We orientate our lives based on our beliefs and group affiliations. "I am here and I am who I am because I believe X and I am associated with group Y." But I mentioned in my first post 'New Beginnings' that there was a period of my recent life characterized by pain, confusion, even anger. I came to a point wherein I was disorientated. I found myself in a space that had no name.
Can you imagine that? Feeling absolutely sure of your life path and then suddenly blinking to find yourself somewhere you can't describe. Suddenly you cannot describe what you are feeling or where you are going. All words are incapable of providing clarity of where you are in your life. The space has no name. If you don't know what I am talking about, then you've never been there. It's a place where life is foggy and the future, both immediate and long term, are unknown. I think people experience this place when they lose a close loved one. For me, I lost a part of my very self.
What do you do in such a space? How do you reorientate your life? Can you go back to what you were before and just try and forget what you have learned, the critical skills obtained, the legitimate information that glares at you? To go back is not possible; the human memory cannot so easily be deleted. So there you are in a space with no name.
I found a word that helped me orientate myself while I was in this space, and it is fitting to talk about it during this season of advent. It is found in Isaiah 7:10-17, and it is the name 'Immanuel'. It is a Hebrew word meaning 'God is with us', and it symbolizes the saving presence of God. When Isaiah spoke it, it was intended as a sign of peace and reassurance for a people surrounded by their fiercest enemies. It is intended for a people that are suddenly met with the doom of utter defeat. In this space without a name, I clung to this name - Immanuel - for comfort and peace. Reality became this one word - Immanuel. God is with us.
'Immanuel' brought me hope. It was a coveted breathe of air after a deep submersion. God is with us. Breathe. God is with us. Moving forward is not so hard when this hope wrapped up in a simple name becomes real flesh in Jesus Christ (Matt 1:23). It is no longer a word, but it is made flesh. Someone of substance now holds that name and I celebrate his coming more joyfully then before.
God is with us.
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I can empathize with you and think more people have been in the space than you might expect. There is an opportunity in being there. Prayers can become more sincere and answers more real.
ReplyDeleteTravis,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your description of your experience. I approach these types of peculiar personal religious/existential experiences with the greatest interest. The Dark Night of the Soul, a space with no name, or a seeker's iron maiden (none of which are the same experience) all have the common and undeniable sense of isolation and alone-ness.
The "seeker's iron maiden" is how I describe my own painful struggles wrestling with the issues I had with Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity as someone who was fully invested, vulnerable, and desperate for their resolution to Truth and a proper relationship with the Ultimate (God). More specifically, my experience of all the issues, all my questions, and all the unknowns as spikes pointing at me that, as I tried one possible answer to one, the others would pierce inward with their new counter-implications, complications, and pain of the denial of any hope of Truth.
I find that these experiences are in some sense, though not in any obvious way, a transcendence. When we are in these Spaces (Dark, No Name, or Iron Maiden), again, we feel a palatable sense of isolation and of being utterly alone. It is in this separation from the comforts of our regular constructs that we are freed from them in a way that offers a great opportunity to experience God without such a thick filter as our regular consciousness or day-to-day mind. God being infinite and ultimately incomprehensible to humans, this often is experienced as nothing (thus the title of an interesting book "No One Sees God: the Dark Night of Athiests and Believers"). I believe people in this situation often come to despair, either momentarily or to only some degree, before either they experience something comprehensible from that "Void" - an inexpressible and delicate comfort of a peculiar kind - and/or they are descended a tiny bit back to regular consciousness and relationship to the mundane world, but at first just enough to feel this comfort, and realize it is part of God which before, in the Space, we could not comprehend because of His Ultimacy.
Obviously I am trying to describe something ineffable. I fear I sound a bit New Agey. Mysticism is ok. New Agey would not be accurate of me.
In any case, I feel for you, because I know we are never quite the same again after such experiences. Although the sense of foreignness that we get of our mundane surroundings does fade over time; so does our memory of what it was like to be in that peculiar Space.
I remember my mother telling me once that such kinds of basculations in our reality, and thus identity, happen several times over a life-time. Certainly, I think they should, at least, over a long life.
Also, I find your discovery of orientation by the word "Immanuel" quite appropriate. And I recommend the song "Every Breath" by Gungor - I can't quite say why but it seems appropriate for these times.