A Deep, Searching Life
Photo by Elizaveta Dushechkina on Unsplash
Children live such deep, searching lives. Too often the grownups around them don't give them credit for that. They have forgotten, maybe.
Alison McGhee
I don’t know where I came across that quote. Most likely in Alison’s blog. For those of you who don’t know Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week, she presents a new poem from a different writer every week, accompanied by a snippet from her own life to highlight her connection to the poem. And both the poems and the life stories are so artfully gathered that my heart lights up each time a new blog appears on my computer screen in the midst of much I’m considerably less eager to see.
I saved those words because I remember that childhood searching so very well. And I remember, too, how little anyone around me would have been aware of what was going on inside me.
I wanted to know. Something. Anything. I longed to be able to converse with adults, to have my own opinions, to be heard. At the same time, though, I understood that I knew nothing, that because I knew nothing, I had no right to hold any opinion, let alone speak it. And it never occurred to me that would change. I suppose it didn’t occur to me because I needed those conversations right then!
The foundation for my desire grew, no doubt, from a steady diet of kitchen-table debates against a father who was as oppositional as he was brilliant. Debates I lost. Every time. Sometimes lost so emphatically as to flee the room in a storm of tears.
Many years later, that girl’s need to know, to speak, to be heard returned to me while I was standing before a vast banquet hall filled with teachers and librarians. (When you do a lot of public speaking, sometimes your thoughts can be on an entirely different track than your mouth.) And even as I went on talking, I was saying to myself, It’s happened! At last! You know something, some small thing, and these people are listening!
It wasn’t a boastful thought. No grandiosity in it. Just a moment of recognition, a small settling into my own depths.
Wanting to know, though, wanting to understand, went far beyond my need to converse. My father, the debater, had emerged from the Great Depression thoroughly wounded, as so many did, and he must have been impacted by earlier life-altering disappointments, too. Because he was not only a debater, but a cynic, as well. His often-repeated mantra was plain and to the point. “Life is a dirty deal!” The statement always accompanied by detailed proofs. I listened—I had no choice but to listen—but remained stubbornly determined that my world couldn’t possibly be as bad as he said. I wouldn’t allow it to be!
Since I never once won a debate with my father, I held my silence. But in that silence, I kept searching for a different, more wholesome, more satisfying truth. In my teen years, I latched onto religion. I attended church even when the rest of my family did not. I read Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, and Evelyn Underhill, a Christian mystic, absorbing their worlds in ways that impact me even now. But my search didn’t truly find support and justification until my junior year in college. That’s when I took my first philosophy class ... and discovered that others before me had asked the questions I’d been carrying my entire life. They had even dared speak those questions out loud!
Aristotle. Immanuel Kant. Bishop Berkeley. And on and on and on.
For the very first time, I knew I belonged in the human race.
Yes, Alison, I remember that deep searching ... for understanding, for hope. I remember longing for a Truth I could live. I remember the child who wanted so desperately to mean something ... to herself, to others. And I will never forget how completely alone I felt in my search.
It has taken a long time to understand that the lonely little girl, the one who lives inside me still, is a gift, a gift that has informed and energized my career. And not just my career. My entire life.
How grateful I am that she never gave up the search!
