letters from barabbas

“What do you want the most?”
“What do you mean, like, physically? Spiritually?”
He laughed, “What’s the difference?”
I didn’t laugh back. “Well, the first is what I really want, and the second is what I want to want.”
“Whichever. What do you want the most?”
“I guess what I really want is peace. To stop feeling at war with myself.”
“And what do you think that will take?”
“Oh, surrender, I guess.” I kicked a swath of pebbles out ahead of me as I walked, adding hastily, “That’s the church answer, anyway.”
He stopped to examine the bamboo around us. “Did you know that bamboo shoots can grow a foot taller every day? It’s amazing, isn’t it? Straight up into the sky.”
“I wish I were that desperate.”

That is a piece of a conversation in the story that I brought to Dr. Troy to read during our first conference this semester. She said she liked it, "Good fiction is the careful compilation of tiny surprises." But she never says anything negative, so it's hard to tell.
Then she looked hard at me and asked if I was doing okay. I said yes, not to worry. Because I am doing quite well, more or less. I asked for her advice on how to weave ideological beliefs into a story without sullying the narrative, and she brought down a novel she had written in which she had incorporated the writings of Simone Weil, a 20th century French Jewish-born Catholic mystic.
I was so impressed with what I heard that I went to the library and checked out some of Weil's books. This is the excerpt that Dr. Troy quoted. I think it's beautiful, and perfectly resonant with my present mood.

I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it.
I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed, but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.
If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear....
What do the energy, the gifts, etc., which are in me matter? I always have enough of them to disappear.

May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my view, but I do wish that it should no longer be shown to me in person. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. If I go, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there...
When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

--Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

This is what I told the admissions committees at Yale, Tulane, UAB and Boston U. In case you wanted to know why the hell I'm doing this.


As I have progressed through the pre-med program at Auburn, the vision I hold for my future has shifted from a strictly clinical focus to a much broader conception of my place in the medical community. My current interests lie in cooperative community approaches to preventing disease. I am particularly interested in exploring innovative, culturally conscious methods of controlling disease within developing nations. My next step in this new direction is to obtain an MPH in Epidemiology, focusing on infectious diseases of Sub-Saharan Africa.

My experience with undergraduate research has been the greatest motivation for my shifting away from traditional medicine towards Public Health. As an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Sharon Roberts’s lab, I spent my junior year helping graduate students with the culture and molecular analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum for an ongoing study of Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis in house finches. Because Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis is an emerging infection in the eastern house finch population, it provides an excellent model for studying the evolution of host-parasite relationships. As a senior, I have had the opportunity to take on my own projects that examine the disease not only on a molecular level but within the whole organism as well. I am currently conducting two projects: a natural transmission study in live birds that I captured from the wild and the genetic analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum isolates that I collected from wild birds last summer. When Dr. Roberts explained the classical transmission study’s further applications to medicine, I started taking a more active interest in Epidemiology. I found myself more excited about preventing the transmission of disease throughout a community than in treating infected individuals. My primary research interests for the graduate level include both international field work and laboratory analysis of tropical parasites and vector-borne diseases.

I have wanted to work overseas since high school, though at first I only expected to be reproducing traditional western medicine as a traveling medical doctor. As I have learned about the history of Africa, however, I have begun looking for ways to integrate novel prophylactic measures into preexisting value systems while seeking to understand their cultural assumptions as deeply as I may communicate my own. Rather than using medicine as a means for disseminating western culture, I hope to enter into the campaign for social justice by leveling disparities in the quality of healthcare across the globe. My talents and passions will best be served by devoting my attention to the understanding of specific host-parasite relationships and working cooperatively with a population to adapt appropriate methods for overcoming its unique health barriers.

While I have always been moving towards a career in healing, I have felt constricted by the limitations of modern medicine. Unimpressed by a purely scientific approach to human welfare, I began taking English classes as a sophomore to acquire a fuller understanding of the human condition. When I began volunteering as a counselor at Alabama’s oncology camp, Camp Smile-A-Mile, I was introduced to a whole community of health care professionals beyond the doctors and nurses. I realized that my contribution to patients’ well-being depended on more than my acquisition of an MD. I finally came to understand medicine as the cooperative treatment of whole families by whole communities. Dissatisfied with the sciences but unwilling to simply switch to humanities, Public Health offers me the opportunity to pursue scientific understanding while working within the whole spectrum of human experience.

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth his pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within him and poisons him.
This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How can one gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity?

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm, if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.

To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.

A beloved being who disappoints me. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name.
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

*

well, maybe there's a god above
but all i've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
it's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

And yet I still long for them, the lusts of the flesh--flesh which has been removed from me. I have been cut off from my old self, made naked, but I have not got my New Man yet. I am disembodied. But I should be glad for that, content that one day I may be further clothed in Righteousness and Truth. Instead, I am chasing after an old sin that is always as far as the horizon. It is an attempt to reunite my soul and body, to resolve the tension and to settle on some tangible existence. It is understandable, and even natural, but it is in error. It is betraying the way of things, chasing in the wrong direction, towards a home that no longer welcomes me. I cannot fuse future and past to condense my distilling breath. I must wait for both to explode, for only in timelessness will I be fully present. In the meantime, I must refrain from following the flesh, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin who would it were otherwise.

i have not seen this day before

If I could, I would break into flower.
If I could, I'd no longer be barren.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

Oh, mourning dove, we'll go up to my roof.
Oh, mourning dove, we'll go into the sky.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

And the cars are a stream running by me,
bending away to a place I don't know.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

I used to think of this song as a simple expression of joy. A release in the tension of a very dark album--the bright spot. But perhaps it is not strictly so. I have not seen this day before: "It must be a sunny day, a good day for once," I thought. But maybe it's just another day, one we haven't seen yet. And whether it is sunny or stormy, it is here, and we haven't seen it before, and it is filling up our rooms whether we want it or not. Jump in the stream and fill it up (surrounding the stones gracefully, if you are able), because you have no other choice.

I've been thinking a lot about how God works--how wrong it is to assume that God ought to do good things for us, though He often does. The "How could a good god let bad things happen?" dilemma is getting old for me. The Israelites were on a wild ride with an incomprehensible Guide, who had a plan though it often didn't seem so. The indication of any sort of plan didn't make it seem any better, at least. "Step in that river? What, and drown?" "Slay that whole village over there? Where is Your compassion?" "Four hundred years of captivity? Do we really deserve that?" They went with the flow, did as they were told, yet there seems to be the sense that the Lord, omniscient and all-powerful though He was, was always weeping with them. He was on their side--so who could be against them?
Yet they wept, and He wept with them.
And if His Spirit filled the tabernacle, and our hearts are now that tabernacle, then He must be filling up our rooms right now, and so the day with all its tears and all its small surprises really is coming through the door.

If I could, I'd no longer be barren. Who knows whether this day will change that? But what choice is there for me but to live it?

I'm not trying to preach this. I'm not hoping this will comfort anyone's pain. But I'm hoping that typing these words out and publishing them on the internet will somehow make them real for my life. It's a last-ditch effort to go into the sky, you might say. Because all around me people are dying and losing their faith. And in many ways I'm doing both myself, because maybe that is what it means to be alive.
I have not seen this day before. And the Lord is for me, and weeping too.