Holidays and Counting

As of this Forth of July, I've passed over two hundred holidays alone, that's counting my birthdays. It is a conservative estimate of about five thousand hours spent trying to find some place of deeper meaning out of which to live other than the stark truth of my existence--that I have no parents or siblings; that because I am adopted, once my parents died, my "family" claimed no bond to me; that my three Dear Little Ones--Elizabeth, Claire and Alice are dead and that my single life of childlessness, as I'm passing into menopause, is not of my choosing. Though I chose my divorce, I did not choose the affairs he had with women in the congregations he served as pastor, and when his behavior came to light and he showed no remorse, nor any inclination to change, his inability to choose our marriage made my choice inevitable.

With the passing of each of these holiday-mile-markers on this path I'm traveling, I have become more and more aware that it is a journey into the darkest fear which lurks in the shadows of the human soul.

W. R. D. Fairbairn's Psychological Studies of the Personality, explores this most fundamental human need--the need for human relationship. Breaking ground in the theory of psychoanalysis he wrote, "The real libidinal aim is the establishment of satisfactory relationship with objects" (p. 138). Our genesis as Fairbairn understands it, proclaims the truth of Genesis, "Let us make man in our own image... it is not good for man to be alone" (Genesis 1:26 & 2:18). At the most fundamental level of our existence, at the place where our most human natures meet our most divine we long for relationship.

A year ago on Easter Sunday, my path a mid this most fundamental longing took a turn. God spoke in a voice both clear and deep: "It is not good for you to live alone, and so much of it has been of your own choosing. You have chosen faith in the truth of your aloneness and the reality of your pain and the power of your suffering of your losses over me. It is not good for you to be alone. Can you choose me? Is my love for you not the Truth? Is my grace not that which is truly real? Am I not more powerful that all the pain of all that you have lost and suffered?"

And so it began: Can I trust God more than all of these? I can know this only as his grace and seek the blessing of his strength and trust the guiding of his hand. Nothing I have can show the way.