Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Prayer Before Stepping off into Transitional Space


The door shuts. A room full of strangers, we sit, the crevasses between us filled with the shards of lives lived in the wretched frenzy of those seeking desperately for what they do not know and cannot find. By some grace we must travel togeather along the slippery slope—Spirituality Group.

The space is filled at any cost, with whatever is on hand, those remnants of pain and suffering, echoes of loss and separation. Emptiness cannot be tolerated; one cannot feel alone. Death’s specter lurks in the corners just beyond our seeing.

What will save from the Fall into fear’s black abyss for which some secretly long.

Somewhere it will find us all, when we least expect it. In some moment we will hear the faint echo of what has been calling to us all along. It will grasp us; gather us up in its arms and carry us away from the edge of the crevasse; deliver us from the descent into darkness.

In that moment we shall be changed.

(The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. / For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. I Cor. 15:52 – 53.)

The eminent psychiatrist W. D. Winnicott called it the transitional space: That place between the deeply buried graces and undeclared sufferings of our inner world and the broken and blessed ambivalence of human existence in this world. The place many say where are spiritual natures are formed.

(Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss other. PS 85: 9-10.)

Surely, the in that moment we shall be changed.

We will know it together, in this “talking cure,” as Freud called it, something unspoken and not fully comprehended between us. The transformation will begin. Something new will be created, something pregnant with meaning that longs to be explored; something expected, yet which can only be known, as Henry Emerson Fosdick’s great Hymn bades us, “…For the living of these days.”

A lifetime of wisdom and grace and courage will be required for facing of those hours which will stretch into days.

The door is opened. Amen.

No comments: