To Forget the Past and Remember the Future

Blue waters dark as fallen angels, cold as the bones of the unburied dead, and vast as the depths of the soul stared at me with answers to questions I did not know how to ask. Fear of swimming into that unknown ocean paralyzes me, drowning the gifts of grace. I am overwhelmed with the obscurity of reality.

Where my perceptions, emotions, and thoughts on life were suppressed. No. Worse. They were altered for survival. At any given moment, the rules could be replaced so that what was once good had become evil. In that hour, I moved from being loved to being hated to being an outcast sent to the wasteland of shame in isolation as I stand amongst a crowd on the pier. A captivity held within the recesses of the mind that cannot be broken but will shatter the spirit.

I saw a way to escape, a crack in the boundary, a light, and I moved beyond it to enter that Holiness, but the rules changed as the earth rotates. A list of sins is brought before me again, with the new infractions added. They are never forgiven or washed clean in the rivers of baptism, but used as weapons whose ammunition never ran dry over a cup of black coffee. A way to kill the spirit for good. To kill the soul so that any life which remains can be molded into their image.

Still, I fight the oppressive heat of hell, the sun overhead, with an air so thick it impedes all movement. I can never move to better myself. I am constantly pulled down into their grips, as if death held more life than one I am trying to live.

How can the mind be so weak, fragile, and culpable to the coldness of evil that the warmth of the moon comforts the soul? Finding a way out of the depths demands a change of mind, to no longer feed the disease, the demon, the evil.

Let it rot into the hell from which it came. Let it die into the darkness from which there is no light. Let it vanish into the nothingness from which it does not exist. My mind and soul can no longer slip into that abyss from which it drags me. There is life above, life to explore, life to love. Yet, the darkness remains, tainting the pureness of the light.

I struggle in the in-between. Can I shed the armor required to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, surrendering to that warmth of light radiating truth? As Dostoevsky asks, “is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?” I asked the question of Dostoevsky to myself, of the void, of the torment, of the despair.

In the abyss of misery God spoke to me. It was not words I heard but His graces upon my soul. For He communicates with the soul for many reasons, particularly when we are about to receive a heavy cross—a cross that caused a simple cry to Him, and He let forth the dam of baptismal rivers to the wounded heart.

He entered the deepest recesses of my soul with a whisper of a gentle breeze across a golden meadow of angels, with a cipher that I only understood—intuitions too strong to be misunderstood. In an instant, my mind learned so many things at once. I would care for His affairs as if they were my own, and He would care for mine. I understood that His judgement was much different from this world.

These sublime truths that have impressed my soul so much that it needed no other master, Wisdom Herself, enlightened me from ignorance. In receiving these favors, I knew I was obliged to serve as I received more. It was not the grandeur of an Old Testament prophecy, but for a single family that I was so convinced of their truth, but fulfillment at times seemed utterly impossible, and I doubted, but in my small heart, there remained a certainty of their truth that could not be destroyed.

An ardent love and desire to save her soul became stronger than the torment. I could go nowhere else. I could not return to whence I came. In one way or another, I would carry a Cross for the remainder of my life. Better to carry a Cross in doing His will, for God will perform still greater wonders.

I did not need to think much, but to love much. To love in a fervent determination to strive to please God in all things. Any anxiety or distrust came from me, as the trials were painful, almost insufferable. I lived in silence and hope.

I do not wish to suffer more, for I am an ordinary man who has seen the light yet travels in a night that can be so dark. Desiring in a perfect hope of God, I must have no memory that is not of God. As Jorge Luis Borges writes, “imagine an inversion of time: a state in which we remember the future, and know nothing, or barely feel a presentiment, of the past.” Providence.

He brought me to this point in time, gracing me with a Cross that caused my soul to weep, that left scars, but it was completed as it remains a mystery, so that I might live in an eternal Heaven. It is here that I will write so that I will forget the past and remember the future that awaits.