Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (13 page)

To be lost in a crowd of more comrades than confidants,
where conversation is more small talk than honest discourse, can tire us to the center of our souls. It is time lost in trivia, time taken away from thought. It is time without return of the energy we need to deal with the rest of life thoughtfully, seriously. It barters the serious levels of life for the superficiality of the herd. It forfeits community for the sake of the crowd and crowds bring clutter, bring clamor, bring distraction.

In many ways, crowds do more to take us away from ourselves than they do to nourish us. They survive on the periphery of life and bring little in the way of personal support as communities do. Instead, inchoate crowds bring, at best, the sheer comfort of knowing that I am not standing on the promontory of the world alone.

Crowds swirl us through life, run us from one event to another, looking for faces in the assemblage more familiar than the masses on the street but hardly soul mates. We get caught up in the excitement of a crowd and make the excitement our own. We go with the crowd and come away knowing what the world around us is feeling whether we really feel it or not.

But none of that is enough.

Crowds come in two flavors. One type of crowd, unrelated as it may seem, is driven by a cause, a purpose, a movement that taps into the very depths of our own souls. These crowds magnify our own hopes and goals and concerns in life. All strangers, perhaps, they nevertheless already share some great human hope.

The other type of crowd organizes around nothing for no particular change in the human condition. They share
no common reason for being together. They are the gathering at the street dance, the participants in the discussion, the people at the neighborhood barbecue, the onlookers at the rally. They are all there together and we are in the midst of them and we share a common event or conversation. But they are no vehicle for serious thought or significant actions.

Great unrelated groups of people do not tend our pain. They do not heal our souls. They do not bring us to new insights or enable us to understand much more about what is driving the latest social trend than we did before we got there.

Rather, crowds tell us what the undercurrents of life are but they do not tell us where this present controlling undercurrent came from or why it happened or where, if it continues, it will end up. Crowds are amorphous gatherings of strangers in a person’s life, not family, not friends. And therein lies the danger. There are no personal ties here that can attest to their integrity, let alone lay claim to their real care for anyone who joins them.

A crowd is simply either the whirlwind or the interest of the moment, not organized movements. They arise out of singular personal interests and disappear when those particular interests disappear. They are at most a gathering of like-minded people connected only by the moment or the character of the event. They are a formless, shapeless population of some aspect of society—the office staff, the fans, the alumni, the neighbors.

The fellow travelers in a crowd do not claim to have a common heart; they simply set out to express a common
interest, more or less important, more or less immediate. More important, they can, if allowed—completely unnoted and unnoticed—suck the air out of an individual and turn the average enthusiast into a cipher rather than a person.

Crowds do not give voice to the individual. Instead they suppress it. They demand subservience to the interests of the crowd rather than to the welfare of the individual. They are noisy creatures who for all their show of comity render the individual silent. Most of all, they do not answer the questions that torment us in the middle of the night about what we ourselves really think when we are alone.

But a person cannot be a person unless and until they are free to act beyond, outside and even against the crowd.

Crowds are important in life but they do not constitute the real essence of what it means to be a human being. There are persons, of course, who sublimate themselves to the crowd in order to feel part of something bigger than themselves, to take on an identity that they themselves have not formed yet, to acquire an aura of the power or status of the crowd itself. Those people will never really become persons.

We can take all of our social cues from a passing crowd—like schoolchildren jockeying for social approval. We can learn what clothes to wear there, what people to associate with, what thoughts to think—but we cannot learn to be ourselves or to make any particularly distinct contribution to the rest of the world.

We may find companionship in a crowd. We can look to the crowd for recreation. We can want the fellowship and
security of the crowd but we cannot mistake that kind of ephemeral social contact for genuine human love and care, for tested constancy or disinterested concern. We cannot look here for the definition of what we most want to be as a human being and become as a person. Those things we must find for ourselves.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus clearly noted the tension between being a self-defined individual and being lost in the identity of the crowd. His advice to the centuries after him is a somber one. He wrote, “I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.” We can roll and toss over that kind of insight for years but in the end the wisdom of it leaves little room for compromise. What we want to become we must become alone. Only then may we safely give ourselves over to the crowd.

“Remember, Joan, you can’t ever really run away from anything,” my mother taught me. “In the end, you only take yourself with you.” At that age, I thought the words were simply a trick of language. Maybe an outworn kind of witticism. It took years before I realized what she had not said, what she had failed to tell me, had instead allowed me to find out for myself. By that time I didn’t need to have someone else explain it to me.

I know now that whatever it is that is troubling us is not outside of us. It is inside of us. Rattling around. Muttering. Waking a person up in the dregs of the night. Filling our dreams with specters and sweat. Echoing loudly in the emptiness within us. One great cacophony of internal noise that goes with us wherever we are. Always.

It is that very noise that emerges in babble and prate when we’re alone. When it’s night. When there is no other
noise to drown it out. It is the noise of the agitated soul. It is confusion. Or fear. Or pressure. Or the recurring guilt or aimless pain we do not say to anyone but which weighs us down and fills us up to overflowing.

It is the call to our souls of the unfinished business of our lives, of the tensions we never lifted, the relationships we never resolved, the promises we never kept, the dreams we never achieved, the things we never became, the enmities we never accepted. It is the question of how to live with all those things now that nothing can be done about any of them at all.

