I have. A little over five years ago my wife took the kids and went back to Missouri to visit her parents. Our marriage was in shambles, broken beyond our ability to repair, and her "vacation" was really just a separation. She called me after a week and told me she might not come home, that she and the kids might stay and make a new life.
Like I said, I have been stripped bare.
This particular story has a happy ending. My wife and I are still together, by the grace of God, and things are really, really good between us. But I remember what it was like the night she called, sitting alone in the dark in our tiny house, knowing there was nowhere I could go and nothing I could do to escape the devastating and searing pain I felt. The state of our dis-union was due primarily to my flaws and failures, and while I desperately wanted the comfort of having been betrayed, I knew in my heart my fate was deserved, that I had brought this misery upon myself, that I was reaping the fruits of my own broken harvest.
I have been stripped bare.
Prepping the frame of my bike for powdercoating has brought all this back to me in a flood of memory and guilt. I began by stripping the paint with a spray-on paint remover. The paint bubbled and writhed under the onslaught, and then sloughed off like bits of dead skin. It turned out that the paint had been hiding a host of imperfections. Scratches and scars that heretofore had been invisible were suddenly exposed. Patches of rust, once hidden, stood out like cancerous flowers on the dull landscape of the frame. I attached a steel wire brush to my drill and began to grind away at the flaws, scraping away the scabs of rust, peeling back the layers of infected paint to reveal the metal beneath, naked and bare.
It made me think of Lear, the once mighty king, now buffeted by the storm, a storm of his own making. Having banished his daughter Cordelia for not stroking his ego, he is in turn evicted and rejected by his other daughters, Goneril and Regan, on whom he had bequeathed his power and land in exchange for words of "love." He finds himself stripped of friends and family, wandering on the darkened moor, accompanied only by his fool and the storm raging in the sky and, perhaps more importantly, in his own mind.
Gloucester entreats Regan to allow her father to stay the night, to take refuge against the howling winds. But Lear's plight is of his own devising, Regan reminds him, and therefore he deserves his suffering:
"O! sir, to wilful men,
the injuries that they themselves procure
must be their schoolmasters."
Her insinuation is that Lear can learn something from all this, that somehow, after enduring the wind and the rain, after wandering the unforgiving heath, after having his heart and his mind broken by the unnatural betrayal of his daughters, he will emerge wiser from the ordeal.
She's right, to a degree. Lear is a tragic hero, in the Aristotelean sense. He brought about his own downfall through his own well-intended, but fundamentally unjust, actions. Aristotle called this hamartia, and we see it time and time again in great men and women who are brought down not by external forces but rather through the natural consequences of their own actions: just think of Bill Clinton and Elliot Spitzer, not to mention the host of literary greats like Oedipus and Hamlet. And like all these characters, real or otherwise, Lear does emerge from his trials with a clearer sense of himself and his place in the world, but not before he's stripped bare, not before he's seen the death of all three of his daughters, not before he cries out that "heaven's vault should crack." This is costly wisdom. Oedipus was so grateful for his newfound insight that he gouged out his own eyes. Kurtz looked into his own heart and pronounced it "horror." And when federal agents finally raided Jim Bakker's palatial house, they found him curled in a fetal position under his desk, a reluctant witness to the truth in his own soul.
This kind of wisdom is no blessing. It is no boon. It is not the "sadder, but wiser" yearned for by Professor Harold Hill. This kind of wisdom is pain and destruction. It is a third degree burn, an amputated limb. It is death, the death of self. Does it result in wisdom? Yes. Is it worth it? I don't know.
And so as I scour the imperfections from my frame, knowing that each tiny scratch and cut left by the steel wire will allow the powdercoating to stick all the better, I feel like a torturor. The fact that I know that the frame will be stronger in the long run doesn't mitigate what I'm doing to it right now. As Christians, we often long for "the refiner's fire." But sometimes...sometimes I don't think we really know what we're asking for.
Like the maxim says: "That which doesn't kill me still hurts a hell of a lot."
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