Nocturia

Black Saturday, 2019.

Woke up at 11 thinking of nocturia and prostate cancer. Peed. Cleaned up Fitz because we forgot to put a diaper on him. He liked the warmth of the bath water, and he’s sleeping on the couch’s mattress on the floor in my room now. Stayed awake thinking of nocturia, prostate cancer, death, and my utter lack of meaningful production. I want to do something meaningful before I die. “But what about your kids?” I say. What could be more meaningful to them? And I find that my meaning has little to do with what’s really meaningful, for I am a man of golden blessings, and I think again about death. Whether good or not, I’m of no use but consumption. And so I got up to consume toast and tea and a book or two.

“I prayed to him in Rome,” I said. “It was like calling down an empty well.”
Said Gillian, “Could it be it’s he instead that’s calling you?”
I said, “But silence has no voice to call.”
“The voice of silence calls, ‘Be still and hear,’ poor dunce,” said she. “The empty well within your heart calls to. It says, ‘Be full.’”
“Oh Gillian, I thirst, I thirst,” I said.
“Then drink your fill, old bear!” she cried, and dowsed my head so deep into the pond that when I dredged it up again, my beard was green with weeds, and she was gone.

Buechner, Godric, (1980), 70.

Would that I’d think of writing, and any creative act—even parenting—as cosmos from chaos, as incarnational love, as a gift from God and a Second Adamic privilege, as a participation in God’s very creation, and not as what I would normally consider meaningful. But the thinking is as much a grace as the cosmos-ing, and I am left with my thoughts of nocturia and consumption. I thirst, I thirst. Would that I would drink, but I am as much the bear as Godric.

And so Christ is glorified in the depth of his forgiveness and in the imputation of his very righteousness to one such as me. And all is as it should be. For if my going to hell were to bring him honor, should it not be? Though he is of love, and I question whether that is ever quenched. And so if my suffering brings him honor, should it not be? Would that I believed that—it’s surely the right thing to believe. It’s just the believing that’s impossible. And so Christ is honored again in my disbelief.

“Be still and hear,” she says. But how can a man be still, how can he hear, but by being made to? How can he drink but by a push?

Satan tells us our own Easter is found here, now, and in work. The Apostles tell us it’s already here but not yet, and so we wait for Christ’s return. It’s hard to remember that we’re still in the climax of our own story. Unless he comes back before our deaths, we won’t see the resolution until resurrection.

2:12 A.M., and I still haven’t stilled to listen.