Born Out of Deep Sighs
As I sit here flipping through all my old papers I find my first letter to you, reading it again and again I marvel at its contents, it’s so…. I can’t really put into words what I feel and experience. I don’t know if it is due to my feeling of alienation from you, because I don’t know today what you look like, how you have changed, evolved, who you have become?
But I close my eyes and dream away, then I can see you as you once were, who are you today? After all these painful months, I wonder: Am I the one who has changed, because if I feel alienated from you that I haven’t seen, haven’t met for so long, who has changed: Is it me?
And can you feel alienated from someone you haven’t met in a very long time and are not meeting right now? It must be in the thought that you and I have changed in our absence from our once vibrant community. For in the thought you are there and with the accumulated knowledge of how I function, of how people change over time, I am frightened by the thought and experience this alienation of the thought in front of you whom I love but right now do not meet in the living reality but only in the meeting of the possibility that takes place lovingly in the thought of you, in the prayer for you, in my striving towards you, in faith in our Lord’s ability that everything is possible for Him and everything is possible for those who believe.
There is and lives my hope, the absurd hope that does not attach its tentacles to reason, for it saws them down, not on human powers or abilities but only in the power of an absurd faith in a God who exists and exists and loves us and wants our love for each other to continue to operate not only in the thought of each other but to be realized in reality, in the eternal meeting that can take place in the hour until the time of this world has come and we will meet in another way, where something higher than our love for each other will prevail, I do not know how or really what only that it will happen and be. Since I have not been able to look at you, meet you or embrace you for a long time, have I lost my love for you, never! Has the pain diminished with the healing of time - no, all my pain testifies to that; only the opposite has been proved to my soul, my heart.
I saw the young man standing on the bare and barren rocky ledge, looking out over the mighty but terrible waterfall. Hail: Thou mighty roar, Thou weeping monument.
There stands the young man, born of deep sighs, born to live, to die, to live, what… Born for what? He looks away weeping towards the mighty forest, he hears the pure tones of the singing birds mixed with the cries of the falling waters. The youth from the desolate island of solitude, from the bare rock of emptiness, from the dead dust of the ground, he cannot forget but only remember, he cannot repress but only live with the light and darkness of reality. He cannot be free, but his bondage is his freedom; he cannot be bound, but he is still bound, but he is still not free. “Where are you, my freedom!” - the cry echoes through the sounding reflections of the mountains - but the answer is different, the echo cries: “You are free, are free, free!” The echo slowly dies out and away. Crying, he understands anew what he has always known but denied.
His bloody knees stain his trousers red but he falls down again in sighs of gratitude, the whispers from his cracked lips are muffled, tears sting when they hit his wounded hand, his eyes shine like fire, despite all the broken hopes, despite all the pain, despite all the humiliation, because they have found reconciliation and in reconciliation freedom and in freedom life.
Slowly he climbs down the mighty cliff, he is far from home, far from safety, but the possibility he faced swallowed the past, the figure he carried, which had been black, now became bright and white. He, the most miserable, he, the young man without joy, where the filling was pain given to pain, came down to the ground again. He who had sought had found, he who had doubted was now certain, he who had sinned and so been bound was now free. He was home!
The words are produced so quickly, easily and fluently sometimes, when I then read what I have written as in a dream I see only myself. It is me and I just want to cry, partly because the memory is so painful and partly because the gratitude flows from my heart.
I look again at my first letter to you. I think it begins so pathetically, but there is nothing more difficult than starting a letter to someone you don’t really know yet, but a Hello is a harmless word, isn’t it? It’s extremely neutral, it doesn’t say anything, because it’s bland, but therein may lie its strength, but of course it depends on the subjective opinion of the recipient and the continuation of this pathetic - Hello!