Step 3:
The Art of Descent
If stillness is the language of descent, then its practice is our art.
What does voicing silence actually entail?
Waiting with darkness - piercing death with our presence - being still in silence -
these all demand a capacity to recognize and be recognized, a willingness to perceive self and others in their fullness.
It's just you now.
Why are you so afraid of you?
This is your challenge. Scroll down a bit and sit with yourself in the stillness for as long as you can stand. Don't correct or coerce your emotions - just feel them, and know them to be yours. Sit with the discomfort of being yourself and tolerate what you didn't previously know to be tolerable. In this way, you're already growing to honor the work of Christ!
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When you're ready, scroll further.
Recognition is Key
If we refuse to behold the face of Christ - if we refuse to behold our own face - we can never bear and bring ourselves beyond the face of death. We must witness our joys and our pains alike just as we witness those of Christ so as to remember our distinct identities; we must behold so as to live as the beloved.
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In so doing, we participate in Jesus' own reimagination of the reality of death - its very unmaking so as to lay the foundation for something new. By this imagination, we simultaneously share in the destruction and design of death and life, respectively.
If you're interested, here's continued reading for you on the road so far For more on the struggles of perception and the tensions of recognition that the suicidal face, turn to Clancy Martin's How Not to Kill Yourself, Thomas Joiner's Myths About Suicide, or John Swinton's Finding Jesus in the Storm: The Spiritual Lives of Christians with Mental Health Challenges. For more on what Jesus bears witness to (and thereby invites us into), look towards Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity and "Descendit de caelis - He came down from Heaven." For more on a renewed imagination of the descent of Jesus, consider Martin F. Connell's "Descensus Christi ad Inferos: Christ's Descent to the Dead."