Burning Away Virtues

Suffering uncomfort in a world that denies it.

Life starts. A child is born and goes through life in fits and starts: difficulties, learning, failing, love, sadness, presumptuous joy at the business of growing up, and the trying and curiosity of it all. You set out on the big world, the sun rising over the horizon of possibility and the truth, and it blazes so bright you can hardly look at it. And in the blindness of the light, you feel your way, stumbling at times, running full force at others. This is the way! or was it? And then you fall in love with someone or someplace or some idea you found in a book pulled from a bookstore heaping self-help shelf and Yes! This is the way.

And you grow older, and the technicolor of youth is washed out to a humming flicker until it’s the dim light of the television as you fall asleep to a movie you’ve seen a hundred times but not in one sitting since tenth grade with that friend who always borrowed lunch money and is now a probate lawyer in Palm Springs with two kids and pool.

It’s the entrepreneurship of it all; the refutation of the weak, however shallow and showy; disproving the naysayers; and the underdog’s closed-eyed leap for glory; the very Americanness — the freak. Now, we are a nation of them because if you’re without some gawk-worthy trait or glaring garishness to spite the prudes, then who are you? Why do you matter? What are you doing to stir the pot, to build your tribe as the pinnacle of morals, to set your way of life as the one truth sitting at the right hand of your political leader, protest movement, outrage dysfunction, herd-minded sputtering, fist-slamming fury at the latest problematic toxicity or offense to your earthly freedom, or your hypocritic grievance against your side — because an attack on one is an attack on all in the most personal and targeted way. Just connect the dots in the conspiracy-versus-my-conspiracy and exasperated game of the friend of my enemy’s friend’s enemy is my … enemy?

America is sick with it. We want fit into an earthly scheme of things to create a happy, comfortable, frictionless place — one absent of suffering, of freaks, of imperfections of body and mind. We’ve convinced ourselves that there’s a formula to it; that if it weren’t for certain political viewpoints, certain public leaders, expressions of speech, ideology, misinformation, systemic fill-in-the-blank, we would have our peace, our comfort, our ease. The world should be just as we’d like it to be.

But it isn’t. Often painfully so. But we invest so much time in trying to will it to fit our needs to have order. That everything must fit into neat little boxes tied with tidy little bows and happily ever after The End. And when we come face to face with the uncomfort there must be some reason, or better yet, someone to blame. Because freaks wouldn’t exist but for the people who make them and enable them. We can eradicate suffering by disconnecting ourselves from the deeper meaning of it. We can ask for redemption from each other and temporal grace so we can live in that disconnect. We don’t want to believe suffering has a higher meaning, a mysterious purpose — it must have a scientismic reason. Eliminate the sufferer to eliminate the suffering. In Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, O’Connor writes,

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

There is the same sentiment about making things right. The self-blameless, self-pitying, cruelty to oneself trying, trying, trying. And failing, again. And there is the suffering. It sits at the core of an internal wound — that there must be some answer to solve, not just heal, the suffering. And that is how it started. I hoped the epiphany would come in the form of an answer to “Why me?” and I would finally be able to make order from the disorder and, finally, with finality, make things right.

But, there’s anger and frustration that I cannot make things right. The overwhelming, life-sucking drowning in it. Choking while desperately gasping for life-giving oxygen, but all I can swallow is what the thief hands me: guilt. It creeps in under cover of night while I’m staring sleeplessly in the darkness, still but for the rhythm of the dogs’ soft rustling and baby’s quiet, downy breath. But suddenly it’s everywhere, in the pictures on the walls and my reflection in the mirror, in every broken memory of bad decisions, regrets, and delicate truths I keep hidden under layers of smiles and small talk — deflections of a reality I’m certain would horrify passersby like the mangled remains of fur and guts trailing down the center lane. Oh, he didn’t make it and you avert your eyes fiercely forward until it’s long past the rearview mirror’s unblinking gaze.

Until I was just sick of being sick. I was tired of living well but not being well. I woke up and could get no satisfaction in chasing outrage or feeding it. Fulfillment wouldn’t come at the turn of a thousand cuts, but they would prevent me from understanding my suffering. I searched without consciously searching. Halfway, maybe, to what Walker Percy meant when he wrote in The Moviegoer, “What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Perhaps the other half is where we search.

