Learning To Be Many Things At Once

Two photos of me, and the agony of becoming, duh

A holy fear seizes the religious person when he finds himself faced by this dual abyss—the nothingness from which he was created and the destiny to which he is called.

Jean Mouroux, The Christian Experience

It is 1993, and I am one year old. The snow drifts hulk above eye level (when did it stop snowing like that?) and beneath my hammy feet, crammed awkwardly into boots, tire tracks etched in the plowed-frozen driveway crunch loudly. A camera shutter clicks—I don’t notice. Neither does my mom beside me; we both occupy a time in human history where cameras were strange enough, rare enough, clumsy enough, to be happily ignored. We float in the unselfconscious sepia tone of home, family, here-now-this, known now almost exclusively to those who lived before the internet mercilessly colonized that sacred zone with its steady drumbeat of notifications and endless scroll of unknown, beautiful faces.

Two years earlier, that child, in that photo, did not exist. She does not remember 1991 because in 1991, she was not. She was less than an empty space—infinitely less. Then, out of that void of non-being, one day she was wrenched against her will (though presumably by a good and loving God) and plopped down in the woods of rural Duluth, Minnesota. From an infinity of nothingness, without form and void, she became a thought in the mind of God and received the breath of life. Now a living being stamped with the image of her Creator, she is irrevocably destined for friendship with God and limitless, unending, ever-expanding life.

Here she is now: a mother, with a little child of her own (three, actually).

To be human is to live in the space taut between opposing poles; it is to exist as a paradox in the flesh. Body and soul; sinner and saint; saved, and yet still in need of rescue. Our experiences are never just one thing, because we are never just one thing. We are a microcosm of the God who fashioned our frame: a unity-in-diversity, an undivided multitude, a single body composed of many members—some seen, some unseen.

In these two pictures is a whisper of the multitude within my own being. I have a mother, and that makes me a daughter/child. I also have children, and that makes me a mother. The child within me is still very much with me; she still waddles amidst tall snow, grasping for the hand of someone bigger, stronger, someone safe. And now, I am that someone safe for other tiny searching hands—I have to be, have to try to be. Am I the child, or the mother? Yes. Am I the needy or the needed? Also yes.

Perhaps this is a taste of what it means to be, as Jacques Mouroux put it, suspended between two abysses—between the void of non-being from whence I came, and the fullness of life and love towards which I am striving: the agony of incompleteness by which, perhaps, our destinies are worked out by fits and starts.

In one sense, we could think about this as “parts work.”¹ The child is one part, the mother another part. The limit of this framework, it seems to me, is that it can never fully explain the dialectic dimension of our lives, the agonic process of growth and becoming that only occurs in the tension between one “pole” of existence and the other. In the place between child and mother, there is an unresolved—I should say, a necessarily unresolved—tension that must give way to acceptance of being both, and also neither. Only there can there be a synthesis of limit and fullness that transcends the polarity, the double gravitational pull, on the one hand towards my own littleness, dependence, and need, and on the other hand towards the call to be a stable, secure, and provident presence for another.

Here, as both child and mother, between what I no longer am and what I have not yet become, deep calls unto deep, and I catch glimpses of my inmost self at the bright, pulsating core of God’s creative love, which is the source and summit of my being.

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1. I recently read and benefited greatly from Dr. Gerry Crete’s book, Litanies of the Heart, an exploration of the therapeutic field of parts work in light of the Catholic tradition. Lots of good stuff there if you are interested in learning more.