Marc Chagall, Solitude
“When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us,
our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words
about it from the silence which is the mother of Truth,”
(Merton, Thoughts in Solitude).
There is wisdom which circulates among courageous souls who are called to share compassion’s journey with sufferers who come seeking healing of mind and heart and spirit: nothing happens along that way until the sufferer is ready. Lately, several things have happened which have drawn me more even more deeply into suffering and grief at the brief lives of my three Dear Little Ones and more closely to my long-slow smoldering rage at living this unbidden childlessness of mine. Only a few shy of twenty years, I have struggled minute-by-minute to keep them at a distance for fear they would consume what little of me remained. All the while, they still consumed me in every battle I waged against their power. I am exhausted now. And they have come again. I have no fight left in me, so I must succumb and find the ways to welcome them into the solitary practice of my daily living. Only here, in the great silence of these sorrows and the sins and griefs they bear can my spirit’s sighing find the Word which might hear the silent death of my fecundity into speech. Only here in mute surrender, in the solitude of this rage too deep for words can the Spirit’s sighs reach the shattered weakness of my heart and intercede for good, for love for a will and purpose which are my vocare, my call.
My very wise Jesuit Spiritual Director has, with great patience, persistence and good humor, consistently offered a hermeneutical frame for my living which I have resisted mightily for several years. The central point of discernment in this struggle—if God created us for relationships, how is God present in all that I have lost? Adoption, mother’s alcoholism, father’s terminal illness, two sets of parents gone before I was twenty-five, three children dead before they drew a breath, and the potential for ever bearing a child of my own with them, extended family caught up I the hubris of blood over emotional and relational bonds, a ten year marriage turned horribly public in the revelation of its truth in clergy sexual misconduct and that same horrible truth lurking in the shadows of the church where I turned for support. The vocare says very wise Jesuit Spiritual Director, is the very thing which I hate, rail against, resist, resent, refuse… my aloneness. Who in there right minds would want it, to be alone, to grieve these many losses, with no family to give and to receive love and the common bonds of daily living which offer our lives their shape and form and meaning?
For these many years, I have listened with particular attention to the brave preacher’s words on the painfully difficult passage from Mark 10: “Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’” (Mark 10:28-31). Never have I heard uttered a word, or an inflection or an inference to lead me to believe that the preacher’s heart would truly be willing to give up family or home or community or livelihood to follow Jesus. How, I have often wondered, might that preacher live, if he or she had no choice but to lose all that they loved and held dearest in the world? Would they still try to follow Jesus? Would they still be so certain of the smug platitude of God’s goodness and their heart’s willingness to follow, or convicted of such righteous sociopolitical truths?
It is not their hearts I am questioning but my own. In some long dormant hidden place I know this journey is mine and mine alone, and just as I must remind myself that I will never be able to find a family at grocery in the produce section among the avocados and artichokes, so I must remind myself that no heart should ever have to comprehend, no less endure, the shattering of the simple safe assumptions of their benevolent and equitable worlds. No one of them should ever have to endure year after year of shattered hopes for life shrouded in fears of death. Nor should their deepest longings and most tender dreams ever be pushed aside for the arrogance and hubris’ gains.
But I am, after all a Presbyterian, we do spirituality more in the spirit of Rabbi Abraham Heschel marching from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King, “Even without words our march was worship. I felt my legs praying,” than we do in the spirit of St. Paul in Romans 8, waiting in our weakness for the Spirit to intercede. This does not come easily to me, this vocare, this silence. I feel my legs still longing to march, to pray deliverance from this evil. Amen.
1 comment:
Thank you for sharing the depths of your raging grief...that alone requires a level of vulnerability which brings you a step closer to being able to face the alone-ness, an alone-ness which calls you to substitute your relationship with God for all human relationships.
While I cannot lay claim to grief of the magnitude that you are feeling, I too struggle mightily with the need to be completely vulnerable in the presence of God, to trust so completely that I am willing to give up all control, to accept divine alone-ness for more than a few seconds at a time. I've tried many techniques but have yet to find the silver bullet.
As a fellow Presbyterian (adopted though I am), I too find it so much easier to do than to sit. I am comforted, however, by the feeling that wisdom increases with age and I share with you the hope that when the time is right we will both come to terms with our need for alone-ness and learn how to surrender to it with gladness.
PS. You have an interesting typo in your link to PCB.
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