For Mateusz, RIP

Writing has become, or maybe has always been, a venting mechanism for me. It often comes in bursts of emotions I channel through rhythm, verse and rhyme, as poetry hides feeling behind structure.

But when the sorrow becomes too big and too deep, too dark it starts consuming me, I turn to prose, for the the length of an obscure paragraph captures the meanderings of my mind better than a therapy session, or a confession, could ever do.

And so I write, taking for excuse the sad passing of a partner at the law firm I’ve been working in for only so little. It is… strange… how to witness the end of a life I didn’t know before this short, recent time could affect me so much.

Maybe because I regret having lost the chance to know the person so many lament the passing of, or maybe because it reminds me of my own mortality, itself a source of despair for me I often try to mask as resignation.

Or maybe it is because it brings, once again, a sense of uncertainty to my often uncertain life, pulling me back to a reality I rarely acknowledge beyond my basic needs, that of the everyday life we all take for granted, but only few actively enjoy in the moment.

I can no longer hide my Jansenist inclinations, as my relationship with God is tainted with reverential distance, less so of a loving son with a merciful father, and more of nameless sinner in front of a severe judge.

Both my confessor, an old, wise Dominican priest, and my Southern Baptism friends have tried (and failed) to convince me of God’s love, and while I do try to warm my heart to the possibility of love and happiness, beginning with the acceptance of a God that maybe, indeed, loves me enough to sacrifice Himself for the forgiveness of my sins, I usually return to square one, for my Jansenist leanings may be strong, but so is a certain gnosticism that corrupts my thoughts and my feelings.

The most famous Jansenist in history, Blaise Pascal, is quotes as having stated that the “heart has reasons the reason ignores“, and for most of the time I’ve been conscious, mindful of my own emotional nature, I’ve struggled to make sense of both, heart and reason, mind and emotions, as my spirit wrestles constantly in a fight between what it knows and what it feels.

And oftentimes, that fight takes shape in the duality and the crucible of two concepts: death and solitude.But before diving into what they mean for me, I might as well explain what I understand for Jansenism and for gnosticism, for my own skewed, corrupted, problematic theology wouldn’t make sense without them.

For the uninitiated, Jansenism starts with the conviction that the human heart is a hollowed ruin, incapable of reaching for the light without an intervention, that is God’s grace, so rare it is absolute.

It is a mindset governed by unavoidable belief in an implacable and merciless God, where the Fall of Man was not a stumble but a total shattering of the human will.In this framework, salvation is completely beyond human capacity, which cannot longer excuse itself in the mediocrity of the attempt for our souls are either fully saved by God’s irresistible grace, or fully condemned by our own depraved nature, and left to wander aimlessly in the dark void.

Jansenism demands a rigorous, almost agonizing self-scrutiny, for it presches that most are called to salvation, but nearly none are chosen, with a deep-seated belief that God’s distance from His creation is a reflection of a holiness so profound that the “corrupted” soul can only approach it through penance and a deep, reverential fear.

This Jansenist tendency feels like living in a permanent winter of the spirit, waiting for a sun that may never choose to rise for you.

On the other hand, gnosticism is the radical recognition that the world we inhabit, the material, the mundane, the systemic, is not a creation of the divine, but a flawed construction of a lesser, corrupted architect known as the Demiurge.

It’s a belief system that teaches that within the biological machine of the human body, there exists a Divine Spark of sorts, a fragment of a true, distant reality that has been trapped in the density of the void.

For the gnostic, what constitutes our world, from everyday life to social hierarchies, are the cold, hardened bars of a prison, where salvation, just like with Jansenism, is not found in the “good works” of the law or the rituals of the church, but in a secret knowledge, the sudden, piercing realization of one’s own foreignness, of our soul is a stranger in a strange land, longing to shed the clay of its material survival and return to a silence that existed before the world was made.

I cannot endorse these beliefs, for when these two problematic inclinations meet, they create the specific gravity that pollutes my souls and makes what could be a call to holiness through solitude into an unbearable hell of my own making, one that exists only within the confines of my mind and my spirit.

For one, Jansenism provides a sense of guilt I rarely acknowledge, a fear of unworthiness of the light, of God’s love, of happiness out of my own broken nature, while gnosticism, on the other hand, provides an alienation that isolates me and convinces me that the world around is a hollow illusion I shouldn’t have to endure.

