Pressing on
Life has a promise and a goal, in the struggle. As my teacher Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz said, “La vida es la lucha.”
Sometimes pressing on is easier said than done. I think of Suleika Jaouad’s courageous uneven struggle with cancer. On Saturday she opened her powerful new art exhibit, Alchemy of Blood in Frenchtown. I went with two old friends, Fausto and Ileana. It was stunning. https://artyard.org/exhibitions/suleika-jaouad-and-anne-francey-the-alchemy-of-blood/
I think of my friend David Moriah who is presently battling for his life. He concluded a recent Caring Bridge entry: “The personal Pearl Harbor I experienced this week has me ruminating on this inspiring story 80 years past as I seek the strength and determination to fight for my life and my future on this planet.
Down but not defeated.
Finding the strength to rise again.
Please don’t wish me good luck. I don’t believe in luck or knocking on wood or having an impersonal universe send me good vibes.
I only believe in two things - hard work and God’s grace.
Okay, let’s roll!” David | Journal
I am thankful for David’s courage and feisty love to press on with perseverance through pain to release. He is an exemplar, a personal hero. I agree that God’s grace and hard work are essential. I am thankful for the grace of forgiveness and perseverance, gratitude and courage through this challenging journey of life. I will need God’s grace in the weeks ahead as I struggle with my own recent health challenges.
Antoine de Saint Expupery, who became known for The Little Prince, also wrote of flying mails over the Andes. In Wind, Sand and Stars he tells of a friend, Guillamet, who returned on foot, after crashing in the mountain snows.
“You were dreadful to see, and you were in misery, for you had lost the beautiful tools of your work: your hands were numb and useless, and when you sat up on the edge of your bed to draw a free breath, your frozen feet hung down like two dead weights. You had not even finished your long walk back, you were still panting; and when you turned and stirred on the pillow in search of peace, a procession of images that you could not escape, a procession waiting impatiently in the wings, moved instantly into action under your skull. Across the stage of your skull it moved, and for the twentieth time you fought once more the battle against these enemies that rose up out of their ashes.
I filled you with herb-teas.
“Drink, old fellow.”
“You know . . . what amazed me . . .”
Boxer victorious, but punch-drunk and scarred with blows, you were re-living your strange adventure. You could divest yourself of it only in scraps. And as you told your dark tale, I could see you trudging without ice-axe, without ropes, without provisions, scaling cols fifteen thousand feet in the air, crawling on the faces of vertical walls, your hands and feet and knees bleeding in a temperature twenty degrees below zero.
Voided bit by bit of your blood, your strength, your reason, you went forward with the obstinacy of an ant, retracing your steps to go round an obstacle, picking yourself up after each fall to earth, climbing slopes that led to abysses, ceaselessly in motion and never asleep, for had you slept, from that bed of snow you would never have risen. When your foot slipped and you went down, you were up again in an instant, else had you been turned into stone. The cold was petrifying you by the minute, and the price you paid for taking a moment too much of rest, when you fell, was the agony of revivifying dead muscles in your struggle to rise to your feet.
You resisted temptation. “Amid snow,” you told me, “a man loses his instinct of self-preservation. After two or three or four days of tramping, all you think about is sleep. I would long for it; but then I would say to myself, ‘If my wife still believes I am alive, she must believe that I am on my feet. The boys all think I am on my feet. They have faith in me. And I am a skunk if I don’t go on.’”
So you tramped on; and each day you cut out a bit more of the opening of your shoes so that your swelling and freezing feet might have room in them. You confided to me this strange thing:
As early as the second day, you know, the hardest job I had was to force myself not to think. The pain was too much, and I was really up against it too hard. I had to forget that, or I shouldn’t have had the heart to go on walking. But I didn’t seem able to control my mind. It kept working like a turbine. Still, I could more or less choose what I was to think about. I tried to stick to some film I’d seen, or book I’d read. But the film and the book would go through my mind like lightning. And I’d be back where I was, in the snow. It never failed. So I would think about other things. . . .”
There was one time, however, when, having slipped, and finding yourself stretched flat on your face in the snow, you threw in your hand. You were like a boxer emptied of all passion by a single blow, lying and listening to the seconds drop one by one into a distant universe, until the tenth second fell and there was no appeal.
“I’ve done my best and I can’t make it. Why go on?” All that you had to do in the world to find peace was to shut your eyes. So little was needed to blot out that world of crags and ice and snow. Let drop those miraculous eyelids and there was an end of blows, of stumbling falls, of torn muscles and burning ice, of that burden of life you were dragging along like a worn-out ox, a weight heavier than any wain or cart.
