Glass melts

Recently read out of Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck:

"I never had any trouble understanding why Virginia Woolf killed herself. I'd read biographies describing how the writer was molested by a cousin during childhood and developed a classic case of posttraumatic stress disorder, which seems to have left her half sentient, never fully engaged with the events around her. She could see beauty but not feel connected to it, yearn for love but not participate in it. She experienced things flattened, diminished, once removed. She was anesthetized to physical suffering (she seems to have drowned herself without flinching) but also to happiness. Psychologists call it psychic numbing or in Virginia Wolfe's words "living behind a pane of glass"."

This passage strikes me not because I have ever been a victim of molestation (or rape or any other haneous crime) but because through circumstances - some controlable and others not - I, too, feel like I've lived behind a pane of glass.

I'm sure it started with thyroid disorders, and then was catapulted by my dad's death. Add a dose of post partum depression, a church falling apart, feeling lied to, and feeling like a single mom through it all and my reaction was to move behind the pane of glass where I wouldn't have to fully engage with the events that surrounded me. (I don't think I consiously chose this, but felt so hurt, so empty and dark that it seemed safer then life out in the open.) (And it was...for a while.)

What amazes me is that, even there, behind the "safety" of this barricade, God found a way to get in! I don't know how and I don't know when, for the darkness and numbness seemed to last for so long. At times I felt as though I was going crazy or losing my faith - a swirling madness of a carnival ride where lights flash on periodically only to reveal the next gut wrenching turn or dip.

But, then, one morning I awoke and was able to breathe. (I mean really breathe - for the first time in a long time.) It was as though my lungs got their first gulp of fresh coastal air after years of breathing the suffocating air of smokey, dark rooms. I see colors so much more intensely, intricacies of patterns in nature so delicate and beautiful. The idea that as humans we get to touch one another and thus deliver love through our fingertips or lips or arms has begun to be a stunning thought. The ability to feel textures and to smell is amazing. But the most incredible thing of all is that I want (I really want) to laugh and smile (and think that there are things to laugh and smile about).

See, I agree with Martha Beck's assessment - "I am endlessly grateful for the fact that I was lucky enough to learn something Virginia Woplf never realized: glass can melt." It makes me think of the phrase, "Our God is a consuming fire" and how I've always seen that as terrible or punishing. Perhaps I will see it that way again, but for right now it gives me great comfort that He is able to burn away any barrier I erect in the name of "safety".