An August Lament

“Serenity’s a long time coming to me, in fact I don’t believe, I know what it means anymore,” sang John Denver in the song, Eclipse.  I know that feeling.  Is it mid-life crisis that makes me dissatisfied and uncomfortable with everything?  Is it stress from hoop-jumping at work?  Is it coming home to what doesn’t feel like home, dealing with the on-going trials and pains of dealing with a special-needs teen?  Is it being so dissatisfied spiritually that I don’t know where to turn anymore for a feeling of security and refuge?

There have been times lately when my hands are actually shaking after listening to my son asking the same question for five hours straight—seriously, not an exaggeration or joke—that I start thinking that maybe there will be peace when I am dead.  Not that I would hasten that common end to all.  No.  I’m not in that mode of thinking.

But dear God, how long?  How long can we endure this constant unchanging assault on our senses?  And upon escalation, which we guard against as best we can, we move into physical confrontation.  No medication even begins to penetrate the obsession and compulsion.  In fact, the last one we tried almost seems to have increased the frequency, severity and duration of the obsessive/compulsive events.  Nor have we found a behavioral mechanism that redirects for long or with any consistency.

And this morning, it began before 7 a.m.

But thankfully, there is a brief respite in that he decided to go back to bed.  And then it will begin again.  The same question.  The same request.  And it will continue almost uninterrupted, unabated until bedtime.

We can’t go places, even separately because there has been too much danger of something bad happening.  There was no vacation this year.  We can’t get too far from home for fear of the worst.  What the worst might be we have no way of knowing.  Running away.  Injuring himself.  Or someone else.

We can’t even go outside due to the threat of elopement.  The physical intervention falls to me since he is now bigger than my wife.  There is little she can do to stop him if he makes a break for it.  And the other day, I nearly had the wind knocked out of me.

Thankfully, he saves this mostly for us at home.  He is usually better at school, at least from what we are told, and when a sitter comes over to give us a couple hours’ respite to take care of chores around the house or let us go to the grocery.  You know, wonderful recreational activities like that.  He is usually better for his therapists, and for that we are grateful.

I quit antidepressants more than a year ago.  I have an almost perfect record of daily meditation, having missed one day in over 18 months of practice, but sometimes, sessions are short because I have to run and deal with being more of a warden than a dad.  I wonder how valuable it really is sometimes, then I think, were it not for those moments I jealously protect when I can sit quietly, seeking peace, there would be almost no peace at all.

No serenity. No calm.

But where is your faith?  I wonder.  It feels tested.  Stretched beyond its limit.  Where is the way of escape that is so often cited when we face temptation?  I can’t find it.  I have questioned so many of the tenets of the only brotherhood of faith I have known that it seems a hollow sham in so many ways.  I still have faith.  But I don’t have an absolute assurance that this particular tribe, so fearful of grace and resistant to anything beyond narrow tradition, is completely right.  I can no longer accept some of its teachings so central to the group’s identity regarding “authority.”  I cannot in good conscience agree with the political conservatism—indeed considered by some as an element of faith, apparently—embraced by nearly every one of its members.

No serenity.  No calm.  No rest for my weary and far too burdened soul.

How long, dear God can we continue this way?  Knowing no rest?  Never feeling secure?  Never able to even for a moment experience a sense of ease, a moment to embrace the beauty of that moment?

But each day is another day.  People ask if I have plans for the weekend or a holiday.  I simply say, “Survive.”  Live another day.  Another day of constant stress.  Another day of growing more isolated from the world.  Another day of warding off the demons, driving back the darkness, whether my own or others’.

How long, dear God?  How long?  How long?