My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 5)

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And then one day, He was back.

It wasn't all glory and trumpets and flashes of light. It was one of those mornings where I was awake well before I wanted to be. Unable to slip back to sleep, I rubbed my eyes and rolled out of bed, wandering into the living room. I had just finished reading through the book of Luke and decided maybe this would be a good day to start the book of John. So I opened my Bible and started reading. And I didn't stop reading until I finished.

The Transfiguration

By then I was sleepy enough to try closing my eyes again to see if sleep would return. I reclined on my left side on the couch, Bible wrapped up in my right arm. I woke up about an hour later, and there He was.

Oh. There you are, I said out loud.

He was back -- just as if He had never left.

Having a sensed experience of His presence again infused my prayer and study life with new vitality. My prayers no longer boomeranged off the wall and fell at my feet. My frustration and anger had dissipated. After a couple of weeks like this, I dared to ask Him about the past year. Why the silence and darkness? What was the purpose and good of leaving me in the dark when I needed Him? Every time I asked, I got the sense it wasn't time for me to know. It was easy for me to be thankful for what we had together again. Though my curiosity continued to seek satisfaction, I let it go when I saw the answer I sought could not be forced.

It was just a couple weeks later that I was practicing lectio divina in a passage of John 10 -- the one where Jesus identifies Himself as the good shepherd. I had spent time focusing on various aspects of the passage and the one I found myself drawn to initially had to do with Jesus seeking out others who weren't there, but that He still counted as part of the fold.

But in spite of my efforts to focus there, I kept getting tugged back to a few verses before that:

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 

Sensing that Jesus had something for me here, I followed Him, directing my attention to the words on the page. I read these words slowly over and over again and in the middle of one of my readings, He interjected all of the sudden: I know you, Kirsten. I KNOW YOU. If I could have seen His face, I imagine it would have been just inches from mine. I would have been able to feel the warmth of His breath. I imagine His hands would have clasped mine to keep me from turning the page, to make sure I heard what He was saying to me. I'm sure I could have felt the nail marks in His palms myself.

I know you.

I stopped. And I burst into tears. For a whole year or more, I felt like He had forgotten me. Like He had really, really forgotten me. And here He was telling me -- not just every one of His sheep, but me -- that He knows me. He knows me. It was as personal as it could be. There was no mistaking He saw me, that He heard me -- and not just now, not just in this present moment, but the whole time.

A week later, I was practicing lectio divina again, but this time in Mark 10 when Jesus rebukes the disciples for speaking harshly to those who would keep the little children from coming to Him. I found myself drawn to the last verse of the passage:

And he took [the children] up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

When it came to the oratio portion of the exercise, I knew I had nothing to lose. So I told Him: This is what I wanted from You this last year. This is what I needed from You. I was hurting so deeply and I felt so alone -- I just wanted You to wrap Your arms around me and love me. I ...

It wasn't long before a very clear picture formed in my mind. I was still in my rocking chair in the sunroom, but this time He was holding me. In this picture, He had taken me up in His arms and held me, my head resting against the warmth of His chest, hearing His heartbeat, letting the tears come. He didn't say anything, but simply held me there.

I fell into tears again. After a year of feeling not only invisible to Him, but untouched and untouchable, I saw Him holding me -- not only in that moment, but for the whole year before. He held me. And that's all it was. That is exactly what I needed and what I had been asking for. And finally, there it was. There He was.

Those two experiences with Jesus brought a healing to my heart that I don't know how to describe. Though I still don't have many clear answers as to the why of it all, I do know that my year of darkness brought a hard-won and much needed purification. In that year, my sin was always before me in a way it had not been before. I saw my own ugliness all the time. The act of taking it to confession helped me to experience healing in those dark things inside me that whether I knew it or not, were damaging my soul.

A visual prayer exercise I completed after my two very personal experiences with Jesus.

And it was a trial of my faith. In that year, it became so very much more than words and doctrines and giving my agreement to a list of things I believed to be factual or true. My spiritual life had been a life of the heart before this year of darkness, but now it was fuller. It was more. My heart had stretched and expanded, and the muscle had grown stronger through repeated testing. It was an act of the will and it was an act of the heart.

