Every Which Way

Even in laughter the heart may ache, and joy may end in grief. Proverbs 14:13

So, I have this old magnet on my fridge. The background is full of a bunch of pictures of the common emotional states a person can experience: ANGRY, EXHAUSTED, FRUSTRATED, JEALOUS, SAD, LONELY, HOPEFUL, HAPPY, LOVESTRUCK, etc. On top of that is a small magnetic frame with the words "Today I feel…" on it. The purpose is to discern your true emotional state for the day by selecting it with the box.

Before I was a Christian, the frame sat on "LONELY" for a long time. One day around six months after I started going to church, I woke up, got some OJ from the fridge and found myself almost subconsciously repositioning the frame on "HOPEFUL". Then I stopped and came back to look at it again. I realized how big that tiny movement was. It was the first tangible evidence of positive change in my life. And I think it was perhaps the exact moment I started re-entertaining the idea that God was real.

The other day I heard a pastor say that emotions are "cakalacka crazy". What a sound bite. When experiencing loneliness or hopefulness or any state in between, these overwhelming feelings can alter our perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and actions. And individual emotions are hard enough to deal with, but I feel like lately I've been struggling with a slew of them. Some sort of emotional jambalaya.

I didn't realize my multiple personalities until the other night when our youth pastor showed the kids a series of pictures of people portraying various emotions. He asked them to pray about the one they most closely identified with. It was then I realized that each seemed somewhat familiar to me as of late. I felt some dissonance in that. How could I simultaneously feel happy and sad, frustrated and free, tired and refreshed? But after reading The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, it clicked.

St. John says our soul is made up of two parts: the spirit - which reaches upward to adore God, and the sense - which reaches down to wallow in fleshly pleasure. And like the others before me, I realized that my soul, too, is divided:

While my spirit is joyfully clamoring towards God in love, singing confident praise like the Psalmist – “Lord, You are good and all You do is good!”; my senses side - my flesh, my ego, my self – while still surrounded in worldly expectation, begins to realize in the midst of God's presence, "I am not God, I am not in control, I might not get my way and I hate not getting my way!" And so the sense must now face what St. John calls a slow annihilation. And this painful tug-of-war between spirit and sense can leave me at times emotionally mixed up and internally black and blue.

Jesus says in the gospels that we must lose our life to save it, that we must die to self to live. And now this paradoxical riddle is beginning to make sense to me as I flounder about in what St. John calls a “wondrous wound of love”: this strange state of blissful brokeness, of crushing despair mingling with glorious joy, completely disoriented and not sure which way is up.

Teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. Psalm 86:11