Dear my most unfortunate beloved,
I met you online in the most decent dating app a little short of a year ago. When I met you, I was in the middle of calming raging storms inside my heart. I broke up with my partner, I was sort of going out with a wonderful person who I unwittingly has been in love with for more than a decade, and I was discerning for religious life, a call I have been delaying responding to for God knows how long. I was torn with all the life options that I was presented with. I think the right term was dread. In the face of freedom, one cannot help but feel the weight of just having one life to lead.
Meeting you was never an accident. In the realm of things which we are too human to understand, we also made it happen to meet. When I met you, I felt a strange connection and a possibility. Maybe this guy is the compromise of all things I want in life? I was never sure and wasn’t ever brave to make choices. So instead, I intentionally pursued to know you much deeper.
They said you will know a person deeper when you travel with him and it is true. You are one of the most patient and the most serene person I have ever travelled with, almost textbook stoic. You let everything happen to you – beauty, terror, me. Yet despite of it all, you remained the kind person that you are. It’s never a mask unlike many of us, your kindness is your true self all the time.
I have met too many people in my life and there was never one like you in ways that I could not put words on. It is sufficient to say that with you, I felt a very strange calmness in knowing I am wanted and longed for, yet you are so restrained to allow our freedoms to operate. You have the qualities and more for an ideal person, at least to me. Let us say that in front of you, I cannot lie. In front of you, I see a possibility of a fulfilled identity. You have that strange ability to look at me and not need too many words to understand and make me liable.
The day we saw each other the last time, I was on my way back to the seminary. I kept on delaying it because I knew that things will not be the same anymore. I am preparing to dedicate my whole life to God and here I am presented the person of you who has captured my heart in many ways I could ever talk about. It is the reason why I could not be more available than wanted because I have given up some freedoms to follow this call. I thought my job was enough to suffice that desire to serve the Lord but later, I realized it wasn’t really about the great things I want to do for Him, but the truth is in the reverse, following this call is all about letting God do all the great things to me. It’s a long journey from here and I am not even sure enough if becoming a priest is for me. Add to that the fact that I have a medical condition which many people may not be able to fully understand for now, so I keep it to a few people. With all philosophizing I have learned and read about, nothing prepared me for this crossroads.
Consider the notion “accident” and all the things you can remember that ever happened in your life. Some thinkers say life is meaningless, that what we experience is just a succession of one event after another, that there is no grand design, no order, no pattern. But another half of the world also thinks that this existence we live out is ordained, willed, and determined.
And there are people like you and me, believing in the weight of both worldviews.
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