All the rest were negative. They were only graces in the sense that God in His mercy was permitting me to fly as far as I could from His love but at the same time preparing to confront me, at the end of it all, and in the bottom of the abyss, when I thought I had gone farthest away from Him. Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es. Si descendero in infernum, ades. For in my greatest misery He would shed, into my soul, enough light to see how miserable I was, and to admit that it was my own fault and my own work. And always I was to be punished for my sins by my sins themselves, and to realize, at least obscurely, that I was being so punished and burn in the flames of my own hell, and rot in the hell of my own corrupt will until I was forced at last, by my own intense misery, to give up my own will.
I had tasted something of this before: but that was nothing compared to the bitterness that soon began to fill me in that year at Cambridge.
The mere realization of one’s own unhappiness is not salvation: it may be the occasion of salvation, or it may be the door to a deeper pit in Hell, and I had much deeper to go than I realized. But now, at least, I realized where I was, and I was beginning to try to get out.
Some people may think that Providence was very funny and very cruel to allow me to choose the means I now chose to save my soul. But Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them.
And all the irony and cruelty of this situation came, not from Providence, but from the devil, who thought he was cheating God of my stupid and uninteresting little soul.
So it was, then, that I began to get all the books of Freud and Jung and Adler out of the big redecorated library of the Union and to study, with all the patience and application which my hangovers allowed me, the mysteries of sex-repression and complexes and introversion and extroversion and all the rest. I, whose chief trouble was that my soul and all its faculties were going to seed because there was nothing to control my appetites—and they were pouring themselves out in an incoherent riot of undirected passion— came to the conclusion that the cause of all my unhappiness was sexrepression! And, to make the thing more subtly intolerable, I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest crimes in this world was introversion, and, in my efforts to be an extrovert, I entered upon a course of reflections and constant self-examinations, studying all my responses and analyzing the quality of all my emotions and reactions in such a way that I could not help becoming just what I did not want to be: an introvert.
I, myself, see nothing wrong in aspiring to be an introvert. In fact, in my line of business (blogging, poetry, now podcasting), I find that being an introvert is absolutely necessary. Sitting at my kitchen table every evening, pounding out my daily posts, I need silence, focus, and a glass of wine. My son sits across from me, gaming most of the time, and he can be obnoxiously loud. I get most of my best writing done after he goes to bed.
In the last 24 hours, however, I've been distracted by something much more upsetting to me--the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It came across my Facebook feed late Friday evening. As soon as I saw Justice Ginsburg's face, I knew that she was gone. And I lost a little faith in the future of the United States.
Now, the woman was 87 years old and suffering from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Her demise shouldn't have come as a surprise. Yet, she was indefatigable in her energy and devotion to her calling. She was working on the current session of the Supreme Court from her hospital bed. And her last official public statement, given to her granddaughter a few days ago, was this: "My greatest wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."
I am not going to get all political in this post. Not going to say anything about the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans who started talking about replacing Ginsburg a mere four or five hours after she passed. (Four or five hours. Let that sink in.) Won't be calling out Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham or Donald Trump. There will be time for that tomorrow and the next day and the next.
Tonight, I honor the memory of a brilliant woman who fought her entire life for justice and equality. She wasn't perfect. She would have been the first to admit that. But she did her best to make the world a better place, and the world IS a better place because Ruth Bader Ginsburg lived. Ask my daughter who is studying to become a doctor. Or my sister who is a licensed master plumber and drove trucks at the mine. Or my friend, Gigi, who was a federal prosecutor. Or my other friend, Amanda, who's an attorney, too. Or my friend, Bobby, who's married to the man he's loved for 36 years.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy is long and far-reaching. That is what I want to say tonight. She was a warrior in every sense of the word, fighting the hard battles, over and over. And, for the most part, she won those battles, over and over.
It doesn't matter whether you're Democrat or Republican. Take out a glass. Fill it with wine or juice or Coke or milk or whiskey. Lift that glass in a toast to a tiny, profound, righteous woman who reached down and lifted everyone up.
Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's life.
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