Enough for Him [and I]

In the bleak midwinter is found the most radiant Light.

A very, very Happy New Year and Epiphanytide to my readership. I have passed through the crucible of the un-, faux, illness: the cough, all but gone; the ribs (six fractures, give or take one), all but healed; the inflammation, sublimed. All told, I coughed up more than 1cup of blood and sludge from my lungs over that period of months. Breathing is easier now than I had remembered it ever could be. The tinnitus remains indefatigable, as does the attenuated hearing—but my ears, usually, are now no longer painfully popping every time I swallow (it has been a very long two years in that regard). Tachycardia also has not manifested in over a month.

And so we return to some meditations while I work on larger projects.

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Amidst Epiphanytide, my church choir sang this setting of In the Bleak Midwinter. A couple days after Christmas, I inquired whether I could miss the Sunday on which this song was scheduled. The answer? “But Paul, you have the verse 3 solo. We’re doing the piece because we’re hosting a special guest, remember?”

And so we sang. Because of travels, I only made it to one rehearsal before the Sunday morning. And in that rehearsal, my voice was a tenuous, fractured, frail thing. The major sixth from the G of “of” to the E of “milk”: a warped sixth at best. And so on. Several of the soprani turned around, dubiously glaring at me. Of course, they do not care enough to know; they do not care nearly enough to know that I was choking on blood dripping down from my sinuses, down my throat, spattering my voice box with coagulation. A few other people, sensing the need for courtesy, halfheartedly remark, “Oh, Paul, that’s so lovely.”

And the Sunday morning comes. We do a run-through; and my voice is even worse than before. Rather than being an 1/8 step flat here or there, at one point, I am flatly a 1/2 step flat. My voice crackles out on several of the sustained notes. The soprani again rehearse their accusatory glares. No one says anything. Courtesy lies dead upon the chancel floor.

The service begins. We sing the hymns and all the rest; we say the prayers. The offertory comes and goes. I sing the solo in four breaths. As “which adore…” drifts across the nave, the director’s eyes glow, a smile besieging the lips: I trusted you, Paul—and not for naught.

Following the service, the husband of the only non-accusatory soprano tracks me down. “Paul, I—when you started singing, I was straining to see who it was, I didn’t know that—you, I’d, I’d never heard, by itself, just your—it was, it was just so very good.”

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My sinuses were bleeding (from my Eustachian tubes, as far as I can tell), the blood taking a forked road—some, down my right nostril; some, down my throat. As I coughed to clear my throat amidst hymns and the rest, I, each time, drew my hand away, checking for blood. To listeners, I sang the solo in four breaths: but it was only three. One of the pauses was only to swallow the cluttering, encroaching sludge in my throat. But none of the listeners knew any of this. What they saw, what they heard, was, as far as I can tell—judging by the many praises and compliments which were laid before me—an unalloyed rendition of that shimmering verse of that shimmering image of Epiphany. None of the glaring soprani spoke a word to me. Does that not say more than any compliment?

As quick as some may be to say otherwise, I write none of this to boast, except insofar as I may boast in weakness. I write this to remark on the idea of Enough for [x].

One of the countless majesties of Epiphany—whose teachings are innumerable—is the tension between merit and satisfaction. Christ, it goes without saying, did not merit the dirt and squalor of the incarnation, of childbirth, of humanity. However, He elected still to be satisfied thereby. He chose satisfaction where merit might shrilly cry, “But no!” For, in His final analysis, if you will, it was Enough. It was Enough for Him because He willed it so, thereby sundering and breaking as upon His knee every axiom of justice, fairness, and “ethics.” For His chosen people, every last needling disrespect and demeaning insult of the human condition was Enough.

But I am no expositor; and so I shall stop the sermon before it becomes one. I, rather, am merely a storyteller, at best, and I often tell stories about myself. This is not because I think I am a particularly interesting subject, but rather because I happen to know more about myself and the contours of my life than anything else. After all, it is my life: or, more accurately, it is that life which has been given to me. My life is not my own, after all. It has been my lot in Providence to have my life torn asunder and plunged into an ocean of novel medical difficulties. And so, I seek to tell worthwhile stories about such an ocean as that.

Oceans are wild, flighty things. Only Our Lord has ever succeeded in calming one, after all. And I have spent much time in combat—combat against drowning in an ocean of psychosomatic malaise—locked in introspective violence over my battered body. It would be so easy to give up, you know. I have stood and sung choral music while tachycardia was wrenching my heart rate to just shy of 200bpm. I have gone to work, countless days, swimming in vertigo, deafening tinnitus, and pain: stabbing pains, aching pains, whatever pains. Many days are, in actuality, these horrific, distended battles. Few around me know, of course. How could they? Those who know I am ill, well, they forget. So, they too often do not know—not really. And to give up would, superficially, be such a respite. When the call for help comes, and I simply respond, “Oh, no, I can’t, I’m sorry. I’m really sick.” Such a respite.

But it would be a lie.

There is too much to do. To languish in agony does nothing to alter or ameliorate the agony. One must act. Yes, I often am swallowing blood while singing. What if I were not singing? Well, the blood would still be there, seeping. I would not be any more well. The only difference would be that there would be no music. And so I sing.

We all, each of us, have been given such grand playbills. We may elect to decline them, to write our own scripts, if you will. But the Pageant is ready and waiting: it needs only the players to present themselves.

And so, it is Enough for me, to seek the good works prepared before me and to do them. The body may heal, or it mayn’t. I don’t know what will happen in that regard. I am better than I was a year ago, which is better than the year before that. Perhaps the thorn shall never fully exit my flesh. Perhaps it shall. That potentiality has no bearing, however, on the good works laid before me. No influence over the playbill. Via free will, there is no ironclad diktat proclaiming, The Show Must Go On. No, it needn’t. I could quit. Anyone could. The good works would simply languish, undone. The Show is not, you see, played by us: it is us.

It is Enough that there are yet labors appointed for me. And I encourage you, for whatever such encouragement may be worth, to not languish, and thereby leave good works to languish undone. The body submits to the mind; the mind, the will; the will, the heart. You must love that which has been given unto you to be Enough.

It is what Christ did at Epiphany. Go and do likewise.