SIMPLY RIVEN...AND THERE'S NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT IT...

Here's to a better human being than I: my wife. I am going to break a resolution I have tried to hold to by mentioning her here and saying that she sent me an e-mail giving me my freedom. Free and clear. And now I stand before a choice I would avoid if I could. And I can't.

No silence or separation. Just a free choice. And the agony of it, not knowing whether I can live with myself whichever decision I make. For all the cheerleading from the one team, there is no guarantee that the truth of my desires will do more than set me free -- to choke on the gap between desire and reality. For all the urgings of the other, there is no guarantee that having once let the genie out of the bottle, I can really give up one piece of myself for the good of another piece, however much the other may root in something larger and deeper.

There is no decision without a cost, there is no decision without a dreadful cost. Who suffers and who chooses who suffers? At the very least I suffer, and I get to choose how.

I think that this kind of suffering may without fear of exaggeration be termed "hell on earth". Especially because I have the power to end it, but know that what follows will necessarily involve more of the same. There are so many Greek myths that suddenly seem to apply: like Sisyphus, I feel like I have been rolling the same rock up the same hill every day for months; but perhaps more to the point, I join Prometheus chained to this rock, and every day an eagle comes to eat out my liver -- and in the morning it has grown back and it can all start all over again. Say what you like about the Greeks, they never pretended that life was without suffering.

This is truly my own private Good Friday, and it seems bound to last until I choose to trade it in for death. But what I do have is a promise that there is some sort of life beyond this choice between methods of death, that God himself will be with me in the depth of my suffering, because I have finally descended from all my privileges to the depth where HE has always been awaiting me.

From the bottom of my heart, I beg you to pray for me, for my wife, for my children.