Stored in my heart is a collection of moments from my life. On occasion, usually late at night, I bring these forth for review in a kind of litany. This inventory of personal events is not particularly original. They are of the garden-variety of human experience – births, deaths, successes, failures, loneliness-es, happiness-es – my life is not so unique. But when I consider what has shaped my very ordinary life, I feel a sense of wonder. It is not that I have a particular experience and learn a particular lesson, it’s that I discover my life disguises a larger reality which I am invited to encounter. I am invited not just to wake up to the reality of life but to live into that reality, or as Jesus exhorts, to stay awake.
However, reality is hard to face. Staying awake can be painful. Learning to see (to listen, to pay attention) is a process, not a one-time event. Pascal famously wrote that “[a]ll humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I don’t know anything about the ability or inability of men as a whole, but I do know my own struggle to stay present within my life. Many of the most challenging circumstances of my life have been what I term ‘locked-room’ situations, where I’ve had no choice but to confront whatever is before me because there is no where else to go, literally and figuratively. All the doctors have been consulted; all the books read. Sitting quietly alone in my locked room, my heart comes to see beyond the specific diagnosis, the specific personality, the specific regret. Underlying it all is this: I do not love my neighbour as myself, I do not love myself, I do not love God with my whole heart and mind and soul. I gaze into the human condition.
In my imagination, the room where I sit quietly alone is the space painted by Edward Hopper in 1963, “Sun in an Empty Room.” The room is empty of objects but suffused with light. As I empty my heart of the things I identify as my life, my heart is filled with light. I think maybe this is God. As I pour out the litany of my life to God, my life is illuminated by love. Love enfolds my limitations. Morning light is endlessly entering into this room, this world, if only I keep my eyes open to see it.
