You dream childhood dreams of superpowers, never realizing that each Superman has his kryptonite. You think: if only you could fly … if only you could become invisible … the powers you would have! You grow up and you forget the superpower dreams you stitched together, scraps of wishes and castles in the air, all crudely patchworked together in childish innocence.
Until one day that patchwork cape falls onto your adult shoulders.
Superhero with superpowers. Superhero with kryptonite.
It bewilders you, because you no longer wish to be invisible. But the power is part of you now. It flows through you, and bit by bit, you disappear. You disappear from your marriage. You find a new relationship after that, and again you disappear. You fight against it, tooth and nail, turning into someone you don’t know, that you don’t want to know … and still you turn invisible. You disappear to all in your office. All in your family. And finally you blink out of awareness entirely, invisible to all.
The truth sinks in: this superpower is real. You really are invisible … you have never had any substance, never will. You are breath only. But does breath have a heart that contracts this spasmodically in pain? Yes. Yes, it does. Spirit of God, having poured out ALL His substance, feeling the same pain.
And you learn that as you become less, He becomes more. You become part of His heart, valves opening … closing. Filling up … pouring out. He sees you, even in all this translucence you’ve become. You become lighter and lighter. The pain purges you of the heaviness of you. Until finally, so invisible, so light that you can barely feel the world around you, you find your other superpower: You fly.
And all light-headed and invisible, you wonder if perhaps the superpower dreams you had as a child were merely a remembering of what you came into this world for:
To fly into Him. To disappear into Him.
You’re not alone, after all.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
- Psalm 139:16
