The Only Way Through is Through
Make a v-shape with your hand. Go ahead, no one is watching.
Use your thumb for one point of the “v,” your pointer finger for the other. Now take that “v” and put it to your forehead, points touching your temples.
Now lean forward. Close your eyes.
This is the posture of exhaustion.
Frustration.
Saddness.
Desperation.
Does it feel familiar? Perhaps not long ago you made the “v” without any instructions. It simply felt like the right thing to do. You assumed the position that all of us who are “going through” understand quite well. It is a posture of closing our eyes to what is right in front of us - something that is causing us pain, to brightly brutal to look at head on.
If we stay in the “v,” we think, perhaps it will simply go away. Close your eyes and the challenge disappears.
But life, faith, and growth in general do not operate by those expectations. Instead…
The only way through is through.
In the past 3 years, we all have experienced a reckoning. We have reckoned with our own limitations, reckoned with a present tense situation that we desperately wanted to avoid but found no possible way around it. Our sense of safety, protection, and sustenance took a direct hit and we had no choice but to call the resulting wound what it was:
Fear. Cynicism. Discomfort.
The saying attributed to Plato remarks, “Be kind for everyone is fighting a harder battle.” We are all confronting our false selves these days - the “us” that we showed the world but now we can’t keep up the holy charade. We are all fighting harder battles than perhaps we ever have.
Ultimately we’d like to make the “v,” close our eyes, and wake up mature and beyond the feelings of despair right in front of us. But…
The only way through is through.
As much as we may hate to admit it, the human (and therefore spiritual) journey is one that moves through dark places on a routine basis.
King David of Israel says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23).
Jesus, the wounded embodiment of the Divine says, “If it is possible let this cup (death) pass from me. Yet not my will but your will be done.” (paraphrase)
What the wisdom of ancient Scriptures, later sages and saints, as well as present day storytelling remind us is that great suffering is often the midwife of great goodness. A keyhole in our life that only a rough-edged key can fit.
The map Jesus reveals with his life is one of becoming fully human and it begins with crucifixion. The story of life necessarily begins with the story of death. Why? Because…
The only way through is through.
But no one wants crucifixion. Even Jesus, honestly.
We all wants spiritual transformation with no struggle, even though we know all change is pain in one way or another. Or, in the words of the great Southern spiritual songs, “Everybody wants to go to heaven / but nobody wants to die.”
I am not saying we need to be okay with or even excited to suffer or struggle. Far from it. In fact, the way through necessitates that we call a thing by its name - no matter how profane or doubtful that name might be.
When we move through betrayal at the hand of a friend or loved one, we need to call it by its name. Then and only then can we learn what we believe about loyalty and practice being loyal to others.
As we shake off the droplets of a faith that used to soothe us, we move through detachment to attachment and find a life-giving Divine who never left us but simply changed names, clothes, and perhaps even appearance along the way.
As the limitations of illness and aging take us down paths we’d rather not walk, we are given a chance to pare down our lives and find the simple things that give us (and others) more life than we could imagine.
Yet all of this wisdom, all of this grace, all of the goodness of maturity and transformation only come via one path. The one we desire least, the one we can’t avoid, and the one that stares angrily into the face of our comfort-mindset.
Then it winks at us, and says what we already know to be true no matter how much we hate it. On the path of growing towards the image of the Divine that is already warming within us:
The only way through is through.
Photo by Victoria Strukovskaya on Unsplash