Today I finally took the time to watch the Ram Dass documentary, "Fierce Grace". In the film he mentions that his former guru once said to him, "My suffering brings me closer to God." Believe it or not, I get that. It's because of all the ways I have suffered that I searched for my faith. While hiking the trail, my initial goal, as I once said, was to begin to believe in myself, "to prove myself to myself", yet by the end, I also believed in God. I never expected that transformation. The presence of a god had always seemed like wishful thinking to me. As so many atheists ask, "If there's a god, why would he let _______ happen?" Why would he let people blow each other up? Why would he allow children to be traumatized by their parents and then have those children grow up to hate themselves?
These are all valid questions and the answer will always be: because of free will and because our pain blinds us. Humans carry suffering forward, generation after generation because they can't see past their own hurts. When that pain festers within their psyche, it begins to cause them to poison those around them. Not all of us have the will power or the inner strength to choose to see beyond it. Many of us sway wildly between wanting to spread our pain and trying to bury it so that we can at least try to give people joy. Our suffering keeps us from being rational, keeps us from being conscious, until we allow it to be our guide. I asked myself over and over again, "how can I find a way out of this?" It may have taken 6 years between the end of my denial and my Appalachian Trail through-hike, but I daydreamed about the AT throughout those 6 years of grief.
One thing I've been trying to find a way to articulate is that despite how often I may get caught up in the whole "woe is me" bullsh*t, when my thoughts wander to my biological father, I don't feel any anger towards him. The closest word for how I feel about him is indifferent. He was a storm that I got caught in. My biological mother left me in the care of a hurricane and the hurricane did what hurricanes do. Now on the flip side, I hate that this led me to experience an extraordinary level of self-loathing, subtle at first, but then it became all encompassing. I hate that it led me to be incapable of experiencing the emotional intimacy necessary for falling in love (until about 21). I have spent a lot of my time hating the emotional, psychological, and physiological fallout of the experience, but over the last 11 years, I haven't felt even a sliver of hatred or anger towards my father whatsoever. I do not equate this with forgiveness. If I had forgiven him fully, I would hardly ever think about him.
But I can accept that my biological father was, in his own way, walking me closer to God. There are so many amazing things that HAVE happened in my life that probably never would have, had this trauma not occurred. There are so many ideas incubating in my mind about how we can change the future for the new generations that would not be there if I had not been through what I'd been through. I can accept that as I allow my suffering to bring me into the arms of God, that those around me will also be brought into the arms of God.
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