Another of my favorite poems, “Dream Song 14,” by John Berryman, begins, “Life, friends, is boring.” It’s one of my favorite poems not because I agree with its general ethos and its claims both implicit and explicit about living (though in previous chapters of my life I did), but because it so adeptly renders a way that I think many people live. Berryman himself was far from boring, and had an intoxicating sense of humor, albeit one that started and ended, at least materially, in nihilism (I could make my arguments about its formal ends but whatever). Nothing seems to matter to the speaker of this “Dream Song”: “Peoples bore me, / literature bores me …” he says. In other words, it would seem that his interior landscape is a flatland.
But Heaven is often described as a sort of flatland, with raised valleys and lowered mountains, so might we say that that kind of inner boredom is a sort of divine state? Of course, our guts say, not.
I’ve gone through periods of my life that have felt soul-rottingly boring. I’m sure if I’d sought out psychological evaluation I would have been diagnosed with clinical depression. My gut tells me that most people have gone or will go through periods of what might some might call depression, but I avoid pathology and its jargon. What many call depression I would say is a devastating and fairly uninterrupted interior boredom that either does or does not have its cause in exterior circumstances. I prefer to frame what might be pathologized in the form of an existential question, such as, “Do I have any control over my life?,” “Am I loved?,” “Do I matter?,” and “Do others matter?” In periods of my life when I’ve been bored at the level of my spirit, the question must have been something along the lines of, “Does anything matter?” In such seasons of my life, anything could have happened, good or bad, and it would have registered as all the same to me, a long drone.
I heard something a few months ago that has really stuck with me: because Adam and Eve were born blameless, their experience of Creation before the fall was heightened. And because there was not yet death, there was also not yet pain (pain of course being something we feel to motivate us to avoid death). It was all pleasure, all the time, and yes, that means that Adam and Eve had better sex than we could ever imagine, but stop trying to imagine it. We know the Adam and Eve story: they fell into Original Sin and corrupted our human nature, opening the gates of this world to death and, by extension, pain. Jesus was born with a full human nature in its fallen state but maintained of course His divine nature. Thus, He could feel the full extent of divine joy and the full extent of human suffering, no sense of His dulled by sin. Am I making sense? He could feel the best of the best and the worst of the worst. Now, instead of imagining Adam and Eve in their all-feeling embrace, imagine Christ in His all-feeling death. If we try, we can envision the brutal agony of a nail driving through His skin, the popping of His tendons, His raw and reeling nerves, His strained but yet unbroken bones. The sweat and blood must have stung His eyes, but if He tried to move His hand—
If Christ’s Body was in its glorified state, all of these things that I sometimes try to picture must have been far worse and more gruesome than our worst suffering. And the heartbreak, too: imagine the sorrow He felt when He thought of how our sins would lead us so far from His side, where we would be happy.
A few years ago, a Facebook friend of mine had a miscarriage and wrote a post about it. I don’t remember what her post said, but naturally she was devastated. Someone commented, “Your capacity for grief is directly proportional to your capacity for love and joy.” And this I think is what the flatland Heaven is: it sores so infinitely in all directions that the only possible way we can conceptualize it is, perhaps most closely, in mathematics, as an axis on a graph—or, even more closely, as a single point totally lacking dimension: (0, 0). Or we can think of it analogically, as a valley that reaches as deep as a corresponding mountain does high, their essence coinciding with one another so intimately that the only way we can conceive of this always-already, both-at-once geographic formation by imagining plain ground.
Boredom aspires toward nothing; love aspires toward so much that sometimes the only way we can truly conceptualize it is as a nothingness. But it is a nothingness out from which all vectors both explode from and converge toward. This is why God is both the Alpha and the Omega: we start and end with Him, and they occur both at once.
In one of my seasons of great boredom, I was worried that God was the Great Lobotomist. My reasoning went as follows: if Heaven is a land of unbroken joy, and we have any memory of this life, we will remember our suffering. And if we remember our suffering, the memory alone will make us stammer in our hymning. So, when we get to Heaven, does God strip us of all our earthly memories? Are we simply anesthetized cattle, brainwashed, stripped of our free will that makes us essentially human? The key to this question lies in the image of Christ Himself as He appears to the Apostles and to Paul after He has risen from the dead: He still bears the wounds of His execution, because He sustained them to save us, and in that way they are wounds turned comforts, sickness turned health, humiliation turned glory. God takes our pains and makes us rejoice in them, because had we not experienced them so terribly, we also would not have met Him so fully.
I’ve been a little sick lately and for a few nights I kept waking up coughing, and in turn I’d be pretty upset and desperately exhausted. Last time it happened, though, I thought to myself, well, this is just how it is, and if it’s going to happen, I might as well ask God to do do something with it and not let this moment go to waste. I assumed that when I prayed for God to do something, He’d take it and use it for some distant person who was just about to figure out the lock box code for their chamber in Purgatory, and maybe He did, but He also did this: He made me actually thankful to be coughing, allowing me to find contentment there, because it was the moment of coughing that allowed me to see how He can use the ugliest piece of driftwood and fashion it into a gorgeous ornament of His Kingdom. This was not just a cognitive movement, either: after a while, I’m not sure how long, I truly did not mind the coughing anymore. I wasn’t detached from it, per se; in fact I felt like I was in it even more deeply; if I had to describe it, it was like being at the bottom of the ocean while a hurricane raged on the surface. I didn’t feel joy, truly, either. But I did feel great peace. I simply acknowledged it as a circumstance that God brought me to in order to make better sense of His ways with me.
I will continue to struggle with accepting the various cups of bitterness from which God has me sip, especially the cup of loneliness. But if God can take something as innocuous as a coughing fit and lead me to accept it as a gift in spite of myself, I am sure that He will do the same for any of the occasions I have to think, in error, that I’m forsaken, or my occasions of injury, or my occasions of grief.
And here is how I think we can find the Heavenly flatland, and not the boring, Hellish flatland of poor Mr. Berryman’s Dream Songs: if all of our movements are directed toward Him, the Center of everything, our starting point and our finish line, it does not matter what we are doing or where we are sitting. Our joys will not cast us so far from Him that we forget that we need Him; and our sorrows will not sink us so deep that we feel He can’t reach us. He can reach us anywhere. Life is pain, and thank God, because our pain is a mirror for our joy. In Christ who redeems, we can sing even as we bleed, and we will rejoice in the bleeding itself. Yes, Alexa, I think it’s time we hear some Marvin Gaye. Ain’t no mountain high enough.