I realized very early on that it was not anything I had done or didn't do that caused the darkness and similarly, that it wasn't anything I had said or done or didn't say or didn't do that brought Him back again. He came back when He knew it was time, and when it was time, He communicated those things to me that my heart most needed to know. Even so, there are still so many questions. I still am not certain if this was a true dark night of the soul, or of it was something else. Though I can see plenty of the good fruit that came out of it, my curiosity regarding the question of why is still somewhat unsatisfied. But I can let that go. Not only is He back, but He was here the whole time. He showed me that.

And now I know with unshakable certainty two very important things:

He knows me. 

And He picks me up in His arms like a small child, never to let me go.

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 3)

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Bitter. Hard and bitter and resentful and hurt. Anger. Fury. Resentment and bitterness and hardness. Bitter bitter bitter, hard. Self-righteous. Selfish. Hard bitter bitter bitter anger and fury.Violent. Hateful. Hate hate hate resentful bitterness.

This grief and its cousin, my spiritual darkness, were incredibly good at one thing: bringing up in me every remotely dark and evil thing that was then or ever had been in my soul. They burned under me like a fire, melting me to a molten liquid and making all the vile and dirt in me rise to the surface. It was horrid to look at and even worse to taste in my mouth. But like David, I could not ignore it: For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me (Psalm 51:3).

Ever before me. Ever. Before. Me. Swirling round me like gnats. Ever before me.

And it drove me to the confessional. Perhaps I didn't go as often as I should have, but every time I went it was a welcome relief to spew out the sin I had confessed to God a hundred times in private, but that somehow still left a foul film in my mouth. Perhaps it was because instead of being met with the hollow echo of my own words and His resounding silence, it was a chance to hear sound counsel and receive compassionate understanding instead. Most of the time, my confessors knew my circumstances and could put in perspective for themselves where this was all coming from. When this wasn't the case, I explained what had happened.

"My son, my firstborn, died of a heart defect recently. Everything went wrong. Everything. God made my baby with a heart too broken to sustain his life. How does a loving God do such a thing? And now God is gone and my friends are having perfectly healthy babies and I hear complaining about such entirely stupid and trivial things -- they didn't have to live in the NICU and just days after giving birth to their first child, wait up all night while blue-smocked surgeons with long faces kept coming to tell me my child might not make it. I did everything right and I know it doesn't matter, but damnit, I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I never got to take him home and dear God, I wish my worst problem was spit-up or a diaper blow-out or having him cry in the middle of the night, but he's dead and he won't be crying anymore. And it's not fair and now I feel so bitter and hard against people who have what is normal and I don't say anything to anybody about it -- I don't say anything to them because anything I do say to them about their experiences with their children will probably make them feel guilty and I'm not sure that even if I try my best to say something kind that instead it will come out full of the hard and bitter lump in my soul that is growing stronger and developing sharp teeth -- so I don't say anything. I don't say anything to them, but ..."

I struggled for words.

"It's corrosive, isn't it? Like an acid."

"Yes! Like an acid that is burning a hole in me, and ..."

This is how it went most of the time for me. It wasn't the contained and outwardly pious exercise so often portrayed in film -- I spewed out all the filth and ick that had been building up in me that I couldn't stand to carry with me anymore -- that, in fact, I feared would burn a hole through my soul that wouldn't ever close up again. I preferred my encounters face-to-face instead of from behind a screen, even with my face all puffy and red and wet, mascara streaking down my cheeks. It wasn't required of me, but it was part of me being honest, part of being utterly transparent. After so much time of feeling hidden and invisible, I needed to feel seen, even if it was like this -- especially if it was like this.

My confessors never excused the things they heard from me -- they never sugar-coated it or treated my sins as anything other than they were. They never told me that feeling hateful and bitter and resentful against God and my neighbor were okay because of what I had been through. But they did put it in perspective for me, encouraged me to continue speaking with transparent honestly to my God of the empty chair about how it all felt. I knew they were right.

I walked away each time feeling like what I imagine the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus felt -- her sin was publicly on display, her shame obvious. There was nothing and no one at all she could hide behind. But the one person who had a right to do it if anyone did didn't condemn her. He knew exactly what she had done and yet extended grace to her when she had cause to fear that she would be dragged to a bloody death in a pit of stones.

