shift

I’ve walked by the river, 

stood by the sea. 

howling winds tearing 

and pulling at me. 

I’ve stood by the river, 

walked by the sea. 

dark clouds scudding 

and scowling at me. 

I’ve run by the river, 

sat with the sea. 

art surging up 

to rescue me. 

I’ve stood in the river, 

stepped in the sea. 

strong deep power 

washing over me. 

With his divorce had come an unexpected shift.

He had already gone through a few major philosophical transitions in the course of his life. From his junior year in high school through his mid-twenties, he had begun the complex and difficult task of separating his identity and belief structure from that of his parents. It had been a tumultuous and irregular process, proceeding in fits and starts. He had at times found himself wholly at odds with the framework of his family and its community. At other times it had provided security and safety. At 21 he had married and moved 700 miles from home. For several years thereafter, his individuation had proceeded in fairly ordered fashion.

At last, late in his twenties, he had settled on a reasonably coherent world view that was mostly his own. He had successfully broken out of the box of his childhood beliefs. He had wrestled through the inconsistencies and failings of that childhood structure, and had learned to modify and adapt his box as needed. He had discarded old beliefs, incorporated new ones, and in some cases re-adopted the old ones in the new framework. It had been a very successful strategy for 20 years.

But some very deep assumptions had gone unchallenged throughout the years until his divorce was in full swing—assumptions about his own capacity and ability and strength and character. Now these assumptions began to crumble. At first he didn’t realize how deeply the divorce was cutting into the foundations of his world. But as time passed, his ability to adapt the structure of his world view to the disintegration of these assumptions failed him.

No assumption, no closely held belief, no sacred concept was safe. It was not like the process that he had been through in his twenties. Then, he was simply rearranging his box, and perhaps enlarging it as needed. Now, the notion that he could even hope to contain a coherent world view in any conceivable box was out of the question. He had finally come to understand that the world was a very large place without regard for his tidy, well packaged understanding; a place that could get along quite nicely while confounding and contradicting whatever he believed about it. But somehow, through all this, he felt confident and at peace with his own collapse. He seemed to understand that there was order and harmony in the universe beyond his capacity to catalog and arrange his comprehension of it. In a sense, he had reached a place where he could live without a comprehensive world view.

Now he began to see his world as a loose association of objects. His divorce was one of these objects. The world view box from his upbringing was another object. His recently failed adult world view with its flexible, expandable box was still another. His perception of the nature and personhood of God, the tenants of his faith community, the set of taboos his faith community had placed around the tenants of other faith communities, and his political perspective were all significant objects in his new model, and suddenly he found himself questioning and examining all these things with an openness and bravery that he had never before possessed.

He could not dismiss any possibility as simply being outside the boundaries of his belief structure. That belief structure was now modeled on the notion that each object in his world view must withstand scrutiny on its own merits at every turn. There was no room any more to accept anything simply because it was inside a preordained box.

Now he must question everything, discard nothing, and be ready to turn sharply at a moment’s notice. Now he must be ready to face the possibility that the most sacred assumptions of his life could crumble at any moment; the most heinous heresy could prove to be a valuable source of hope, truth, and inspiration, while perhaps even still proving heretical; the most noble cause could prove unworthy; the most trivial event could transform his understanding.

This shift in his world view was so pervasive, so massive and transforming that he found it almost impossible to discuss with most people. All but a tiny handful simply did not understand it. When he tried to explain, he found people awkwardly groping for a construct from their own box to map his transformation onto. Or they just shrugged it off and changed the subject. He was not surprised at these responses. He knew that only months before he would have reacted in the very same ways.