by Joanne
Blum, Ph.D.
There is an old minister’s joke about a man, out mountain climbing, who loses his footing and finds himself hanging precariously over an abyss, clutching a flimsy tree limb. “Is anyone up there?” he calls out, desperately hoping for aid from someone on the rocks above. Suddenly he hears a booming voice, seemingly from the heavens above, “Yes, my son, I am here.” “Is that you, God,” the climber asks. “Yes, my son,” says the voice. “Help me, God, save me!” the climber yells. “Certainly, my son, all you need do is let go.” There is a moment of silence, then the climber’s voice again, “Is anyone else up there?”
What makes this joke work is its familiar call to surrender, and our equally familiar resistance to it. As always, our laughter springs from bemused self-recognition. Yes, I too have dangled from that cliff, hoping to be saved, without facing any danger or discomfort. This is well-trodden human territory—the experience of the edge.
What our spiritual teachers have told us repeatedly—like God’s voice in this old joke—is that if we want to navigate our edge experiences effectively, if we want to leave behind previous boundaries, and move into a richer experience of life, we must risk discomfort and confusion, trusting to what we don’t know and can’t explain. If we did know and could explain it, we would not be on the edge, and there would be no transcendent possibilities hovering in the air around us.
The very word “edge” implies both risk and potency. An edge is “a thin, sharpened side, as of a blade”; it is a “brink,” and an “extremity.” But an edge is also a “dividing line” or “border,” a “point at which something is likely to begin.” When feeling uncertain, we talk about being “edgy.” When doing something innovative and creative, we describe it as being on “the cutting edge.”
In the “edge” experiences of our lives, we feel all these things at once—frightened, uncomfortable, confused, insecure, awake, alert, and, somewhere deep inside, well aware that we are on the threshold of something entirely new. The edge, though a precarious place to be perched, is also a place of great power.
We confront our edges, again and again in life. Not the dramatic, cliff-hanging variety, but the small daily edges that punctuate and define our experience. One friend describes her marriage as a process of meeting, and wearing away, one rough edge after another. However uncomfortable the friction might sometimes be, my friend insists it is this facing and overcoming of edges, boundaries, and limitations that is behind her marriage’s ongoing vitality. In a relationship, she insists, “If you’re never up against your edge, nothing is happening.” My friend is correct, I think, in that it is typically in the context of relationships that we are most likely to encounter our inner edges.
The edge lies in different places for each of us, though. We locate it by scanning for our areas of greatest resistance. Where are our buttons being pushed? Where are we feeling threatened and defensive? Whenever such inner resistance arises, it is a clue that we are coming up against our edges and have entered a region of both discomfort and discovery. We can always refuse to face our edges, of course, and often do. There are an infinite number of ways to avoid, deny, or flee from our uncomfortable feelings. But if we do, we must know that we are sacrificing that potential for discovery, and for transformation.
I encountered a sharp edge shortly after I began visiting a hospice patient named Mary. My first visit with Mary took place on one of those golden September days when everything seemed lit from within. For a while, I thought this was why I found entering Mary’s dark house so difficult. Mary was suffering from ALS and already experiencing extensive paralysis—of her legs, arms, vocal cords. She had moved in with her sister’s family six months before, and her room there—which she now rarely left—was so stuffed with furniture and clothing racks that the windows were covered and there was only a small passage for movement around the bed. Entering that room, I found myself pulled in two directions at once—outwardly moving forward but inwardly retreating.
As a volunteer chaplain with hospice, I certainly had chosen to make visits like this one, to people like Mary who were going through their last months of life. I had been blessed and enriched countless times by my experiences with them. Why then was I feeling such resistance to calling and scheduling my visits with Mary? Why such foot-dragging as I made my way to her door?
Such resistance is always a sign of the edge, and it always calls us to greater openness and surrender. The great poet Rilke wrote that “we must hold to what is difficult,” words that suddenly rang true for me in a new way. Was this the kind of difficulty Rilke had in mind? If so—and I felt intuitively that it was—then perhaps his promise was equally true, that as we persist in what is difficult, “what seems to us most alien will become what we most trust.”
Rilke’s words resonated in mind with other teachings about
surrender and non-resistance. How long we have misunderstood Jesus of Nazareth’s advice to “love
your enemies,” and to “agree with your adversary quickly” (Mt.
As I continued my visits with Mary over the months, I came to realize that my resistance about visiting her had little to do with her dark, cramped room. It was rooted in my own unresolved doubts. Deep and familiar questions arose: Why was this woman experiencing such a difficult illness? How could such a death be just? Where was God in the midst of this painful situation?
I realized I had asked these questions before, at the time of my mother’s death, some 15 years before. She too had lived an honorable and spiritually oriented life. She too had suffered in her last months from a relentless disease. I had asked then too: How was this a part of any God-guided design? Clearly, it was no coincidence I had been brought again to this place. I may have forgotten I had set aside these questions years before, bitter and unresolved, but something in me had not forgotten—and that something wanted me to resolve them.
As I continued to visit Mary, I had many opportunities to break off the relationship, to not call, not look, and not trouble myself further. I knew that if I did cut it off, though, I’d be sacrificing an opportunity for deep healing. I also knew that inwardly something was already happening. Though my edginess continued, it grew somehow softer and more familiar. If more vulnerable to life, I also felt more sensitive to it, more able to perceive its sweetness and depth. Slowly but steadily the discoveries came—a deeper humility about the limits of my personal understanding, a keener awe at life’s intricate, far-reaching design, a fuller appreciation of the mysterious power that is with us even in extremity.
My friend Mary never felt betrayed or abandoned by God. To my amazement, the only words I ever saw her scribble laboriously on her white lap-board were about God’s blessings in her life. Again and again, she wrote about her gratitude for her family and church, and her constant sense of God’s presence. That presence never failed her, not at any step in that long, difficult disease process, nor in the transition afterward we call death. Witnessing Mary’s overcoming, I felt a movement toward an overcoming of my own, an opening of the heart, an old knot of pain being tenderly untied, and a settling in of some kind of peace.
Rilke is right that we must “hold to what is difficult.” We must greet our edges with openness and courage. If we fail to do so, allowing ourselves instead to maintain our barricades, we will miss a potent opportunity to come up higher. There is an energy at work within the edges of our lives, an energy we can trust, and it wants to take us toward boundless life.