Where, When I Languish

 

lan·guish verb

1. 1.

   (of a person or other living thing) lose or lack vitality; grow weak or feeble.
2. 2.

   suffer from being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation. (Oxford Dictionary)

Like many people I know, I have been languishing. I have been "lacking vitality, growing weak, and suffering from being forced to remain in an unpleasant situation."

For the past few weeks I had been coping by finding purpose in one of the few refuges I had left, my garden. Having it all buried in snow, even though not unexpectedly (after all it happens just about every year) feels poetic, in the pathetic fallacy kind of way. Every perennial I have nurtured over the years is left hanging in uncertainty, and now I wonder which ones will withstand the long freeze. I wonder that about other things in my life, as well.

So yeah, this pandemic has got me languishing. It has cancelled many things that made life meaningful for me: family gatherings, making plans for the future, little outings with my kids, vacations. It put a halt to church meetings and forbade me to sit elbow to elbow with people I love and respect, making it hard for me to feel belonging in my community of saints. It even cancelled the temple, which was my monthly lifeline for many years, connecting me to God and my family and giving me perspective and divine strength in my trials. 

For me, isolation is something I don't do well. Every apologetic attempt to gather in order to find strength and connection from loved ones is tainted by guilt, anxiety, and often brings with it less connection and more disconnection—a feeling of division with others who either believe the restrictions are a total conspiracy, or else they are an unbending standard. I have found myself feeling frustrated and angry with people I once respected and loved, both the rigid and the lax, something totally new for me who once saw only good in everyone. It has shone a light on my own surprising lack of charity, and on my own unwillingness to build Zion with people who see things differently from me.

This whole thing—the pandemic, but also the entire political and social landscape of my church and community—has gutted me. Watching setback after setback has filled me with doubt. For my whole life I have been a diehard optimist. I was always cheerful in difficulty. I possessed a curious reserve of faith and hope in even the most difficult situation. I always thought I could do anything. The past few years have tested me in heart wrenching ways, and I have simply come up insufficient. I now have to live with that about myself.

Parenting, of course, has taken me to a new level of Dante's inferno. I don't need to go into details about that, the failures, isolation, and frustrations of parenting in a pandemic. Talk about "being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation." My poor kids.

I have learned before about mental illness, specifically depression and anxiety, from close family who battle this kind of thing every day. They are veterans in this feeling of being stuck, this emptiness, this languishing. I feel newfound respect for them. For me, this is a new experience. It sucks.

In the hymn, we sing:

Where, when my aching grows, 

Where when I languish,

Where in my need to know, where can I run?

Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish?

Who, who can understand?

He only One.

Lately, I have been wondering what Christ knows about languishing. Does He, a God, really understand about uncertainty, about our mortal limitations and constant "need to know?" Does He understand what it's like to know what you should do, but are unable, for whatever mental and emotional reasons, to actually do it?

I don't know the answer, but I do have enough faith to believe that Christ does understand uncertainty. I believe He faced it in the garden. I believe He continues to languish under the load of our collective uncertainty, as well as our stagnation, sorrow, and sin. I do not believe Christ was an omniscient being when He entered Gethsemane. He does not enter Gethsemane, either His or ours, as the triumphant Son of God, but as a sensitive, anxious, frightened mortal being. The voice I hear as He asked, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" is not one that knows exactly how His trial will end, or how long it was meant to last, or if He could even perform the task at all. In my mind, it was a voice that trembled with bone breaking doubt. That vision of Christ is relatable to me. The record says He fell on His face under the weight of it all. He knows what it is like to be totally alone in that feeling, to have disciples falling asleep at the crucial moment He needed them. He knows what it is like to feel "exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death." (Matthew 26:38-39)

I don't know how much longer this pandemic will last. I don't know how much longer the other garbage my life is throwing at me will go on. And I have learned a bitter truth that some trials in life do not have a foreseeable mortal end. For all I know, they may go on forever.

However, I believe Christ knows about the trials that feel neverending. Christ continues to suffer with us to this day, 2000 years after His Gethsemane. He has yoked Himself to us, even now, treading the winepress alone until every grape is turned to wine, and every dredge from our bitter cup is drunk. I have to believe He knows how to succor His people in their infirmity. (Alma 7)

As I languish "in my Gethsemane," I want to believe that He knows how to "reach me in my reaching." Looking out my window at the snow falling again, I believe that "spring has to come." I don't know what damage this long freeze, metaphorical and literal, will have on us all when it's all over, but I believe life is always strong enough to heal and prevail. I want to believe God will prevail in my life. I want to believe that this languishing must end.