We try so hard to fight against what we know is the Good, True, and Beautiful, looking for acceptance from each other in a fallen world with no capacity to give it. And we wonder why despite all the virtue signaling to each other our moral superiority (based on superficial beliefs and traits), despite all the carefully curated outrage and painstaking image crafting, we still suffer from despair and malaise at this stylized “grace” that gives us meaningless pleasure.

Maybe it’s the same way we can look upon our neighbors and see only irredeemable characters in a story we would like to think is perfect because we refuse to see the evil lurking around us. The deviant who has convinced us there was no fall, that we are blameless beings and every strife and uncomfort and paper cut is someone else’s fault. There is safety in our superficial pain. We are “saved” from risking an insular life, however thoughtless and shallow to take a leap into a depth of pain we aren’t certain we can endure — even if the promise of paradise waits for us on the other side. No, it’s much simpler to point at the ignorance and cruelty of someone else than to accept each of us carries each other’s sins. We can stand that little bit of pain if it means we don’t have to wade neck-deep on our own, afraid of what we might drudge up, or worse, afraid there is nothing there at all — or we will be changed into someone we don’t recognize or no longer fit into the life to which we’ve grown accustomed. “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Flannery O’Connor writes. In her story A Good Man is Hard to Find, she writes, [spoiler alert!]

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”  She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

So, I read Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain; and look at America through Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese and watch John Ford’s cowboys silhouetted between the rough western outposts and their virtue; eke out an understanding of Milton Glazer and Edward Hopper and listen incessantly to Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, and Woody Guthrie (and even Arlo!) and Mississippi John Hurt. All these oversized, disjointed pieces I try to stuff in a tiny box I keep to fill up the soul-shaped hole in my heart. But they aren’t meant to be kept in a box. They aren’t meant to be my ears or my eyes. They are simply the guideposts along a journey; they are pieces — but pieces that fit together as if they are held together by their own force of will onto a stained-glass window.

And suddenly, their purpose, not the answer to my purpose, is apparent: the light bursts forth through that window, prismatically illuminating the world not as I want to see it, but truly as it is. It is a light so powerful, as O’Connor writes, that “even their virtues are being burned away” and the epiphany of grace remains; it is the only way to make sense of the suffering and cruelty and the everyday malaise. It wasn’t that I wasn’t worthy of the answer I sought, or that I was created solely to live a life of joyless suffering, or that I was too small, too grotesque, too ugly, and cruel to be offered it. No, it was my blind refusal to see that the offer was there all along that kept me in despair.  My suffering was the embodiment of love; it is to know that I matter enough to be offered the most precious gift in this world and beyond it. A truly cruel, uncaring, and absurd life would eliminate the purpose of suffering. So, why should I not suffer if this search has a purpose I’m called to pursue, even if I never arrive at the answer?

When I was put away for a while, I lived with a girl who ritually cut herself. She always wore long-sleeved shirts to hide the slim, careful, even scars on her arms, built on top of each other from rounds of shallow slices in the flesh of her arms. I asked her about it one day, sitting outside the house alone, smoking, her long dark brown hair tangled in the late winter wind that hid her face but for the cigarette she casually raised to her lips before she answered, “To take away the pain.”

I didn’t understand it for a while. But she had gotten mixed up in drinking too much and drugs and excesses that didn’t exist well with a strict upbringing. Her only tie to life was her Catholic faith so she didn’t abort the baby conceived in rape but gave it up to a couple in another state. She loved that baby but could never know it. Suddenly, her sadness and suffering were clearer than any bodily scar.

We can waste a lifetime mercilessly drilling down on our imperfections, blaming others or some system for our dissatisfaction and feelings of failure, or try to assuage our driftless heart through swearing allegiance to ideology, politics, or class and justifying our moral failings or self-ascribed moral superiority to those same things. The grace we give to each other and ourselves is painless — it says more about who we think is worthy than who actually is, so it is meaningless. If we want to fill ourselves up with meaning and a lasting, satisfying purpose, we have to endure the pain and shock of grace. It was there all along. Returning to A Good Man is Hard to Find, the Misfit at last exclaims, “She would've been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” That’s the epiphany, but I hold the gun.

The question was never why me. The question was always why not me?