I'll Rise

I love the following lines from Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" poem:

into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise

What is it like to see life as an adventure?
To no longer live chained to fear
of the unknown
of the unsearched, untouched, unpredictable
To see the horizon as bursting with color
rather than hazy, bleak, and dismal

Jumping into the depths of what is not known
Yet trusting that I am held
I find myself

There is a passage from C.S. Lewis' "Weight of Glory" that struck me several years ago when I was at a breaking point in my faith journey. I had experienced months of turmoil and hardship and a sense of not "feeling" the presence of the one whose essence I longed to touch more than any other, my saviour and my God. I felt as though i'd walked through the desert without a sip of water for weeks, and just wanted some kind of release. "God, are you still here?," the words pressed hard in my head. "Why are you doing this to me?" After months of crying out for help, a sense of rest and peace, or even death to release me from the grip of inner suffering, I got an answer: JUMP.

Words spoken to my heart: "Stop holding onto that last little straw, that last little piece for yourself because you don't fully trust me. You don't fully trust that I have your good in store, so you hang on to the tiniest morsel in hopes that if things turn sour, you can go back."

Lewis responds well to my fears and anxieties:

The tempter tells me, “Take care. Think how much this good resolve, the acceptance of this Grace, is going to cost.” But Our Lord equally tells us to count the cost…What matters, what Heaven desires and Hell fears, is precisely that further step, out of our depth, out of our own control.

What does all of this mean? The true Christian life is marked by a remarkable degree of "unselfing" and only in jumping out into what is beyond our reach and beyond our control, will we truly find peace. Safety nets, as Lewis suggests, are really no help at all. Jesus constantly calls his disciples to go beyond their limits, and in stepping beyond those limits they get to witness and partake in absolutely crazy things: healings, miracles, a vision of resurrection. If we want to come to terms with the truths bouncing around in our hearts and in the universe, we have to give up every shred of our own dignity and say "I want what you have for me instead."

I'm coming around the bend of a hard, but very good, time of sharpening. And as I look to the future, Angelou's words speak to my own sense of things:

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

For an added experiential element, i'm attaching Ben Harper's musical rendering of the poem: