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On
Incarnation
by Morten Andersen
On Incarnation:
a Vancouver War College debrief
Having grown up on the country side, never being surrounded by
tall buildings or sirens, and never being exposed to open drug
use, it was quite the change of environment.
However, I have experienced not knowing where my next meal
would come from; have experienced being in despair and taken a
look at the bottles in the cabinet, fighting the battle of the
temptation to drown my despair and sorrow in strong liqueur or
beer; I have grown up around bio-polar and ADHD, seen the
effects of alcohol close up, experienced being completely
depleted of love, and looked through the empty facade or mask,
which desperately tries to hold everything together by denying
the real issues – and the more I looked through that mask the
more I failed to recognize my own issues. Instead I kept
magnifying how everyone else where superficial and live lives
depleted of love, hidden underneath another mask of
self-denial, hurts, pains, habits and hang-ups. And yet I was
powerless to do anything about it.
I have grown up with social out-casts who went in and out of
jail, for drinking and for violence. But I also knew that the
real issue was never the drinking, nor the violence. My friend
was just another person with a butt-load of hurts, habits,
hang-ups and perhaps most of all fear for being known. I just
didn't know how to express that feeling, or what to do about
it. Yet I was filled with tears on their behalf – sharing that
pain, frustration, anger, despair and powerlessness.
Even though I never used drugs myself, I was by no means
sparred from addictive behaviour. I relate to the struggle of
fighting the impulse – the sense of want, and wanting it NOW!
And most of all the sense of disgust, followed closely by
shame and guilt and the feeling of being completely alone in
that situation, with nowhere to turn for help and no-one to
talk to. And the more I looked for that help and for those
persons “out there” I only just kept seeing more people having
the same problems. The only difference being they had
travelled so much further down that road and convinced
themselves that their behaviour was completely acceptable,
perhaps even something to brag about. And then, what only
brought forth more guilt, shame and disgust, was all of a
sudden socially acceptable – and before long the struggle was
buried too far down to hope to reach by myself. Soon it was
even necessary to keep doing. But still the emptiness never
disappeared.
I don't know what my expectations were for coming to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I guess I
expected to learn what it meant to live my new life – the new
“Christian” life, whatever that meant. I was next to rootless,
because I knew all my opinions, all my viewpoints, all my
convictions, all my values, all my thinking, all my
behaviours, even all my excuses – all of it – was up for
revision. All I really expected was hardship and pain in the
process of change, blended with a weird mixture of laughter
and fun, travels and delays, rising up only to fall forward
again, of daily living and daily death. I expected it to be a
year of submission and obeying. To follow God's direction – I
mean, what else could I do? No reason to fool myself anymore –
everybody thought I was crazy anyways... might as well get the
full nine yards out of it.
What I didn't expect was how I found myself in those whom I on
the outside had no similarities to. I didn't expect my inner
being, being exposed on the canvas of another human soul,
body, mind and heart. I didn't expect to find this place being
one of the Western World's most clearest mirrors. Whatever
presuppositions, whatever was hidden out of sight in me,
whatever I was afraid of – all of it – was walking around me
in perfect daylight and clear sight.
It reminds me of whenever I walked into my neighbour's barn
where I grew up. It was a colder temperature inside, on the
warm and sunny, summer days, and the floor was hard and dirty.
Everything was darker inside, so it took a moment to adjust
the eyes. But after a few moments I saw the light from the
warm sun shining through all the crack, and all the saw dust
specks was hanging in the air, dancing around.
In the same way, I have now travelled to a colder and harder
place where the sun doesn't shine as much. But somehow the sun
shines through all the cracks, and lights upon all the saw
dust specks, which dance around in mid-air all around me. And
in seeing the saw dust, I slowly learned to quite myself for a
moment and see yet another plank sticking out of my own eye.
So in answering how I incarnated my conclusion is this: I came
here exactly as everybody else – with baggage and tainted
glasses. I came here exactly as everybody else – with dreams
for a brighter future, but too disorientated to take them down
from the sky and turn them into reality. I came here exactly
as everybody else – with a longing to help those around me,
but strangely reluctant to help myself first.
I came here exactly as everybody else – deluded, and caught up
in redundant stuff leading to destination “no where” without
realising it spells “now here.”
Praise be to God that I also came here with an unquenchable
thirst and hunger for Him, for honesty, for knowing love, for
wanting to live life to its fullest, with a drive to keep
going on, and for having been placed with the best possible
support around me. I rejoice to say that my eyes were, and
continue to be, opened to my own planks. And I want to testify
how humbling it has been to find how much I actually was like
the people who live in a place “such as this” - how humbling
it was to realise the labels pushed down on these people are
but reflections of our own minds, souls, bodies, and hearts.
I was just as broken, just as love depleted, just as deluded,
as anyone else here. And that made it my home. And just as
anyone else living in this home, I often experienced the
barriers I experienced in my addictive behaviour. The struggle
to share. The struggle to stop.
The struggle to accept. The struggle of emptiness. The
struggle of being new. And thus the struggle to love. Thus the
struggle to relate.
Thus the struggle to find the motivation to keep doing what
must be done and oftentimes I failed to live out the
requirements, but instead I were merely doing them.
Sometimes I even felt a struggle to care.
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