imprisoned impressions

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.” 

Henri Nouwen 

I once had the profound privilege to walk through The Accedemia gallery in Florence. Five years before that I had the dubious experience of standing outside the Accedemia gallery and looking at the copy of David that offers a shadow of the sublime to tourists and visitors too impoverished or too hurried to enter the portals of the gallery. I was too poor to pay for admission. My friend promised me the copy was almost as good as the original as so I wasn’t missing too much by being unable to pay to go in. While it was a possible stretch to say that the original wasn’t worth the cost of admission, it would have been impossible to say that there are no other sights within the Accedemia Gallery that warrant the visitors attention.

The Four Prisoners (see picture above) would be centerpieces in any other gallery if they weren’t competing with the illustrious David. I adore The David, and confess freely that I stood in awe at the splendor of perfection that is the essence of this sculpture. But after that prolonged experience of awe I turned my attention to what else populated the gallery, and came to be as consumed by the four prisoners as I was by the majestic splendor of their illustrious colleague. 

The David is what I aspire to be one day, but the prisoners are what I am today. Caught in the agony of unfinished perfection, straining to step beyond the constraints of a broken world, trapped in time waiting for release, knowing that I am as yet incomplete.

Occasionally into this entrapped experience comes another who is willing to touch the pain, peel away the delusions of perfection and feel our loss of completeness. To be seen and accepted, to be known and loved seems too rare for most of us to even hope it might happen, let alone open ourselves to actually seeking it from the others who seem to be so consumed with the dream of perfect people posing in proper settings. 

I am a prisoner of the present and it is an experience of an agony of unmet hopes and incomplete dreams. The parts of me that have emerged from the past with what looks like a finished shape just make the unfinished parts seem more horrific. I am not alone in being unfinished state, nor am I alone in feeling the agony of incompleteness. It is. Not,“it is” ok, nor that, ”it is” good, or that, “it is" worth it. No, the encasement of my essence just “is” and until I am free it will remain presently imperfect and when eventually yet another portion of me is freed it will be unimaginable to view me as the prisoner I was.  

The only moment you have to touch me in this state is the present moment. 

Sadly, we too often miss the opportunity to accept the present passion of imprisonment of other people because we have no idea how to embrace the pain of another’s present. 

At this moment in time someone you meet will be straining against the cold embrace of present pain, loss, poverty, illness or the lash of other peoples’ indifference and indolence. Their imprisonment is transitory but their memory of those who would willing stand silently as comforters, accepting the reality of their present imprisonment will never fade. 

Who remembers you standing with them as they strained against the bonds of a broken and battered experience of the incarceration of expectation?