Already you were beginning to taste the relief of this snow that had now become an insidious poison, this morphia that was filling you with beatitude. Life crept out of your extremities and fled to collect round your heart while something gentle and precious snuggled in close at the centre of your being. Little by little your consciousness deserted the distant regions of your body, and your body, that beast now gorged with suffering, lay ready to participate in the indifference of marble.
Your very scruples subsided. Our cries ceased to reach you, or, more accurately, changed for you into dream-cries. You were happy now, able to respond by long confident dream-strides that carried you effortlessly towards the enchantment of the plains below. How smoothly you glided into this suddenly merciful world! Guillaumet, you miser! You had made up your mind to deny us your return, to take your pleasures selfishly without us among your white angels in the snows. And then remorse floated up from the depths of your consciousness. The dream was spoilt by the irruption of bothersome details. “I thought of my wife. She would be penniless if she couldn’t collect the insurance. Yes, but the company . . .”
When a man vanishes, his legal death is postponed for four years. This awful detail was enough to blot out the other visions. You were lying face downward on a bed of snow that covered a steep mountain slope. With the coming of summer your body would be washed with this slush down into one of the thousand crevasses of the Andes. You knew that. But you also knew that some fifty yards away a rock was jutting up out of the snow. “I thought, if I get up I may be able to reach it. And if I can prop myself up against the rock, they’ll find me there next summer.”
Once you were on your feet again, you tramped two nights and three days.”
When Guillamet climbed back on his feet, ready to die, yet he knew the way he was on and where he was going: and he was taken, unexpectedly, by his love and courage, even to a new life. Let his story be a parable for us all.
Coleman Brown wrote:
“There is a promise, and there is a goal. The Psalmist remembers the promise: We will not fear though the earth should change. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge…
The promise is that we are not alone. When we fall, we will rise again. When we fail, we will find a friend. Our sufferings are not pointless: they are the beginning of a new life in bonds of unity and peace.
The goal is to know One whom we will trust and accompany and know better than even now we know our own hearts. This One calls us and will call us into tasks and friendships, suffering and joy, which will deliver us from bondage to ourselves.
To gain Christ—what is it? It is to become new, to become real, to be cleansed of malice and accusation and anxiety. It is to love God freely from our heart and to love our neighbor—as ourselves (and so to love oneself and one’s neighbor).
Other things we must decide and determine along the way: we are in a real adventure. We shall make mistakes and see strange things, suffer—know uncertainty, and some of us, terror at times. We shall cry out.
Listen and look for those sent to bear us up and to bear with. Cry out, and listen and look. We will not be alone. God will send ordinary folk like ourselves to sustain us along the way of our uneven journey.
To gain, Christ? It is to get the clutter out of the way, to drop whatever is necessary in order to press on. It is to become whole hearted, to get myself out of God’s way, (not in self- rejection, we are always profoundly in God’s way when we are rejecting ourselves) to begin to see what really lasts and counts, even to begin to reckon what may be eternal.
The goal will not be completely fulfilled until the end. It takes our life, the entirety of our life to fulfill the goal. Will we begin to sense how that transforms our living and our dying?
Through the cold and rain— may we press on. What we seek is not behind us. God has something in store for us, the fullness of which we cannot receive until we finish the race.
The promise: we are to become intimately acquainted along the way, and at the end of the way, with the One who loves us and suffers for us and dies for us and who is come to new life. We are to become acquainted with this One— and become like this One.
For this new life we were created. For this new life we are being set free. For this new life we are destined... Do not lie down or forget where and unto whom we go.
Press on. There are friends and kinfolk cheering for us, some of them, as they say, from the balconies in heaven.
Press on. God’s love bends low and near and God’s presence is by our souls.
Press on. The road may rise very steeply for some of us, and the weather become ominous. But we shall reach the top and see the shining city of our God. We shall find streams of living water, even along the way. Who can faint while such a river ever flows to quench our thirst?
Press on. The journey has a goal: to where we are no longer ever again isolated and cut off…
You and I are on the road, sometimes it is a beautiful road. Sometimes it is terrible. We are on a journey, an uneven journey, a real adventure – but one that has a destination:
“That I may know Christ in the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that, if possible, I may obtain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this, or have it all together; but I press on to make it my own, because God has made me his own. Friends… one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3)