Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run

I’m tired of being cryptic. The past forty-eight hours have been amazing. A little hedging remains necessary, but the bulk of what’s going on I can freely tell.

I. Sufjan is the Glue

I haven’t been myself for a couple of months. The change happened so gradually I pretended not to notice, but the past few weeks have seen me mired down in another round of depression, and, having read somewhere to use that as a marker for a wrongness in life circumstances, I began to sort and sift reasons, restlessly, subconsciously. I still felt like shit, but underneath my consciousness of my misery – and my disgust at being here yet again, come ON already – things were processing.

The shoot of green bursting from the bulb happened on Wednesday. For many, many months I haven’t felt like listening to Sufjan; my moods and tastes tended much more toward Conor and Josh Ritter. But Wednesday I popped Ray LaMontagne’s Till the Sun Turns Black into my computer at work, and started listening. I found myself almost immobile with this existential anguish, and laughed a little at myself: Ray’s is a GREAT album for wallowing, so no wonder I felt horrible. Tired of it, I turned to blind instinct and replaced Ray with Sufjan’s Illinoise.

I should have known. Leigh Ann and I always say that Sufjan is the glue. Part of the healing in listening to him is the brilliance of the music – Illinoise in particular engages in polyphonic melodies so carefully constructed that they sound wild, a great clash of different sound energies colliding head-on like high speed trains or jets of superpowered water and then surging skyward as a huge and magnificent One. It’s complex, intricate, dazzling brain music. Parts of my mind that I had gradually shut down since the start of the New Year couldn’t help but open back up, stretch, and breathe.

The rest of the healing comes from Sufjan’s great, throbbing faith that underwrites and permeates every aspect of sound and word. It wrapped itself around my mind. It restored my soul.

So by the time the album had played through I felt volumes better, reanchored in myself.

And that was the beginning.

II. Remember Who You Are

Remember that command, intoned so magnificently by Mufasa in The Lion King? (I don’t care who laughs. I love that movie. I had it entirely memorized from opening to closing credits in seventh grade.) Every once in awhile, when I find myself hiding bits of me from the rest of the world, that command reverberates in my skull.

After the restorative session with Illinoise, I changed out of my office clothes into jeans and cutely layered T-shirts and headed to work at the bookstore. Nothing bothered me that night – I cheerfully cleaned up the whole store and assisted difficult customers with an unruffled professionalism that had them thanking me.

And then a young man approached me and apologetically asked for help finding a book on St. Paul. In the process of locating it, I joked around with him and discovered that he’s a fan of C. S. Lewis. Immediately I seized on that and asked if he’d ever read Till We Have Faces. He had not. I expounded upon its virtues, gesticulating in excitement, and sketched a few details of my undergrad thesis in which I examined that book. He picked up on “psycholinguistics” and brought up Derrida. I almost jumped up and down.

“I LOVE Derrida!” I said.

His whole face opened wide. “You know who he is?”

“Are you kidding? I cried when he died!”

So we swapped favorite points of Derrida’s theories. He declared me one of the five coolest girls he’s ever met in his life and said we should get together sometime to talk literature and theology. I scribbled down my number and handed it to him, and he walked off to purchase the book he came in for, with Till We Have Faces balanced on top.

For the rest of the night I walked around on a brain high. I didn’t, and don’t, particularly care whether he calls me or not; the point of the whole experience was the experience itself. I connected with someone on a supernerd level, and I have missed that terribly these past few months. That missingness has contributed to the bogdown as well.

So, oddly, that conversation changed everything. Things that looked murky now look crystalline. None of my circumstances changed; I changed. I underwent a sudden re-vision, my eyes can see, I know what I want and who I am, and now I can change my circumstances. Maybe I don’t know precisely where I’ll wind up, but I do know where I’m going – I’ve been taken by the shoulders and turned in the direction I should go, and I don’t know what’s coming to me in the future, it’s all a huge question mark, but for the first time in years that brings, not dread or feelings of being trapped or hopeless or directionless or confused, but a thrill of unimagined miracles infusing what I always thought was ordinary.

And above it all, the words ring:

I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.

Like the faith of Abraham lauded in Fear and Trembling, the certain knowledge that promises will come to their fruition in my lifetime fills me with joy. Someday these most cherished dreams of mine will come to pass, and the ones for which I am responsible I can begin to attend, knowing that these will bring me the fulfillment I’ve been looking for, and at an acceptable time the rest will come, too. And in that work to be done, in that resurgence of faith and hope, in the strength of renewed purpose rooted in divine love, I am free to shake off everything that holds me back, and look far into the distance, and run to meet what's coming.