A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished

Like most people, I had to read Hamlet in high school. It's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays  because of the famous soliloquy: To be or not to be? Hamlet is contemplating suicide. He is stuck between life and death, compelled by that which he does not know and tormented by confusion. In other words, he is a college student. 

I haven't taken a look at Hamlet since senior year of high school, during the Great Snowpocalypse of 2011, actually. But there's one phrase from Hamlet's soliloquy that has been haunting me lately, "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Now, let me be 100% clear. Although I am writing about a suicidal guy's suicidal thoughts, I am not now, nor have ever been, suicidal. I still remember that dark year back in middle my father was in Iraq, my body, mind, and friends were changing more quickly than I could handle, and I sat around brooding a lot. There was in the news a girl my age who had killed herself because she was bullied on the Internet. After the news segment ended, my mother said quite sternly that if I ever did kill myself, she would never stop being angry at me and my brother, then four, would be damaged for life, unable to love or trust again. I knew then, though suicide and depression were romanticized in the angsty preteen culture to which I then belonged, that they are no laughing matter.

But to be a self, to be a thinking thing, is exhausting. My mind races and flies. I can sit at my desk for an hour and think of a hundred different things and feel that no time at all has passed, that I am racing down highways, and sometimes they look like I-44, I-70, I-5...

To be a feeling thing is exhausting, too. To feel you own raw wounds, to see the anguish around you and take it on, like a cross... C.S. Lewis wrote, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, possibly broken." I read that quote first in the Barnes and Noble in Independence, Missouri, shortly after moving to Kansas City, and did I know then what God had in store for me? No. I had not yet begun to love in this way. Even now, I am sure I do not really understand, but I have come a long way on those highways. Grace has brought me safe thus far.

Freud was right about a few things, dead wrong about a few more things, and in the middle on the rest. (In my scholarly opinion, having taken one class on him!) He wrote about the id, ego, and superego, how our superego continually has to keep the ego in check. Don't think this, don't feel or say that, and the superego continually pushes the ego down, down. On this, he was right. Preserving the self you think other people want you to be is endlessly wearying. 
Hamlet is wrestling with a terrible uncertainty. I know what that's like. I think it's a universal human experience, to feel the same bundle of questions relentlessly claw at your mind. 
And so, with Hamlet, we whisper longingly, "To die, to sleep..." and so end the mental gymnastics. But how do we die without dying? If we believe life still has meaning, if our God-given survival instincts still teach us to cling ferociously to this worldly existence, if we believe Jesus Christ died to conquer death, we don't want to really die. We just want to cease existing as a self for a while. But how do we do that?
Hamlet says "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." We want to lose ourselves in deep consummation, in holy communion, with something else. The gospel promises us this sweet death of self. When Jesus says, "Those who lose their life for my sake will find it," this is partly what he means. When we are lost in the mission of Christ, there is no more worrying about maintaining a perfect self. The Spirit will move us onto perfection. The Spirit will resolve our uncertainty, and sanctify it. The Spirit will enter into our grief and make us one with Christ in his suffering through that grief. 
Mansur Al-Hallaj was a Muslim mystic who I studied in my Islam class. (Okay, okay, I had to Google the exact name.) He was focused on Tawhid, sacred unity with God, and caught up in trances, would say, "I am Al-Haaq" or "The Truth," an Islamic term for God. He talked about the Muslim mystic becoming like a moth drawn to the flame of God irresistibly and yet consumed. (And this was centuries before Otto talked about mysterium tramendum et fascinas, the terrifying and fascinating mystery that constitutes the sacred.) As a Wesleyan I believe in prevenient grace, that the Holy Spirit is active even in other religions, and this seems to me a prime example. We long to lose ourselves like a moth in the flame, long to feel there is nothing in us but God anymore. We yearn to say with Jesus, "I and my Father are one," and one day we will, because we are co-heirs with Christ. 
Can we experience it now? It's an already/not yet thing, I think. Not yet, not on this side of eternity, will we truly lose ourselves in God. But already we can go a long way. Already we can give up our lives by committing totally to Jesus Christ, to place our identity and purpose in God instead of building up ourselves. Often we focus on the sacrifice this entails, and rightly so. But it is also profoundly liberating. 
How else? We can pray, not by asking God for lots of things (although that's definitely a good thing to do-- after all, the Lord's Prayer says, "Give us this day our daily bread," quite petulantly, in fact), but by simply being with God. Sometimes, when I have had a very long week, I like to lay on the floor in my church and just do nothing. My brain starts racing, but I breathe deeply, feel the Holy Spirit filling up my lungs, and think about God's love enveloping me. I don't have to do anything to earn God's love. Just laying on the floor, he loves me infinitely more than I can imagine. And it's a sweet rest. Just as I am, just as I am, he loves me, and the me disappears before his greatness. I walk away strengthened to go do God's work. Contemplation and good works, works of piety and works of mercy, as Wesley would say, are both profoundly necessary. And in both, we achieve the consummation devoutly to be wished.
We can achieve the same trancelike state in other ways too. A youth pastor talked about how he loved shooting baskets in seminary, meditating on God's closeness, simply being with God. The same thing happens to me sometimes when I play badminton, or ride my bike, or have a friend braid my hair or give me a massage. Rest, God's rest.... 
I should add that my discovery of this consummation has been a great work of God's grace. When I read about contemplation first at about fourteen, I lit a candle (excited that I had been given candle privileges recently by my parents), sat on my bed, and expected some great enlightenment. But my mind just exploded and scattered and I felt nothing special. How slow of heart I was, and how patient of God, to slowly wean me off special feelings of spirituality to the meat of the word and of faith in the Holy Spirit whose wind I do not know but whose movement is always with me. 
And I have a long way to go. I am writing about this in part because I am in need of this consummation, to lay down for a while the relentless question-- what is my vocation?-- and give up my life in God. And God, in his grace, has lead me and will lead me still.