It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in a broken world. Mary Oliver
I wonder if today’s Renaissance men/women are the artistic melancholics of our day. Given the weightiness of our self knowing via the social sciences, faith practices, and the constant barrage of consumptive sensory experiences, we are now “too aware” of our inflated presence in the room. In this magnified display of the self and its proclivities, a degree of self-loathing may actually be healthy. Should we not grieve over our penchant for pleasure at the cost of discipline and service? Should we not ponder the subterranean rage that masks itself as distance and boredom? Should we not feel the sorrow befitting a people cut off from their deepest more spiritual parts?
For a man my age there is so much still unresolved. So much disparity between my values and my actions. So much space between my dreams and reality. This distance can fill up with such profound sadness at times. Rilke speaks so eloquently about the shear terror that beauty offers us in the unresolvedness of life, in the deep meaning of things seeking divine fruition. One of his more profound observations is the idea that the purpose of life is “to be defeated by greater and greater things.” As they say…this is a hard saying. Who can know it?
Circling around God for years, I, like Rilke, wonder if I am a “falcon, a storm, or a great song.” In moments of holy discontent, this unrelenting sorrow is a blessing as it is my edge. It is the air my lungs need to take in the deep deep richness of the dark. However, it is the paralysis this darkness may bring that frightens me most. When my obsession with the journey takes me into God, the dark is holy and brilliant in its glow. When passion becomes a mania or fixation it becomes unwilling to embrace the questions as divine messengers of a different knowing. In this state these quandaries mock me into disbelief and suspicion. In this place I get lost in the loathing and begin to see it all as a joke. My life is a joke. I am a burden to myself and I cannot bear this yoke of self awareness alone. I need a people, a tribe, and a family who share the same appreciation of the consequences of this awareness. I need a Savior who only allows a heaviness that leads to transformation.
To still have so much uncertainty and reservation within my breast is on certain days overwhelmingly sad. On other days I realize that living in this tension of knowing and unknowing is overpowering only if I refuse its terrifying glory. Only if I refuse to the undertaking, to the divine duty of loving life into the questions. Only then does the disparity become a fruit ready to fall to the ground welcoming gravity’s call. Only then does the silence and solitude unveil the striking likeness of the knowing in the unknowing.
And so I am learning to as Rilke says, “love the questions.” I am learning to lean into life as a lover full of sensual heaviness, flinging her hair back with a beatific gaze of pondering and brooding melancholy. This hesitation she sings is my muse, the very enthusiasm my soul needs to pursue.
Today I welcome my melancholy artistic status. Like Rumi, I submit to this powerlessness reason has offered and seek my sojourn in the unanswerability of beauty and the arts. We read to find ourselves in the story. We paint to mine the silent poetry hidden in color, texture and line. We dance to surrender to the passion our body hears. In these forms of expression we in many ways “live out the questions.” We discover the mother tongue. We see the sound and hear the colors. We ask our bodies to teach us the melodies running deep underground in our souls. In this place of revealing, beauty remains terrifying and rightfully so. I would not have it otherwise. But here I do not seek the answers but seek to live them. And as Rilke, I will at some distant day, live my life into the very thing I cannot imagine at this very moment. I end with more Rilke…”I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”
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