I am walking in a strange city. It is neither night nor day. Why I am here I cannot say. I come to one particular street – a cheap notional place brazenly vaunting the dregs and idiocies of our cultural life.

Here I pace along a shifting array of storefronts pausing occasionally, scrutinizing the featured assemblages of merchandise within unkempt windowed fronts. It is a succession of phantom forms bidding for my attention.

Oddly, I identify that beyond the surroundings of this street loom the hulking skeletal remains of larger buildings – as you might see after a bombing raid during World War II. Everywhere, I am confronted by these ghostly and haphazard kaleidoscopic images, and engaging as they are, I am possessed of a wanting to be elsewhere.

It is my dream. I think my fantasy is a fabrication of an underlying and often present disquietude counterpoint to all else that I am.

THE EVENING BEFORE I had been reading an essay of a favored theologian whose thoughts often forced my own thinking toward regions of introspection not before visited. Relaxed, I with quiet mien followed the text. Then! One phrase stepped forward from the writing, volunteered itself front and center: “anxiety of failure.”

The phrase was a signpost toward memory’s depths summoning to my attention places of defeat, frustration, withdrawal and spiritual turmoil – regions of hurt where often I had been driven.

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Earlier on, I was a young man waking up with a wish to go where his then meager gifts could not take him. I was not at home to myself, needing yet to sort out what one must know and believe if I was to nurture in myself a more constructive mindscape.

Considering the upstream region of who I am (my childhood home and the unfocused nature of my early education) might help to explain the seemingly attendant disquietude underlying and dominating so much of my middle years. However, I do not wish to go there.

I have already factored in the historical positives and negatives of who I am, along with this capricious notion that failure is always lounging off stage waiting for its cue. These things are the substratum out of which I have now obtained a different mindset – experienced and more alert to the nuanced and ambiguous nature of our lives.

What I wish to set out is my desire not to have to forfeit the conviction that our lives arise out of a cosmic reality, a holy intelligence that is always out of reach. All my life I have been exploring this phantom land of spiritual likelihoods, yet a place no less real of all the lands our minds walk in – exploring it in words away from rational squabble.

It is important that we understand the intimate nature of this interior landscape of the spirit. Yes, there are genuinely rational insights that help to explain who and what we are; but these are not the whole story.

IT WAS NOT EASY to lay aside that image of myself constructed when I was young and by which I had lived so much of my life. Firmly, through those years my disquietude remained a continuing dynamic, strangely nurturing in me a deeper knowledge of myself and the will to wrestle down my anxiety of failure.

Now, it is what I have done as of this ninth decade of my life relative to where I have been that is most upliftingly of interest to me. As for my dream and its attendant disquietude, let it be a kind of “dropped handkerchief” inviting my waking self toward new landscapes of being – and I am not forgetting, the dream was mother to this essay.

It is for me a major thought that perhaps our lives prosper and progress, not so much by maturation, but because they are often friended by a timely disquietude – a restiveness possibly fostered by a dawning awareness of our lives being nothing less than an ongoing dialogue with our God!

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is minister of visitation emeritus at First Parish Church in Saco. He may be contacted at mesteva@maine.rr.com.


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