Purgatory

Stuck in the middle with myself

Allow me to tip my hat to my career in corporate America, and present you with a single slide:

Alright. So this is a pyramid, if you’ve heard of one of those.

At the top of the pyramid, there’s the best stuff in your life, the greatest memories, peak human experiences. We get fleeting moments like this, sometimes every day if we’re lucky (e.g., toddler invents ritual of kissing both of your shoulders before going to bed), sometimes only once in a while. At the bottom of the pyramid is the work that is necessary to sustain day-to-day life (laundry, exercise, etc.). I doubt this needs explanation.

Both motherhood and writing—when they’re going well—allow me to straddle the pyramid and have one foot at the top and one foot at the bottom. The pragmatic and the peak. I spend a lot of my time at the bottom of the pyramid, perhaps much more than I naïvely thought I would, but it’s still a gratifying, essential, and meaningful part of my life.

I won’t bore you with the details of the last few weeks of my life, but it involved illness, injury, and a string of plain bad luck, and I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. I occupied the “avoidant middle” of the pyramid for a while. This was a cold welcome back to a familiar place, a place where I spent a lot of time in my twenties. It’s a corrosive place for a young woman to be.

Illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321)

The “avoidant middle” is dark, but the room is comfortable enough. The bed is warm, the phone is charged. There are no windows. You can stay there for a very long time—years, if you allow it—and not do much of anything. You can endlessly distract yourself from the fact that you are there, bathe in the noise. (I didn’t realize how much time I spent in this place until I became a mother, but that’s a topic for another day.) The “avoidant middle” is where we wait and wait for our lives to begin, but not with an attitude of anticipation and optimism, but instead with something like bitterness. It’s where we watch endless hours of television while scrolling on our phones, where we’re jealous, tell ourselves we’re just so unlucky, blame the world for our problems. It’s where we plan and plan and plan and never get the courage to actually do anything. It is the point of total spiritual exhaustion. We don’t put in the work required to live a life of meaning, so we rob ourselves of the peaks, too. If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no work and no play makes Jill a very sad girl.

We also trick ourselves into thinking that the avoidant middle is something else, the “incubation middle” (see pyramid). The avoidant middle is good at pretending to be something virtuous or necessary. “I’m tired.” “I’m waiting for something good to happen.” “I’m preparing myself for what comes next.” But most of the time, we’re not in the incubation middle, and we know it. The incubation middle has a different energy entirely. It’s hopeful, patient, trusting. This is where we’ve applied to the grad school program and we’re waiting to hear back. It’s where we’re two weeks into a new routine and haven’t seen results yet, but we know, if we stick with it, we eventually will.

When we’re waiting for something big to happen in our lives, when we’re in the “incubation middle,” we are in a purgatory of sorts. This is not necessarily bad. Purgatory is meant to be purifying, and it allows us the opportunity to reckon with our desires (not all of them good). Christians believe purgatory exists because of God’s divine mercy, but even here on earth, perhaps the waiting period is more merciful than we realize, and in waiting, we are being protected from what we want. Waiting is not wasted time.

Sandro Botticelli, Purgatory X (1490s). Over the course of 20 years (1480-1500), Botticelli worked on illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. We don’t know why he never completed them. You can see them at Staatliche Museen in Berlin. “Dante and Virgil climb up between rock crevices to the first circle of purgatory. They admire reliefs depicting deeds of exemplary humility on the huge marble walls: the Annunciation to Mary, the dance of David in front of the Ark of the Covenant and the justice of the Emperor Trajan. Two of the proud are creeping up from the right, bent beneath the weight of heavy stones.” (Source)

The path in life is rarely linear. On the pyramid, we bounce back and forth from the middle to the bottom, bottom to the middle, over and over again. But we should remember that the middle is one step away from the top, just as purgatory is one step away from heaven. So we work, we rest, and we wait.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be feared.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

—Psalm 130