Deficit

In January of this year, Gerry the spiritual director challenged me to think about deficit as part of my spiritual journey. I wrote part of a journal entry:

I live in a fortress of solitude. It is not at the North Pole, like Superman’s, but...

In those days, my main employments were shoveling lake-effect snow and brooding about my job-search. That deficit, the lack of purpose, melted into the Mediterranean on my way to the Holy Land. There is no lack of things to do, see, or write about in this context. Even if I must push creative endeavors to the back of the queue, I still have a queue. Why am I writing about deficit?

...when some ‘thing’, an object or relationship or resource or whatever, ceases or never begins to be there ... Deficit is all things that are less, insufficient, misplaced, removed and un-actualized.

I could be writing on Palestine’s behalf but I am not. They try to live abundantly. This is my last journal entry before I leave for Geneva. I will be gone.

“Gerry,” I said, “I think I understand what you mean: deficit can be a vacuum or it can be a space.” He nodded emphatically at this: “...and when it is a vacuum, all manner of things get sucked-in.”

“But when it is a space... then there is a place for, I guess, resonance?”. He was pleased with that.

“Exactly. Resonance. Very good...”

Only in resonance can the beauty of the missing ‘something’ be gleamed. Sometimes the resonance is the beauty to be gleamed, like the inside of a kettle drum or the pregnant pause after your doctor says “we successfully removed the tumor.”

Gerry encouraged me to settle into my deficits last winter and appreciate the present moment for what was there, resonating. Resonance is problematic because it is not always filled with choirs of angels.

The problem is that you can fill your deficits with whatever you want but things may not fit their container. When the jammed pieces of that life crumble and fall out, lesser substances still seep in through your cracks. This brings to mind the time I watched the movie “Office Space” and took a shot every time someone said “TPS reports”.

My use of lesser substances has tapered to nothing; I turn to friends or the news, at least, to fill spaces. Yet, however adeptly I squeeze the poisons out of my system, I must contend with being emptied. Grand Rapids or Bethlehem, a cold bed waits for me every night this December.

Gerry encouraged me to think of deficit not as an absence but as something that has a substance of its own. In the wake of this illumination, my thought life is continually mutating. Gerry, speaking on another matter, said that “perhaps it matters less what thoughts and feelings you have than how you relate to them...”

I realized today that there are two kinds of Faith and I have been enmeshed with one of them. I employ what I call “mustard seed prayers”: mountain tumblers. This audacious Faith gives us the courage to hurtle obstacles, risk failure, and stick like epoxy to our convictions. This is the Faith that empowers us to persevere through dissonances, pressing on toward what we know is right. The other side of Faith is patient it sits on top of the mountain through all weather. This Faith coats us in olive-oil and prevents adversity from lingering with our souls. This is a Faith that breathes inside a vacuum, can stomach stagnating uncertainty, and wait trustingly for conditions to ripen.

This Faith is found in fasting: embracing the deficit.

Deficit is not the woman who disappeared over a hill six months ago: it is the space she vacated and...

I do not miss her.

From time to time, I have to repel the suggestion that I try to date a nice Palestinian woman. If she is a nice lady, her culture will insulate her. Pairs come together through channels of church/mosque and family, often with beautiful results but sometimes not; romance is not necessarily absent but, either way, there is an established social network that brings nice couples together. I am a guest here. I could date another guest, an international, but we turnover every three months with no guarantees of return.

Logically, with limited energy, I would not set my sights further afield but, naturally, that is what I do. It is only speculative unless I meet someone who is a close match to what I really want, what is really missing. Then, that woman can be on the other side of the metaphorical check-point. I can enumerate all the obstacles and fill my empty time with reflection, rhetorical devices, and prayers. I can convert what might be a period of waiting, in deficit, into a situation that demands determination. “Nobody said never...”

...there was an instance...

The same friends who helped me prime my engines back-pedaled and started to pump-up the airbags. I thought they had empowered me to be confident and persistent but they all turned, in accord, from encouragement to comfort. “Be patient ... trust God ... you’re a nice guy...”

I could hardly stand it. Nothing I did had mattered very much. I used to fill the deficit with problems of my own construction, looking for what was wrong with me or what I had done wrong in order to defuse the absurdity of emptiness. Yet, there is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with her. Circumstances are more than sufficient to delay, if not preclude, the whole thing. Halas: there is nothing to be done.

Anyone who has done a large jigsaw puzzle has reached this point. It is time to lift up the puzzle and tuck it into the corner for another day. I released my epoxy grip and slipped-away, back to that vacant bed for an extra long-night of sleep. In the final hours before sunrise, I had a dream sequence:

I thought that I was in California but the flora was Belizean and the architecture was Palestinian. It was as if Bullet-Tree and Beit-Jala had a love-child. I was walking around a court-yard area, admiring the chaté palms and noticing that the stone was still wet and cool. Then, she came to get me...

I don’t know her name...

...she called me inside and we laid down together in the chill of the morning. It took a few minutes to get situated, scooching close together and getting our arms and legs positioned comfortably, but we finally got comfortable. We talked about something trivial as we snuggled each other to sleep: cozy. She was as familiar as she was beautiful but I had never seen her before in my life.

...which was the best part.