How I long to see these words fulfilled in my own life. This calls for patient endurance until the end. As a friar, I have given many things away and given up many opportunities and possibilities. What I have not given away, I have had taken away. I imagine that the community of the faithful that produced the Gospel of John was remembering the mysteries of Jesus Christ from a place of privation, of enduring pain over losses, as well as from a place of plenitude and promise, according to its consciousness of new life, indestructible life, in the risen Christ. Many days recently, I have been dwelling on the privation and the persistence of lifelong losses. This, as opposed to the awareness of plenitude and promise that saturated me from the beginning of the Bolivian journey and even before that, from Christmastide.
Am I not in fact describing the cycle of culture shock, running from delight to despond, from idyll to disillusion? Am I not right on time in my run through this course of experience? Perhaps, but I digress, because I have gone through cycles of euphoria and depression before, all throughout the journey of life, throughout my ongoing, continuing conversion to Christ. The cycles will not end, I suppose, until my life is totally consummated in Christ. When will it be? How long, Lord? How I long for the joy that cannot be taken away. But such security cannot be found on this side of eternity. So, how to cross over—or, how does that impossible reality cross over to here? This calls for faith.
I began this day in a bad mood. It certainly had its proximate cause in the day before, in the mental fatigue and the frustration over the lack of fruitfulness in my language studies. I had nothing, and by the day’s end yesterday I was withholding even the nothing in which I was mired. Don’t ask me to give that away, too, God! So I was cranky this morning for that proximate cause. But the crankiness had its ultimate cause in something beyond those petty things of the day. Señora Kitty saw me in the student lounge at breakfast, and I told her yo estoy de mal humor. She asked me why, but I did not have the words in any language to really name that longing and identify that absence. And if I could describe the ineffable, still, it is a very personal matter, even a private matter. I could not share that with her.
So I began the day with despondency. But goodness overtook me gradually. Two good hours of classes with Profesora Viviana, who was substituting for Profesora Liliana. A game of Scrabble—and vindication, as Profesora Karla, Grace, and I defeated Profesora Sara, Joshua, and Brother Scott soundly. Then, two life-affirming and spirit-renewing conversations over Skype this afternoon with friends back in New York and Massachusetts.
Nothing has changed outwardly, and these things are a bit more trivial than the second coming of Christ. But through these little nothings, I could see something of everything once again. Maybe I am ready to try again to let myself be seen, too, by a God whose love I do not understand.
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