Beyond Survival
Embracing superfluity in Order to Really Live
When I was born, about three months premature, the doctors told my mother that I “was a perfectly-formed baby girl.” I forget when I first heard this story, but it must have been when I was a teenager. I remember that it shook me, knowing that these medical professionals saw no hope and wanted to prepare my mother for the worst at once. Given this beginning, the fact that I didn’t die has always been regarded as either some kind of miracle or as somehow due to my mother’s strength or to my own. Really, it was due to the careful monitoring of the doctors and their decision to send me to a NICU in a neighbouring city.1
So, I survived; well and good. The only disability with which I was left when all was said and done was blindness. But I think that the almost-dying part of things still coloured not only my family’s narratives surrounding me and my life but mine as well. For the most part, these have been positive. My mother is grateful every day that I survived and that I blossomed as time went on. The blindness was something to be dealt with, not something to be suffered. I’ll always be grateful that my family never thought of it as a setback but as a challenge. This was due to some early intervention from the CNIB, but also due to the rise-to-the-occasion nature of my family.2 “Just get on with it” should be on our family crest. It’s true that my mother never doubled down, learning Braille and taking courses on how to teach daily living skills to blind people as some parents I know did, but she did something more important. She worked, cooked dinner, and was a Mom. So, the blindness wasn’t a thing as such, but I think the survival was.
I was often praised for being “smart.” I could play the piano by ear, and to many people this was an amazing thing. To me, I was always lacking in that department, because I went to school with a couple of genuine prodigies who were heaps better at it than I was. So, I felt I knew my place in the scheme of things even if my family insisted that I was amazing. I knew myself to be pretty average in terms of my ability to learn and such, because others always seemed to be streets ahead of me, and this was at a school for the blind as well.3 No one at the school knew of my early survival, and even if they did, for many of them, it would have been nothing great, because they had similar stories. We were just kids being kids, getting into trouble, learning stuff, having fun. It was actually rather refreshing in some ways, not to be told I was smart or somehow made to feel special. My Nanna, (my father’s mother,) even went so far as to say that she thought I was an old soul or that it was like I had been here before. I do sometimes wonder whether the fact of my survival had to lead to miraculous or special things for me in all of our minds. I mean, did we all see it as something destined or some almost-mythological sign of greatness? If I ever did, I think that ship has truly sailed, thank God.
I sometimes wonder whether the imposterish thoughts I often have are linked to the crazy odds of my having survived as a very premature baby in the 1970s. I think we all have these thoughts which say things like: I have nothing to contribute, I can’t write, everything I’m writing now is stupid, my accomplishments look weird to me when listed on paper, that sort of thing. We all may have reasons for these thoughts, origin stories for them. For me, it could be this crazy survival thing. I think that I have often felt the burden of those odds, the need to actually be “special” as well as the knowledge that I have never really met that bar—a completely arbitrary and self-destructive bar that I have set for myself, I might add. I know that my family and friends, if they use such words, think I’m special to them for good reasons, even though any mention of this makes me cringe in what I now think is a very weird way. I mean, I blush, I get all hot, it’s just strange! Compliments are usually meant and they’re just someone telling you that they appreciate something you’ve done or something you are.
So, where am I going with this? I think I’m saying that focusing on the “miraculous” survival that happened to me when I was barely born is a red herring. I would instead like to focus on the liminality of that time when I was spoken of in the past tense, because that’s actually where we always already are. The idea of “survival” is really an illusion. To speak purely in cellular terms, we are born already dying. Death is in us whether we like it or not, and I think that’s part of what makes us human. We could literally die at any moment. So what if we made that a reality for ourselves? This is difficult, because our whole lives, especially nowadays in the west, are built upon not thinking about death, not thinking about our limited existence. In fact, one of the chief complaints about the Christian faith is that it too perpetuates the illusion of immortality in a world that is clearly filled with death every day. But does it really do this?
Let’s look at Christianity for a bit. Who is its head? It’s founding-stone? A guy who was born in a cave, pursued by actual soldiers just for being a baby, accused of all sorts by the authorities and finally crucified to death, to actual death. He also suffered hunger and thirst, was tempted, was scourged and beaten and bled, and yes, was killed after being extended on a cross.
You have to look death in the face if you’re a Christian. You have to acknowledge that it walks beside you, that only a thin line separates you from it. I think that what we call holy people walk right on that line, living liminally, letting their death guide the way they live their life. It is true that we hope for eternity, but there is no eternity without death first. The wheat doesn’t grow unless it is sown first. No one’s full humanity can come unless the husk of ego is pierced and the seed of true personhood can come into the light of Christ. This is what we mean by “being saved,” which I think is a very problematic translation into English. People often think of “being saved” as being saved from hell or being saved from some punishment. I have come to believe, and I think there are teachings that more than back me up, that “being saved” is being saved from mere survival, being saved from being special, being saved—IE., freed—from comparing oneself to others. We are saved even as we sin, so long as we sincerely seek forgiveness and a deeper knowledge of who we are in God’s eyes.
I know that I will likely leave no lasting footprint on this world or on this age. I know that I am not that special, nor do I need to be. I survived when I could just as easily have died. So what? This is true for all of us every day of our lives. “You fool! This night, your soul (could) be required of you.” That actually happened to a friend of mine. She was preparing for a gathering of friends on a Saturday afternoon when something went weird in her body and she suddenly died. it’s time I take a lesson from her, or at least one more, since she was always one of my teachers. We are liminal beings, poised between life and death, and our life should be spent in love, in sacrifice, in dying to the self as much as possible, but not because of hell. This isn’t about escaping some punishment. It’s about living into something greater, living into eternity now, so that when actual eternity comes to meet us, we will know it and take it for our own, rather than fearing it as something dangerous or strange. Mere survival is nothing compared to that! Life, on the other hand, the life we’re given every day to live, is something to be treated carefully, as a gift, not as something to which we are actually entitled. I’m still trying to figure out what all this means for me, but it’s something I really want to learn how to do.
As a friend of mine says, we are ultimately superfluous in ourselves. If we stopped living, this world would keep going around. Maybe it’s time to embrace that superfluity, to acknowledge that we were not created for any purpose but out of God’s love and the need for that love to be reflected outward. We literally have no earthly use, but we have been given this gift of life and we are in the hands of a loving God who has given us the ability to make choices and to use our will to draw closer to Him or to move further away, by which I mean further into ourselves, further into our craven need to seek survival (which is the root of overweening ego) at all costs and out of fear of utter oblivion. “ Don’t ruin my culture or it will disappear! Don’t step on my country’s identity or my country will disappear! Let me do anything I want to preserve the special awesomeness that is me, no matter what it costs you and no matter if you disappear. It’s me that can’t disappear, after all, not ever!” We do not really know what good is, but we can come to learn it, little by little; at least, that’s what I think, and in order to live in a good way, we may have to really embrace the fact that everything we think of as ourselves will one day disappear. “We have here no lasting city, but we look for one to come.” Still, while we have this city, this self, we must let it be but not really possess it, not really grasp it. We are a gift to each other. We should not be each other’s curse.