I return to the image used by Jesus about the vineyard: He is the vine, and God is the gardener. We are the branches of the vine. The Gardener removes the branches that do not bear fruit, and those that do bear fruit He prunes so that they bear more fruit.
Walt Whitman also said in his poem “Song of Myself”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
It has been more than a year since I discovered Christ, awake in my heart, and since then my life has been like that branch that the gardener prunes. I still contain multitudes, but there are not as many of us now.
Jesus gave a commandment: that we love one another as He loves us.
Among that multitude, how many fulfill that commandment?
In the past year and a half, those who do fulfill it have prospered and those who don’t have withered and faded away.
The one who has prospered is the one who seeks a relationship that could lead to forming a family. The one who hasn’t, is the one who would never be satisfied even if he had a harem.
The one who has prospered is the one who sings. The one who hasn’t, is the one who fears doing so.
The one who has prospered is the one who seeks peace in his relationships. The one who hasn’t, is the one who harbored resentments.
And so, the multitude advances through the fields of God.
Classes at Berklee ended a month ago. My plan during this time was to read, paint, compose, and do all the things I hadn’t done so far in Boston. What happened was very different. At the end of the semester, I heard sounds coming from a dark part of my mind that I had not yet entered. I felt a strong urge: “enter that cave.” I sensed who was waiting for me there: one who had made me suffer all my life, especially in the last two years. So, I entered the cave, torch in hand, praying everything I knew.
I began a qigong practice designed for deep purification processes, which was supposed to be done for 40 days. It took me about 45 minutes in the morning and another 45 minutes at night. I stopped after a week. Functioning in the world became impossible, and I fell into a senseless contradiction where I felt under constant attack. Without going into much detail, I felt I was going to be rejected and fail both personally and professionally. It was two days of wandering through the desert. But that was an illusion, and like waking from a bad dream, the conflict dissolved the moment I decreed that, no matter what, I would stop punishing myself and would love myself unconditionally. Poof! The conflict vanished, and the rest of the day was wonderful.
Feeling that I had resolved that, I abandoned the 40-day practice and decided to rest.
However, little by little, that fearful, humiliated, and punishing self began to return without me even noticing. I don’t really know how things progressed, but I do know that this past Friday, once again, my inner world was plunged into an apparently irresolvable conflict.
Again, I felt the urge to grab the torch and enter the cave. I did just that, and the pain intensified, as if, by approaching the dragon, the temperature began to rise unbearably. This is where, if it were not for the help of Christ, I would not have taken another step. But through prayer, I kept moving forward and, finally, I found what I was looking for.
It was shame: the self that had felt rejected and humiliated, and that had since been hiding from others and punishing itself for not fitting in. “I am a misfit,” it said. “If you show yourself as you are, you will be rejected again,” it felt.
A cry of humiliation passed through me, and with it several images passed like a movie through my mind. They were all the moments in my life when I had felt rejected by my friends and other people I cared about. It’s something that has happened to me on several occasions throughout my life. The most recent was in the fall of 2022. After that, my life at Berklee became very complicated, and I gradually tended to isolate myself without really realizing what was happening. The last one to cross my mind occurred when I was 5 years old, and I saw it again clearly as if I were living it anew.
In that childhood vision, I saw myself sitting on the playground floor, behind a small fountain with my back against a fence, while my two best friends (and one of their cousins, who joined in) insulted, yelled at, and punished me. Not without reason; I had been a little tyrant with them. I remembered, as I watched this pain pass, how I used to give them scores based on how good friends they were to me. If that wasn’t enough, the fact is that I always gave one of them very high scores, “F. has twenty billion three hundred thousand points,” and poor E. always had barely two or three. As I said, a little tyrant.
I then understood how that pain had stayed in my body and unconscious all these years, filling my life with shame and fear of rejection. Having occurred at such a young age, that trauma became a facet of my personality. Despite remaining hidden in the depths, it manifested on the surface as a major limitation to my self-esteem and my ability to relate to others. But now that the life within me is expanding unstoppably and rapidly, I had begun to feel that my personality was becoming painfully small.
How beautiful to think that that child, wounded, humiliated, and ashamed, finally dared to come out of his hiding place, trusting in the One who awaited him in the light. Twenty-four years later, that little self was found amidst the hustle and bustle of the crowd. Once embraced by that light that is Christ, he let out a final cry of relieved pain, and with it, he dissolved forever into Love.
Who knows how my personality will evolve now that that shame has been healed. Perhaps I will discover that I want to be a cabaret dancer or start talking with strangers on the bus. Who knows. I only know that this is how the gardener prunes the branch little by little so that it bears even more fruit.
With all my love,
A.
P.S.: I have been listening to this string quartet that Beethoven wrote after an illness that nearly took his life. This movement is titled “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart,” which translates to “Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity from a Convalescent in the Lydian Mode.” A beautiful expression of Beethoven’s triumph over adversity and his gratitude for the gift of life.
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