My complicated past is an anthology,
a long line painted on the plains.
I feel like literary history
about to startle the professors.
But it’s not true.
Days ahead, snow heaps up
in the mountains
like undelivered mail.
After driving all night
I guess what it’s like
to fly over them.
For the first time you see
how close things are together,
how the foothills push up
just past where you quit
driving. Urgencies
sputter in the exaltation
of chill air.
Your heart
begins to fall like snow
inside a paperweight.
Oh when in your long damn life,
I ask myself, when will
you seek not a truce,
but peace?
There is a chase where a falcon dives into the forest and doesn’t come back up. Every moment, the sunlight is totally empty and totally full. – Rumi (of course!)
Darkness is a good and necessary teacher. It is not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. First, like Ezekiel the prophet, we must eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing, and moaning” in our belly, and only eventually becomes sweet as honey (see Ezekiel 2:9-10; 3:1-3).
By the time most people reach middle age, they’ve had days where life has lost its meaning, they no longer connect with an inner sense of motivation or joy. Sometimes this manifests as clinical depression and requires a therapist’s skilled care and medication. But even if we don’t experience depression, most of us go through a period of darkness, doubt, and malaise at some point in our lives.
There’s a darkness that we are led into by our own stupidity, sin (the illusion of separation), and selfishness (living out of the false self). We have to work our way out of this kind of darkness by brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated. We resist going through the darkness and facing our shadow, so we usually need help, as the Twelve Steps wisely identify. An accountability partner, spiritual director, or counselor can help us navigate this difficult, ego-humiliating process.
There’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning, motivation, purpose, and direction might feel even greater here. The saints and mystics called it “the dark night of the soul.” But even while we feel alone and that God has abandoned us, we sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we are in “liminal space,” betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun and filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort. But it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
The darkness that we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in different forms and ways than we’ve become accustomed. Even if we don’t feel like praying, staying committed to contemplative practice is particularly important.
Sometimes it may be tempting to remain in the darkness—it becomes familiar and we rebel against the light; the paralysis and self-pity has a strange attraction. We may feel an inner restlessness, as if we’re aimlessly pacing back and forth on the same path. Allowing periods of this seemingly fruitless darkness may be part of deconstructing our false self so that we can rebuild on the foundation of our True Self. We must lose our old image of God and our old ways of experiencing God’s presence to discover the absolute reality beneath all of our egoic fantasies and fears.
The Voice of God is heard in Paradise:
“What was vile has become precious. What is now precious was never vile. I have always known the vile as precious: for what is vile I know not at all.
“What was cruel has become merciful. What is now merciful was never cruel. I have always overshadowed Jonas with my mercy, and cruelty I know not at all. Have you had sight of Me, Jonas, my child? Mercy within mercy within mercy. I have forgiven the universe without end, because I have never known sin.
“What was poor has become infinite. What is infinite was never poor. I have always known poverty as infinite: riches I love not at all. Prisons within prisons within prisons. Do not lay up for yourself ecstasies upon earth, where time and space corrupt, where minutes break in and steal. No more lay hold on time, Jonas, my son, lest the rivers bear you away.
“What was fragile has become powerful. I loved what was most frail. I looked upon what was nothing. I touched what was without substance, and within what was not, I am.”
There are drops of dew that show like sapphires in the grass as soon as the morning sun appears, and leaves stir behind the hushed flight of an escaping dove.
A few months ago, I flew from New York to Wisconsin to say I’m sorry to my ex-wife. We had been together for 14 years when she was told she had breast cancer in 2006. I was beside her through her surgery and chemo appointments, but I was terrified. At the end of her chemo, when she was still very sick, I ran. I began a torrid affair with my therapist, whom I eventually married.
My ex-wife healed from the cancer, and went on to marry again and have two children, but my violation was a big one. I’d said I was sorry before, but the words didn’t reach the bottom of an experience as deep as abandonment.
If words aren’t enough, what’s left? In a recent phone conversation, she told me that she never really had the chance to sit me down and tell me how the pain I caused her felt. A key part of apology, perhaps, is really listening to the victim’s experience, taking that in deeply. So I booked a ticket to Wisconsin. The plan was to listen and then, together, try to create a process of repair. We had no idea what this might look like.
The Jewish process of apology, teshuvah,requires that the one seeking forgiveness first undergo a personal inventory, or reckoning. In Hebrew, “teshuvah” means “return.” I thought that it might give us a kind of frame for our process together.
