Notes from the Borderline --Lynn Park
Posted in St. Gregory's Members Blog on Friday, August 24, 2007
I know a lot about borderlines, the spaces between. It’s the space Dave Hurlbert and Harriet March Page (both members here at St. Gregory’s) and I touched on in the monologue show Out on the Porch now more than several years ago, the space that’s neither inside nor outside. It’s a both/and that sometimes wishes it could be either/or; it’s a neither that can’t find its way home. It’s the place between inclusion and exclusion, between health and illness, normalcy and deformity, disability and able-bodiedness. It’s borderline personality disorder, well-managed by medication, along with therapy, grace, and hard work to mitigate the hair-trigger responses that sometimes used to shipwreck my best intentions and that sometimes still leave me feeling my nerve endings are exposed. It is knowing about the borderlines across which, and despite which, we extend and receive the touch that bears healing.
“And the Fire and the Rose Are One.” Someone said it was T. S. Eliot’s mark of greatness as a Christian poet that he did not have to “baptize” his every symbol. Sure as the borderline sometimes cuts deep, the fire and the rose sometimes bring something greater than joy. Their presence, or something very like it, has been my reward, when I’ve been faithful to the difficult way that has been set before me. It’s long been my goal “to paint the deep and glowing dark in tones of light that do not lie.” This doesn’t require a heroic nobility or a wistful virtue. Stubbornness and wit, DietPepsi and a good cat, as well as mounds of Kleenex and a ready telephone have seen me though more than once and will, I trust, do so again.
Once, in the midst of great difficulties I had a sense of being encompassed by a dark so deep that my little flashlight would not penetrate it and then felt myself tumbling over and over again through the darkness. When I “opened” my eyes, for it was a kind of vision, it was to a night sky so filled with stars as to bedazzle the senses and to fill me with a great calm.
One of the reasons St. Gregory’s is so precious to me is that I carry as deep in my heart the Buddha as I do the Christ. Many years ago I was graced to see the Christ and the Buddha standing side by side, with light circling between them. As I watched, my eyes still closed, the light circled from them to me, and every prayer than I had not dared to pray was in that moment answered. At St. Gregory’s I am thankful that I can be myself, whose heart does not locate itself solely within the received tradition, and trust that heart will find its home as it plumbs the depths and reaches for the heights—in the company of friends, saints, and angels.
Many, if not most of these notes, will not be baptized but that I trust they will be received and hope that they may perhaps spark conversation. Some days I may start with a recent or not so recent digital photograph. These past months in the hospital have dulled my eye. As I get out and about more, I hope that organ of perception and response reawakens, as photography has become a means of discovery for me this past year, and one I like to share.
Good readers, what borderlines have you crossed or do you eye with either curiosity or trepidation? Are there particular times when the fire and the rose have fed you?
