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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK170 Jack Fritscheremotionally. I was paralyzed. Totally unable to feel. Only fit to curl up and ask why. I stood outside my body and myself and my soul and my mind. I was a question mark left over after everything had been said and nothing had been explained by mystics writing about the dark night of the soul. I committed my entire being to my vocation, but God in His immense silence said nothing. Would I never be able to sink the whole of myself into whatever this mysterious vocation was? I became a spectator of the movie of my life, watching the daily rushes unreel. I could only compare this to Christ%u2019s agony in the garden when He sweat blood and begged His Father to reveal the secret reason for such despair and isolation and fear.I crashed flat on the bed in my own room, trying to breathe, too panicked for tears.I lay on the bed.I stood across the room watching this happening to me.I cursed because I wasn%u2019t insane. This is what I got for pushing God for fast answers. A goddam cut-rate breakdown. Step right up, folks. I could feel the Librium. Father Sean O%u2019Malley, redhead from the Society of Jesus, fresh out of Dublin, had liberated me with Librium. Lovely Librium, caught knock-knock, in my chest. Damn capsules. Lovely capsules. Damn freckled, flat-top Jesuit! Lovely Jesuit. All I could think of was Annie Laurie saying that the first day she held me, newborn in the hospital, the vegetable man%u2019s horse crashed into my father%u2019s car parked out front and ruined it and made a great noise and made me cry. On that day of my birth, for little reason I cried. My poor parents would never understand this. Suddenly, I was stone.I will. I will. Through clenched hands and teeth, I will my way through this. If this is the way from the plateau, then I will that this dark night clarifies my vocation. I will that it shall pass. And pass. And pass. And pass. Mir Mir untha whull, hustha ferst uthum ul? I felt light. Outside myself. Silly. Giddy. Dizzy. Spinning. Happy. Sad. Tangled in life. Threaded. Nobody loves me. Me, not nailed big and strong to a cross, but threaded. A child%u2019s beads strung tightly on taut string. March. The river melts and floods. Life is young, poised, free. Threaded. Young goats rolling in long wet grass. Tearing up the mountainside, tumbling down. Unthreaded. Laughing wind in trees, water and spray bubbling near moss beds and skimming over shallow cool sand. Claustrophobic shepherd trapped. Poised, balanced rock, ready to fall. Either way. Either. Or. Confiscated. Not really poised at all. Unthreaded. Marbles caught up in a leather pouch. Discontinuous bits of movie film. Fish in a bowl. Time snowballs. To another time. I will. Life and time and what? Responsibility. What the hell are you talking about? Fancy ramrods. Through