at ease is to be unsafe.” Thus, suffering is a purgation of evil that caused me to shudder. Yet, I must let it pass through me. For it will pass. Though the memories of suffering within the Sacrament of Marriage never fade. God never removes them. He allows them to remain so that I remember where I came from.

In the eleventh hour,
you held my hand,
to be pulled,
from the bowels of hell,
to the gates of Heaven.

God gave me what I could not handle on my own, but gave me nothing He cannot bear with me. If I desired a more perfect union with Him, I should accept with grace those more difficult trials to come. As they are opportunities to discipline my mind and body, to persevere, to be purged and made more like Him.

In prayer, fasting, and penance, when suffering inevitably comes, I accept it. Difficult as it is, I understand the constant purgation my life must undertake. In those hours, when the streets are empty, and I sit with my wife in adoration with Him, I no longer ask why but what? What was He showing me? What was He purging from my life? What was He purging from my soul?

In those moments, I want to understand God, to understand His will, but I could not grasp His reasoning. Perhaps, at times, I did not want to accept it. But when His light presses upon my soul, I dare not resist. To go against Him would throw me back into the blackest depths of the seas.

In the eleventh hour,
you felt love,
that wills good,
expels demons,
brings the soul peace.

And yet, in my humanity, I fought those interior impressions that I am to love as no one has loved me. I do not understand. They go against everything I have been taught by the world, and even by those who were meant to love me.

It is not within the quietness of life around me, but in the quietness of my soul. But the restlessness within drowns out His gentle voice. Though when He grants that quiet, His voice begins to heal the wounds, but the scars remain.

There are those moments in life that are easy to navigate, and then there are those that are simply hard. But it is the poetically hard moments, those moments that lie within the soul and guide our salvation. The poetically hard are those moments found within sacrificial suffering for the purification of souls. But Saint John of the Cross urges me, "strive always to choose not which is easiest but that which is most difficult," to not shy away but to embrace that which is most demanding.

In the eleventh hour,
you saw the candle,
of how I see you,
to the stars,
of how God sees you.

Though I am not seeking just Holiness. For Holiness is not poetically hard. I seek a complete union of my soul with God. But I ask, what lust do I commit, what desires do I hold onto? What prohibits my union with God? What thought lingers deep within the recesses of my mind that is not of Him?

If I forgo my will to enter into that night, to enter into that darkness and in concealment, hidden from evil, to whom the light of faith is more darkness, I can be free. I can be free within the laws of God. Free from my desires within. Those desires that plague me, leaving me feeling empty, without hope.

I battle, I argue, and I pray to understand how God works, as if what He has shown me is not enough because it does not conform to my understanding or to the manner in which I would conduct my life. But the soul must pass beyond everything to unknowing as if Wisdom herself were an unreachable point in space.

Those whispers from Wisdom insisted to a love that willed the good of the other. Yet, I fail to resign and detach from the armor within, that if it were gone, I would desire it back. It protects me so that I might not let go. As if I do not have faith. As if I do not hope. As if I do not love.

Who can enter, or even desire to enter into, this complete detachment and emptiness of spirit? For I must have no burdens with respect to the lower things. How can I find such a path, and follow it? I cannot determine the path myself. I cannot walk a path believing it is the narrow one that God instructed me to take. For only God can illuminate the path I must follow.

As the deepest things of God are the least known to men, my finite mind cannot comprehend. What are these deepest things? What fraction of an idea could there be that I am unaware of? And here, a desire to know more, even these questions, I must detach from. For only God can imbue me with such Wisdom. That is, if He wills it. Even the slightest desire to know more about God is a form of attachment. Thus, the more I let go, the less I understand, but it is here that God seeks me.

I must remember that the language of God is different. He speaks in the moments my mind is focused on the words within a page. Those words written by another soul, God speaks. A sentence for Him to convey a thought, a notion, an idea to enter into contemplation with Him. Though to reveal the insight of Wisdom fails me.