Within the two, I get caught between a God who is too far and a world that is too close, with one side telling me I’m are a sinner in need of judgement, and the other telling me I’m a spark in need of an exit.

And when these two meet, they create a vacuum where I cannot look up (to a merciless God) and I cannot look out (to a hollow world), I can only get forced to look in, where the meanderings of my mind become a labyrinth with no exit.

This conflict often manifests in a deep melancholy I rarely vent, and even less seldom publicly acknowledge except through the plausible deniability of poetry, for art masks through beauty the biggest wounds in our hearts.

And often, in this sorrow of my own making, I find myself musing about death.

Sometimes as an exit, sometimes as a peak, as a the conclusion to a story that can only get more complex, more contrived, more obscure as it gets forced to continue without a direction set by forces above and beyond me.I think of death in the abstract, and I pretend I have come to terms with my own mortality, but I would be lying to myself and to everyone by accepting it.

I am just deeply ignorant of what death entails, except the misery it leaves behind in this material world of ours, poor sinners.

We would be ought to believe in eternal life after death, and a good Christians this shouldn’t come to doubt, but as shown here, I’m far too off to be considered as an example of what an orthodox Catholic should believe, even as I clearly mark my own theological struggles with a disclaimer so no other soul engages with error as I regularly do.

And yet what my crisis could have remained as mere results of my own struggles with my emotions, a side effect of my hypersensitive nature, they instead take these darker turns, mending a dark theology into what shouldn’t be more than the occasional depressive episodes suffered by an aching poet with a penchant for drama, an overeducated idiot with too much free time and too few friends.

I don’t think I’ve lost enough, or not close enough, to really understand death, or to see it more as a tragedy than it can be an escape, for it is one I have never really suffered nor one I could be bold, stupid, or desperate enough to take, even kn my darkest moments.

But to confront the fact that someone I barely knew had his life, so… full, with so much content, potential, direction… end so abruptly only weeks after I made his acquaintance really drove me to an edge I had not stopped by to contemplate the abyss from.

To see him as more than a colleague I barely had contact with would be to idealize a non-factual.

Nothing could guarantee he would have been the champion to secure or orient my career, despite being, in principle, in the same lane, just as nothing can guarantee his passing won’t pull me out of my practice for reasons only business can understand.

But as it often does, it is a tragedy, personal, professional or simply the random occurrences of a live unappreciated in its luck that brings me back to what St. John of the Cross christened as the Dark Night of the Soul, though for me it seems to be more of a recurring phenomenon I have not yet accepted as a feature of my life.

Maybe because I still, unconsciously, reject pain and suffering as noble burdens in Christian spirituality, or maybe because I still misunderstand that my ongoing permanence vis-à-vis the upheavals in others’ lives is indeed s form of God’s grace and love, for I, self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, immensely capable and equally mediocre, caught between my choices and my chances, remain when and where others do not, and when and where I do not, I move on, bruised but never killed.

In this in-between, I try to drown my thoughts with music, just to end up enhancing its intrusive nature.

Radiohead seems to be the most adequate choice to throw myself deeper into my sorrow, as Thom Yorke’s voice floats from ear to ear, singing of pains commercialized into albums.It is with Pyramid Song when I started further derailing from my heretical leanings and into a mythology that predates Christianity.

With it, I got to think about the Egyptian underworld, the Duat, as souls get carried in boats with a certain judgement awaiting for them.In there, the finality of death is met with the Hall of Truth, where the heart of the deceased is weighed by Anubis against the feather of Ma’at (truth/order), the decision noted by Thoth, with as options either an afterlife ruled by Osiris, himself the first king, or an absolute void after getting consumed by the monstrous Ammit.

Perhaps, in the end, it is the void what terrifies me the most, and what pulls me back to the Christian faith, for the possibility of pure nothingness consuming my remains while whatever is left of me stays until it somehow, it finally decays into another form of oblivion, that of forgetfulness, is a form of torture that can only be compared to how severity and skepticism rip me apart in silence.

I simply wouldn’t know, by any standard, if I deserve any form of eternal life, and that ignorance prevents my pain from acting upon itself, for it fears the void more than it fears the escape it could provide.

And so, in an ironic twist of faith, I find myself praying for my soul and for those of the recently deceased, for I cannot do more than that in my limited capacity.

Every now and then a tear may fall from the corner of my eyes, but I no longer know if I’m crying for myself or for those who are no longer with us.