If you walk the path of life long enough, you will inevitably end up moving too slowly, perhaps injured, in a valley while the sun sets. Here, the shadows of uncertainty and unanticipated pain grow long. They can feel like death as they pass over you while the sun hurries to disappear behind the horizon.
How much of our lives are organized around avoiding death—survival? Sometimes the human experience consists almost exclusively of the impulse to survive. This is often from necessity. Yet the way this narrowing mars the human psyche and stunts our spirits is a great tragedy.
The valley of the shadow of death can consume whole lives, whole generations, whole groups of people when night feels everlasting. I, for one, find it difficult to remember the impermanence of the night in the darkness.
As I travel, I struggle to let the things that feel like death pass over me like a cold and unsettling shadow. I cannot go backwards to where the meadows and still waters lie, for that too is consumed in darkness, and it is not my destination. It is the past. How does one “fear no evil” when things as you have known them slip away? Often the shadow being cast draws me to a dreadful and disturbing conclusion: what is dying is not the thing, the relationship, the imagined future, or the impression of self, but instead a fantasy.
“Reality is the friend of God.”
That quote is something I once heard from Father Richard Rohr, and it puts language to a concept I am learning to integrate. As illusions and fantasies begin to weaken, I am not only afraid but terrified. It can feel as though something is wrong. In these moments it is easy to find temporary relief by finding an “evil” enemy to blame. Sometimes I fall into this temptation. Still, the terror only subsides when fantasy loses its hold and truth is revealed. Is seeing truth not akin to seeing God? For what could be truer than the divine? The truth abides in God, and God’s hiding place is in truth.
I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Of course God is with us no matter what state we are in, but like all illusions, when what is real is obscured, how can you be aware of anything but a distortion? Perhaps this is what holds us back. We want to be led into pastures and still waters, but we resist, with terror, the clarifying valley of deathly shadows—casting doubt and uncertainty on our precious illusions and petrified fantasies.
Enter the valley, for it is on the way to truth.