Christian Life 39 - Your Face Before You Were Born

Have you ever heard of a koan?  It's a riddle used by Zen Buddhist priests to help their students tease truths out of their own psyches.  When discussing koans with Westerners, the most popular example given is "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"  There is another koan with which I have been struggling for the last year or so: "what was your face before you were born?"  Today, I think I may have found the answer, and it was in the most unlikely of places.

A few weeks ago, my elderly mother fell and broke some bones.  As I type, she is in rehab and recovering well, but she was in extreme pain for several weeks before her true recovery began.  During those first weeks, as I maintained a bedside vigil, she would frequently ask me to read to her.  Several of the women with whom I am intimate (my wife, my elderly charges, my daughter) like for me to read to them.  I don't really know why; perhaps my Cosellian monotone lulls them to sleep! ☺

The point is, my mother's request was not unusual.  So I went to the facility library to locate an appropriate book.  Unfortunately, the shelves were lined almost exclusively with thrillers and romance novels.  Mostly as the least of the evils available, I selected Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan.  It is a romance novel - which I despise - but it at least has the advantage of being a (highly) fictionalized account of the relationship between Joy Davidman and Jack Lewis, both authors whom I admire.  Today, I read the following passage.  It describes Davidman's first reaction to reading the manuscript of Lewis' Till We Have Faces:

"It was as clear as if someone had walked into the room and ripped the veil off my soul, forcing me to stare into its darker depths.  Much of what I'd done - mistakes, poems, manipulations, success and books and sex - had been done merely to get love.   To get it.  To answer my question: do you love me?  Even as I gave love, was I trying to gain it?  Had it really taken fictional Orual to show me the truth? 

In my bedroom, I fell on my knees on the hard floor and rested my head on the edge of the mattress, pressing my face into the softness.

The face I already possessed before I was born was who I was in God all along, before anything went right or wrong, before I did anything right or wrong, that was the face of my true self.  My "bareface." [bold-type emphasis mine]

From that moment on, the love affair I would develop would be with my soul.  He was already part of me; that much was clear.  And now this would be where I would go for love - to the God in me.  No more begging or pursuing or needing.  It was my false self that was connected to the painful and demanding heart grasping at the world, leading me to despair.  Same as Orual.  Same as Psyche.  Same as all humanity.

Possibly it was only a myth, Jack's myth, that could have obliterated the false belief that I must pursue love in the outside world - in success, in acclaim, in performance, in a man.

The Truth: I was beloved by God.

Finally I could stop trying to force someone or something else to fill that role.

The pain of shattered illusion swept through me like glass blown through a room after a bomb.

All had been turned around.  No longer was the question Why doesn't Jack love me the way I want him to? But now Why must I demand that he love me the way I want him to?" 

 

Well done, Patti.  I make one suggestion (not that it's needed; the book was published in 2018 and is apparently selling well): I should like to change the sentence "He was already a part of me" to "I was always a part of Him." ❤

Pax