The knots within my soul held more than any sequential sentence could ever. An issue that Ted Chiang named years before I understood why it mattered. He recounted the basis, the structure, the essence of our language in 'The Story of Your Life'. His prose has remained at the forefront of my thoughts.

He discussed our perception as being in a sequential mode of awareness. At the same time, the beings within the story exhibited a simultaneous mode of awareness. That we experience events in order and perceive their relationship as cause and effect. They experience all events simultaneously and perceive the underlying purpose behind them all.

My life is but one period of time. I know my initial and final state. Can I understand the effects of life's events so that I might initiate their cause? Perhaps not. My writing requires one word to follow another, a sequential pattern of my thought to be communicated for others to perceive in that sequential manner. Yet, the page these words lie on has two dimensions; can I use the space to convey more, to move towards the purpose underlying everything?

My actions ripple across time like a stone thrown into a still pond whose ripples continue beyond my perception. Ripples interacting with other ripples from stones thrown from afar. A perception that remains finite, far from the infinite and what He desires.

So I pray. Never ceasing. A constant presence with God. Awaiting to see what He sees, for Him to speak, to hear the Wisdom He has. To listen for that whisper to direct the moment.

Though I fail in those moments of silence in which He seeks my suffering, for I am too broken to speak of them, to declare matters that pertain to my soul, I cannot. For my suffering is the purgation God has graced my soul with. Who am I to ask for His help in the trials He has given me?

I ask to remove those memories of evil, those images that haunt the soul. But how? For that is His Providence, while the language to ask God for such has slipped away.

In the eleventh hour,
you understood beauty,
comes from within,
to radiate out,
as a sign of God.

I learned about quipu while in Cusco. Of their ancient system of communicating and storing information through knots in rope. Such that, it is not I who cannot understand Him, but that language has not yet developed enough to communicate what He has shared with me through the language of the soul.

I have struggled throughout life to articulate my thoughts and ideas. The essence from which I have come, because language has failed me. Though language structured my thoughts and what lay deep within me, affording me the ability to share a fraction of what is within, it failed to reveal God or my relationship with Him.

How can I express the manner in which God spoke, when the manner He used has no relation to my human nature? For there are aspects within words, equations, paintings, and music that can express a concept of life, but to share a collection of thoughts, the notions of a series of events over time, as a single moment within eternity, remains obsolete.

Give ear to my prayer, Lord,
for I must learn to love,
to love as You have loved.

For love is the providential language. The language where the moments of grace are not measured in time, for they are the mystical aspects of our soul within God.

Life is governed by Providence, which Father Lagrange defines as "the conception in the divine intellect on the order of all things to their end." If that is true, what within my being has not been governed by God? As the incense from the thurible burns, the Holy Ghost knows my prayer before I have prayed as I kneel in the pew before the altar.

Teach me to love her,
to love her as you,
as you have loved the Church.

The events He permitted in my life have a greater purpose, but are charred into my memory. Between the events of life are brief intervals of conversation and thought within me. Are these too governed by God? A thought that arises from Him to set a series of events into motion? An idea that will only fully be realized in Heaven?

The origins of the universe become, then, a guiding image for the birth of a single thought. As the galaxies formed from the fundamental elements of the universe, particles interacting with their surroundings and with one another over the smallest increments of time, so too has my life been formed. The tiniest movements led to the immense, and all was governed by Him.

Show me how to love her,
to love her as you,
as you have loved me.

If the slightest aspects of the universe led to the vastness we see, and all were under His Providence, then the smallest aspects of my humanity are also within His hand. A single thought within. A single good thought within, derived from Him, opens into an understanding of the universe, and above all, of Him.

Grace me with the virtues,
the virtues to lead her,
lead her into Your Kingdom.

As in the origins of the universe, my life also has an absolute zero of time, a point before which I cannot trace my interior to a chain of cause and effect. Yet, within that first movement toward good, and in each sequential thought, He graced me with the opportunity to engage and act upon what is from Him.

Allow me to become holy,
to become as holy as I need,
as I need to love her purely.