A morning of sadness
A morning of grief
A morning of new light
even while I drag darkness
behind me.
Oh the pain of being far from oneself
from the true self
that is yet isn't God within me.
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
And why are you disturbed within me?
Espera en Dios, pues he de alabarle otra vez
La salvación de mi ser, y mi Dios.
Jesus how shall I reclaim
what is beyond my vision?
Yet I hear your gentle call:
Come! and be yourself, Come! and be mine!
Lighten yourself from this world
that in vain, in vanity, you try to carry.
Are not my arms open?
I love your curiosity
for I made it
I love your widespread evangelistic heart
for I made it
I love your desire for what you do not know
for this calls you to me
But I have recreated you for dependence
the beauty of your mechanism
the soft animal of your body
now rests in me
you desperately need me
as the water and air
that make up the rest
You shall not despair your housing
You shall not despair the weight of your work and more-than-work relationships
You shall not despair your confusion
You shall not despair nor fear your work
You shall not despair nor be ruled by your desire to accomplish something
You shall not let yourself be redefined when I have called you mine
from the beginning
Is not the world still mine?
Even in the season when I have given it over
so that each one chooses--
for I do not force love
But am I not still calling?
Let me be the shepherd
You have concerned yourself
with the others and the wolves and the terrain
such that you have ceased to be my sheep
Follow faithfully behind me
Walk in calm and trusting
Your hands cannot support my staff
and the others will not follow you
You visage will not deter the wolves
and they will devour you
You do not know the camino
Stay close to me
With a simple vision
Release the responsibility
of anything more
than trotting faithfully behind me
If you come to me every night
I will tell you who you are
So you never forget
So you become her
This prayer evoked the tender response of dear friends this week. Their thoughtful responses are posted (anonymously) in comments below:
If you weren't feeling anxious or stressed out, you would be a little bit more (or less than) human. It is hard to trust a God we can't see, who keeps her ways obscure . You want to trust, and maybe that's enough right now. Christ knows your desire. It is the anxious, stressed out Julie that She loves and walks with. Not the Julie you want to be and will be (we walk in faith) one day. This may or may not be what you need to hear - I am writing it mostly because I am learning this, just a little bit, right now.
ReplyDeleteIt is so hard, so hard, so hard to feel separated from yourself and from your calling. A friend posted this on Facebook a while ago:
"When you follow your heart, the whole world conspires in your favor" -The Alchemist
For pure, unfiltered bilge have you ever heard the equal? I ask you. The thing is, we seldom know what Christ wants of us. It has always made so much sense to me that he would want me whole, now, and living my vocation. But I have been confronted lately with so many broken lives - lives that Christ has glowed out of, often unbeknownst to the broken, glowing Christ bearer.
Anyway. I ramble. But this is what I am walking with these days.
I feel like I should offer you something in compensation for that 'Alchemist' shit. I came across this recently - a friend sent it to me several years ago (written by that prolific and eclectic author, "anon."). It seems true to me:
"We may desire to bring to the Lord a perfect work. We would like to point, when our work is done, to the beautiful ripened grain and bound up sheaves and yet the Lord frustrates our plans, shatters our purposes, lets us see the wreck of all our hopes, breaks the beautiful structure we thought we were building and catches us up in his arms and whispers to us, "It's not your work I wanted, but you."
I sympathize with the temptation to judge myself, but I usually don't. It's not because I don't regularly fail - I do. It's because I don't think I know or understand enough to be qualified to judge - not me nor anyone else. To me, the act of judging, whether oneself or others, is presumptuous. It is far better to be humble and leave the judging to God, the only authorized Judge. And unlike us, God does not judge harshly and persistently, for God is love and God's love keeps no record of wrongs.
ReplyDeleteSo I understand grace not so much as about God's lavish forgiveness (that too!), but as a function of human ignorance. We simply are too damn ignorant to be judging anyone, for humans look at the outside, but God looks at the heart.
[We go out] to learn to live one day at a time, to be fully present in a foreign place that [we] did not seem able to do in [our] familiar places, to integrate mind, soul and body so that [we] can be whole within and without, connected to God and humanity.
ReplyDeleteThis is, I admit, a distant observation, but I feel that you are more you there than you were here. I don't believe that that is a function of geography, but that uprooting yourself radically was likely God's leading you to discover yourself more deeply, which is consonant with being in communion with God. We cannot know God in our mind only - in that sense, the Western masters from Plato to Descartes to the typical American are just flat wrong. Westerners colonized bodies all over the world (and to this day), and even colonized (and fetishized) their own bodies. Non-Western bodies have launched revolutions all over the world in protest, and the strange thing is, I see American bodies shutting down in protest to the colonial control of their own minds. American bodies are dysfunctioning everywhere - we have poorer mental, emotional, relational, spiritual and physical health than anywhere else, and that's from my perspective of having been to over 30 countries and all 50 American states.
We human beings can get used to anything, including a permanent schizoid state (divorce between mind and body), and so when we try to fuse them together, it can feel as painful and unnatural as surgery.
When I was in my season of depression, I despaired the "despair" I felt. It was very difficult to trust God in my heart, even though on a cognitive level, I still trusted him. I don't know why, but it wasn't until God healed me that it changed. So we must be patient with ourselves, my friends. Have grace for yourself when you feel like you are anxious and not trusting God enough. This is something that God can heal in you; seek him. And in the meantime remember the height, depth, breadth, and length of his love for you in this moment, even in the darkness, even if you feel like a mess.
ReplyDeletePerhaps my body here feels--or knows--things that my mind still cannot articulate. Perhaps the painful longing described in Romans 8.
ReplyDeleteThe theology of a broken world felt in my own broken self.
How can one not despair this without great mercy? As Thomas Merton calls the Beloved Mystery: Is not God mercy within mercy within mercy?