Everything else in life is sound. What rises from the inside of us, unbidden and unwelcome, is noise. It curdles our life. And at night it demands our personal attention when we can do nothing about it but cower, knowing all the while that clearing the static of it must be accomplished alone. It’s what we don’t say in the daytime about what we don’t like. It’s what wouldn’t look good to others if we ever did say it. It’s what we don’t like about ourselves and do not want other people to sense about the small parts of us.

And yet, this noise in me is the voice of the Spirit calling me to attend to what I have long ignored or denied or forgotten. It is the challenge to face up to the unfinished business of my life. To resolve what I regret. To confront whatever it is that is blocking my ability to live a life free of consternation, alive with joy. Indeed, we can’t ever really run away from anything. We can only settle it or be harassed by it all the nights of our life. It is a choice we make that will affect the entire rest of our lives. It is the martial art of the soul.

Silence is the gift that throws us back on ourselves. Which is exactly why there are so many who cannot bear the thought of it. Without external distractions, we are left vulnerable to the voices within that demand that we come to grips with all the pieces of the self we have so carefully concealed. Beneath the smiles and the frowns we use to protect ourselves from anyone who might get too close to the turmoil within us lies the noise of the soul that will not cease until we finally agree to hear it. It is the silent self that calls us to damp the noise that hounds us in the night, that calls us to responsibility for the authenticity of the self.

Internal noise is the eruption of the psyche within, which demands our attention to the submerged parts of ourselves that haunt us yet. Our secret pettiness, perhaps. The new fires of anger or the old fires of depression that rage beneath the patina of patience. The smile that is not real.

The truth is that internal noise is not meant to burden us. It’s meant to enable us to go on with new energy, new honesty and new hope. It is meant to dispel our confusions, to unknot their ties on us before we find ourselves entrapped in the past in ways that make a free and vigorous future impossible.

It’s time, we know now, to choose between the conflicting agendas that underlie the tension. Shall we continue doing what we are doing now but do not like or shall we quit, move beyond where we are now, begin again somewhere else? Shall we maintain this relationship whatever its oppression of us or shall we end it and go on alone? Shall we admit this mistake and resolve it or continue to
hide it and live for the rest of our lives in fear of its revelation? Shall we bow our heads within us in sorrow for what cannot now be changed but which lives in us still? Shall we finally accept it as an immutable lesson well learned and which every day makes us an even better person than we were before we learned it?

The choices are life-changing, yes, but internal noise indicates clearly that this life as we are living it now needs—somehow, some way—to be changed.

We are struggling with the cries of unhealed feelings and broken psyches, the pain of which drips daily into the soul. The tempest of internal turmoil keeps us tossing and turning at night, leaves us isolated from ourselves and dishonest with those who love us most. These are the things that divide the soul from itself. These are the beginnings of the schizophrenic spiritual self, the person who looks like one person to others but is entirely another within.

The major question of a person’s life lies in whether or not we are willing to bring both parts of the self together—the public one and the hidden one—to stop pretending, at least to ourselves, in order to become the person we seem to be. The monastics of the desert put the problem this way: Abba Isidore of Pelusia said, “To live without speaking is better than to speak without living. For the former who lives rightly does good even by his silence but the latter does no good even when he speaks. When words and lives correspond to one another they are together the whole of philosophy.”

Philosophy, the understanding of what it means to be human, to be wise, to exist in the fullness of life, is a demanding
discipline. It is more than knowledge, more than simply success. It is the study of what it means to grow a crystal soul, bright and clear and true. It is that which the elimination of the pernicious noises in the soul, the coming to the fullness of the internal self, is all about. And how is that done? Our internal noises are cries for attention to the soul. Face them. Deal with them. Get help with them. Grow from them.

Without that, we are not yet fully alive.

When early spiritual writers considered what would be required for a person to make progress in the spiritual life, they did not design a set of austerities. They did not make physical exercises the core of the spiritual life. They did not recommend to those who came searching for wisdom programs of rigorous fasting or sleepless nights or great penances. No, instead they recommended something far more difficult: They demanded deep, great measures of internal awareness.

They demanded that their disciples give less time to congratulating themselves on the holiness points they had achieved by ticking off religious exercises and give themselves over to the far more difficult discipline of self-knowledge. Disciples were taught to identify within themselves the spirits that colored their lives and drove their desires and moved their hearts. It was the great purifying
act of being able to admit to oneself at least, what it was for which the soul pined that was making it impossible to accept the good of where they were in life. Then it was a matter of overcoming the negative impulses within so that the spirit of the joy of living in God could take them over and give them the fullness of life for which they longed.

These were not sour souls, these monastics, these truly spiritual people. Nor did they teach that the spiritual life itself was a sour enterprise. They, above all, having faced the rigors of the dry, dour desert, knew that a healthy, holy life lay within a person’s own control. We are not at the mercy of the environment.

Most interesting of all, life, medicine, and psychology have in every age proved these sages true. Human beings everywhere have transcended all manner of pain. Paraplegics talk of being happy. Holocaust victims report finding God in concentration camps. People living in poverty insist they, too, find good and hope and enjoyment despite the paucity of their circumstances.

At the same time, there are people who have great health, take political freedom for granted, and live stable and comfortable lives who report their sense of hopelessness and describe lives lived in despair. To writhe for want of more than enough, to grasp for heights beyond our personal abilities to achieve them, to live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with life in general, as well as life in particular, is not healthy aspiration: It is the seedbed of hopelessness.