Bind my wandering heart

I don't think I'm at the end of my life, but I feel like I am, what with regrets piled up like stones on my shoulders. I thought it was the right thing to write about some of them in my book, but I mostly regret that now as well, if only because people who know me can't look me in the eye, and people who don't know me think I am a saint for having been a sinner---for being a sinner.

When you are engulfed in sin, you are blind. No, not blind, but with tunneled vision. You see only the object of your desire, whether it is a drink or a vengeance or a lover or perhaps something so banal as your own exaltation.

Worse, with tunnel vision comes a queer kind of clarity, a crisp focus. You believe that you now see more clearly than you ever have before. This is a deception; when all you see is a glass of whiskey, you are more apt to notice the glistening drops of water on the rim, the swirl of a cloud within the drink, the way the light strikes its surface. You imagine you see the world with some special sight, but in truth you only see that miserable drink in that dingy bar; you don't see the sunlight or hear the crying out of the world or notice that you are only a tunnel-blind wretch in a pit, a wretch who imagines he has discovered an exception to the law of creation, which is that sin brings curses.

I have lived this lie, and I have heard it voiced by other self-deceivers, and it goes something like this: You don't understand, but this is different. She/he/it makes me feel like I've never felt before. The draw is overpowering. We were meant to be together.

This is the lie the drunk tells himself about his booze, that the adulterer tells himself about his lover. Beneath it is the deeper lie, the uglier lie, which goes something like this: I have suffered, and I am owed.

Thank God that the God-man, Christ Himself, never said such a thing. It is only we would-be gods who utter it, and then one of two terrible things happens: Either we destroy nearly everything around us to get what we want, only to find it has been a mirage, or we wake up in time to be saved from complete self-destruction.

The waking up is terrible because when you wake up, you see what has transpired while you were asleep. What I see is a marriage that will never be what it was supposed to be, friends who look at the floor rather than my face, places and gatherings that cannot be the same because of what I have done, because the fabric of our community has been rent.

I cried to my wife this morning, that I have been a blind man in a china shop, swinging a broomstick and hearing the shatters, but only now taking off his blindfold to see what he has done. Everywhere I look, I see the broken things, and I don't know why I am seeing them. I can't unbreak anything I have broken, and the sight of it all fills me up with so much grief that sometimes I can scarcely breathe.

I repent, I want to turn back, but I cannot. When you hack off your fingers, there is pain and you can no longer play piano and this is simply the way of things. When you repeatedly violate the trust people have placed in you, how can they trust you again?

They cannot, any more than I can trust myself.

Perhaps that is the point of the shattered glass, for the transgressor, that every jab of his flesh will bring him to prayer. Hundreds of times a day I whisper the prayer of Orthodox Christians: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." No hour goes by that I don't ask God to forgive me for this vain thought or that bit of bragging or for the hardness or anger or despair in my heart. I rarely sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch, and when I wake, I pray myself back to sleep. I feel crippled in some way that I cannot explain.

But the pain of repentance yields something good in God's hands. I cannot now stray far before I feel broken down and lost and utterly, unbearably alone. So it is good, to open one's eyes to the destruction wrought by one's sin. It is good to have a foretaste of Judgment and of the grave, and for these realities to bring us back again and again to our knees, back to a humbling of our hearts, back to Grace, Grace that we cannot understand until we have looked our wickedness full in the face.

"Let that Grace now like a fetter," goes the hymn, "bind my wandering heart to Thee." There was a time when I didn't understand this notion, was even incensed by it. Who wants to be fettered, bound?

I do. Let it be so, let it be so.