Absence is Presence

I originally wrote this post in 2018. I hope, even though historic, it may provide insight into understanding me and how I understand my world. It is a very long post but it does explain how my life has so dramatically changed. It isn't where I am now, but much of what was written remains meaningful, therefore I feel worth keeping.

So...back..three years...

I love these words spoken in the TV series, The Young Pope, a.k.a. Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) 'absence is presence'.

These words of the young pope echo my own conflicted and still emerging search for enlightenment— Like Lenny, my feelings and faith have been shaped through a life of abandonment. Abandonment sometimes by my own choices and sometimes others. I am at last finding closure on a life that has been unhealthy and abusive and feeling my way forward toward a place of health and potential.

Background.

I was minister of a church, after ten years of marriage my wife confessed to having an affair. It was personally shocking and publicly humiliating. Shortly after she left with her daughter, half our belongings and the whole life we had made together including the last four years with the congregation we served in community where we lived. People often feel the gap left by someone (or something) they long for, so powerfully as if the longing itself is a presence. Everywhere I went in those first days of separation, her absence was palpable. Juliet Binoche says to Scarlett Johansson in the film Ghost in the shell, 'We cling to memories as if they define us, but they really don't. What we do is what defines us'.

'My God! Why have you forsaken me?

In those dark days my life felt like a routine of forced futility. I would walk my huge dog 'Harley' around the small park close to my home which was right next door to the church, right on the main road for all passers by to observe my resolve. Every day for over a year I walked hundreds of circuits of that park. I cried into the wind, beseeched clouds above, blasphemed into my coat and waited in that half empty house for the divine intervention promised in the platitudes of Christian 'friends'. Instead of communication, I sensed a silent neglect of excommunication. I read books on spiritual wilderness, bereavement, grief, I gained wisdom but no comfort.

Then I had to find a way forward, and so I began to paint and draw again. I'd get up, have a coffee, walk the dog, then paint all day. I'd stop around five when the light began to fade. Then I'd walk the dog again. some days my only spoken words were to other dog walkers or Tesco checkout staff as I picked up groceries. I really was living in almost total isolation. Evenings alone in that house, I'd have a beer, eat a couple of bags of quavers and then look at the days work, make mental notes on what to change tomorrow, have a hot bath and go to bed early. Really early!... Half past eight or nine! What else was there to do? I lost three stone in twelve weeks. This self portrait was done at that time. It was painted from a photo I took in an upstairs bedroom. It was just after my wife moved out. Blu-tac on the wall where pictures once hung. Absence is presence.

Every Sunday I still had to perform my duties as a minister, I would get up listless, numb, yet somehow sermons would form in my mind and flow out of my mouth. Ironically in church I appeared anointed, while at home I felt abandoned. This was not simply about my marriage break up, it was not just about the death of my Mother in Canada and the visceral back lash from my family after she died. Or about my three year estranged relationship with my Daughter. It wasn't about the lack of friendship from those I thought loved me and I could trust. It was about... everything! My heart, mind, body and soul were broken.

Stuff

Time is not a healer, time just helps you pile up all your present stuff against the past, the way you pile furniture up against a door to stop the monster getting in. Like a ferry, time moves so slowly you feel you may never pull away from the shore. Impatiently you fury at the lack of progress, until, incrementally the current carries you into deeper waters and higher winds, so images and sounds become blurred and muffled. It's not that you really 'heal' you just wait long enough that each time you look back from where you came, the landscape is more distant and less distinct than last time you looked.

Now

Three years on, thankfully, I've arrived in a very different place in every sense. I am no longer Minister of that church, I live in a new house, a new town, a new job, plotting out a very different future. I hate that christian poem called 'footsteps' I wasn't carried through my darkest days I was almost crushed under the weight of my cross. My body is older, heart harder, mind wiser and soul still striving to follow the one who's absence is presence.