Till the Other Place

After a season of aching jaws and disturbed sleep, it is nice to fully enter sleep and stay there for 12 consecutive hours. I liken it to a Holy Retreat during Easter week in the Himalayas. As if I know what it feels like. All that I know of the Himalayas are courtesy of the Discovery Channel and here I am saying blatant things like that! Gosh, the audacity.

Although I am no longer dog-tired and on the brink of entering a second realm that comprises of the living deads, I still remember clearly those days when I come home, prostrated both in my mind and in my room. And all I seek is solace in the ancient words of Merton, hoping that through his knowledge, I may derive some potent understanding of the crisis I am in. Perhaps it was fated, but I found the exact words for what I need.

There is a certain kind of humility in hell which is one of the worst
things in hell, and which is infinitely far from the humility of the saints,
which is peace, The false humility of hell is an unending, burning shame at the
inescapable stigma of our sins. The sins of the damned are felt by them as
gestures of intolerable insults from which they cannot escape, Nessus shirts that
burn them up for ever and which they can never throw off.

The anguish of this self-knowledge is inescapable even on earth, as long as
there is any self-love left in us: because it is pride that feels the burning of
that shame. Only when all pride, all self-love has been consumed in our souls by
the love of God, are we delivered from the thing which is the subject of those
torments, It is only when we have lost all love of our selves for our own sakes
that our past sins cease to give us any cause for suffering or for the anguish
of shame.

For the saints, when they remember their sins, do not remember the sins but
the mercy of God, and therefore even past evil is turned by them into a present
cause of joy and serves to glorify God.

It is the proud that have to be burned and devoured by the horrible
humility of hell...But as long as we are in this life, even that burning anguish
can be turned into a grace, and should be a cause of joy.

Extract from Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, Pg 323

And after Merton, I am reminded of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and am partially relieved... For I realise that it is not only I who seeks this humbling silence that I crave. That it is not an uncorrectable intrinsic flaw that dictates the plague of confusion and undeniable sorrow that I feel. Where I am is just another place; a waiting room of sorts till I find the grace that settles my touchy heart.