disappeared but became obscured by the frustration caused
by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones
and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one
thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me,
not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me
to turn and ask the simple question, "What do you want?"
When I was finally able to make that turn-and start to absorb
and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to
me-I began to get well.
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe,
what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego
self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another form of
self distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover
above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the
ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It
is the self planted in us by the God who made us in God's
own imagethe self that wants nothing more, or less, than for
us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such
friendship only at one's peril.
THE WAY TO GOD IS DOWN
When I was finally able to turn around and ask, "What do
you want?" the answer was clear: I want you to embrace this
descent into hell as a journey toward selfhood-and a journey
toward God.
I had always imagined God to be in the same general