What I found was that there wasn’t much time. My ex seemed happy to see me, but her 2-year-old had to go down for a nap. Her 4-year-old wanted to play with magnet tiles. Then it was time for the library and swim lessons and to put the shoes on, take the shoes off, put the shoes on again — oops, we left Lammy at the library — and hurry up and find a snack. It wasn’t until two days into the trip that we really sat down and talked. This, though, was part of the healing. While I had envisioned a major summit meeting, what came through was life — her full and happy life, and she was letting me be a part of it. Returning.
“Thank you,” I said, “for letting me come here.”
I explained that my purpose was to create a space for her to say whatever she needed to say to me so that I could hear her and apologize without defense or excuse. I offered this not because it was dictated by teshuvah or any of the other apology styles and rituals I had read about in preparation, but rather because, in my own experiences of being aggrieved, it’s what I most wanted.
I wanted it from the therapist, who had ended things in a violent way; I wanted it from my parents, and from others who had wronged me and never said sorry. Maybe, I thought, this was a universal longing — to be listened to, rather than apologized at.
She was generous, saying it meant a lot to her that I had come. I was expecting anger, but what she felt, she said, was a deep sadness. She, too, had known that our relationship, in those 14 years, had long been too smothering. But she was sad, almost unthinkably sad, that I left her in the way that I did.
Causing someone sadness is different from causing pain or fear. It’s duller, deeper, and it lasts longer. I sat with those words and felt tremendous remorse. I remembered a photo I had seen of her sitting by a window, some months after I had left her. She was still mostly bald from the chemo, and she stared hard into the camera, her mouth tugged back into a kind of grimace, as if she were swallowing the world. I did that to her, I knew, and more.
The instinct, of course, is to fill the space with language, but I wanted to take the time to bear the full weight of her telling.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally said, “for causing you such great sadness.”
We talked about ways to make amends; I had thought of everything from helping out with her kids to volunteering in cancer wards. But no, she said, the amends were here, in this process.
We talked then about teshuvah, my reckoning for why I had done what I did. The truth is, my ex and I had, in effect, grown up together, having started dating when I was 20. In a way, she had parented me. I had grown up with a very sick mother; she gave me the chance to feel loved and protected. But when that love was threatened by her illness, I could only think of rescue, much as I had when I was a child. My therapist offered that to me, and was the one person who, seemingly, would never get sick on me, never die. When I finally left the therapist, I learned what I should have known all along: that I was an adult, capable of standing on my own two feet and responsible for my own decisions.
“I forgive you,” she said.
My apology process was a lucky one. Not everyone is so magnanimous. But I wondered if our journey could serve as a model.
Our culture is good at promises — our leaders take oaths, we say “I do” — and we’re good at applying punishments when those promises are broken. But where is the space for real remorse and introspection?
We live in a Christian nation (resist all you want, but three-quarters of us identify as Christian) and I wonder whether that foists a redemption frame on our apologies. We look to be absolved, forgiven, immediately, the way we look to God. But people are not gods, and I wonder, in this era of facile press-release apologies, whether we need to slow things down.
Of course, apologizing for committing a crime is different from apologizing for breaking someone’s heart. But there is some crossover. Perhaps, for example, perpetrators could engage in a more sophisticated manner with the public rather than always slinking off to their private lives to, supposedly, think about their actions. With the #MeToo movement, we’ve rightly made private transgressions and abuses public, in all their painful detail. But after those revelations, we need more than one quick “sorry.” Imagine a dialogue where we witness real reflection and change.
Because the truth is, an apology is rarely a private exchange between two people: When you harm one person, you harm many. When I abandoned my wife, I also abandoned my community of friends, who were furious with me. I hurt others, who heard her story and were scared that their lovers could also leave them in a time of need.
Could this ripple effect work the other direction, too? An intimate relationship can scatter scars. I hope that an intimate apology, made public, can heal them.
Cris Beam is the author of “I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy.”
O Lord, who else or what else can I desire but you? You are my Lord, Lord of my heart, mind, and soul. You know me through and through. In and through you everything that is finds its origin and goal. You embrace all that exists and care for it with divine love and compassion. Why, then, do I keep expecting happiness and satisfaction outside of you? Why do I keep relating to you as one of my many relationships, instead of my only relationship, in which all other ones are grounded? Why do I keep looking for popularity, respect from others, success, acclaim, and sensual pleasures? Why, Lord, is it so hard for me to make you the only one? Why do I keep hesitating to surrender myself totally to you? Help me, O Lord, to let my old self die, to let me die to the thousand big and small ways in which I am still building up my false self and trying to cling to my false desires. Let me be reborn in you and see through you the world in the right way, so that all my actions, words, and thoughts can become a hymn of praise to you. I need your loving grace to travel on this hard road that leads to the death of my old self to a new life in and for you. I know and trust that this is the road to freedom. Lord, dispel my mistrust and help me become a trusting friend. Amen.