And it felt like a little bit of me came back each time I walked away from the confessional not only unscathed, but seen. I had not only escaped death, but was given a chance at an entirely new life.


To Be Continued

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 2)

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I know it feels like He's gone. You feel alone, abandoned, ignored. You feel like you inhabit the blind spot that goes unchecked: that He doesn't see you and doesn't care to see you. You feel punished. But that's not what's real. It feels like He's gone, but He actually is here. I know you want to fall apart in the safety and boundary of His arms. I know that it feels like you are dissolving, falling to pieces without anything to catch the fragments as you are pulled apart. I know it feels nothing like it, but He actually is here. I know you're afraid, that you feel like you're falling and dying, but you are safe. 

Much of the time over this period of a year or more was spent with a relentless internal dialogue attempting to keep a lid on my emotional blender. Though I knew my feelings of abandonment and anger were valid enough and permitted those emotions to churn and stir as they may, I also kept reminding myself they weren't the final arbiters of reality. In other words, just because I felt like God had abandoned me to my sorrow did not mean that He had. And so I lived in that exquisite tension between the opposites of what I knew by faith and what I felt, reason and emotion each pulling against each other in a tug-of-war that had me at the middle, threatening to pull my limbs from their sockets, and send my mind well beyond the bounds of sanity. It was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting.

I knew there was only one place I could go. 

I turned to the One who all my feelings protested had left me behind -- an irony not lost on me. I felt a bit like Peter in John's gospel. Offended at His teaching that if they do not eat His flesh and drink His blood they have no life in them, a large contingent of Jesus' followers leave His side. Jesus asks Peter if he is going to leave as well, and Peter says, "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." There is a sense of resignation and acceptance in what he says; a sense of "I don't understand this eating Your flesh and drinking Your blood thing. Frankly, it sounds more than a little crazy. But I know too much now. I've seen too much now. I believe too much to leave now. I know who You are."

And so it was with me. This feeling of Christ being absent had heaped the pain of abandonment and neglect upon the still raw pain of my loss, but honestly -- where else could I go? He was the only one who had what I needed. 

So every day, I went to Him in the sorrowful mysteries. 

I had taken up the practice of the rosary shortly before becoming Catholic, having found there what many Catholic faithful had found before me: among other things, an experience of deepened intimacy and union with Christ. But in this season, time spent in the sorrowful mysteries did not mitigate the intense feelings of aloneness. They did not serve to lift the heavy fog in which I was mired, nor did they bring to me the God-hands that I hoped would keep me from separating like newsprint left in water too long. But I did find in them someone who knew what it was to feel abandoned and alone, someone who in a moment of intensest agony cried out loud, asking why God had forsaken Him -- and even in proclaiming that, did not sin. 

And so I prayed through those mysteries just as one might sit down and direct the most intimate concerns of her heart out loud to an unoccupied chair in an empty room. It always felt as though I was talking to no one, that my words boomeranged off the wall and came back to me, falling into a jumbled heap at my feet every time. I related to Jesus in His passion as you might relate to an historical figure in a textbook, finding commonalities in our feelings about what we suffered, but unable to forge a real relational connection.

No matter how many times I picked up my piles of words again, I never got a response from the One to whom they were directed. I heard only the words themselves and the sound they made as they echoed back at me from the emptiness of that room, clattering against each other and falling to the floor in front of me with a loud metallic clang. But continuing to offer them was all I could do. I found no comfort in offering them, but I did find what I presumed to be comfort's distant cousin: an allowance to grieve and a permission to feel abandoned -- and to say so. It was knowing that the Christ who felt so absent to me -- who seemed no more present to me than George Washington -- felt the same thing at one time, too.

I didn't like this reality at all, and often let my God of the empty chair know exactly what I thought of it. I expressed anger and frustration. I told Him I felt neglected and forgotten. And like a small child, I just as often said nothing at all, but stretched out my arms, expressing my desire to be held and comforted, to experience the promises of solace and healing that seemed to leap from the pages of Sacred Scripture. But just as with my grief, I didn't see what choice I had. I decided to lean into the reality I had rather than the one I wished for, knowing I could no more make God show up in the way I desired Him than I could will the earth to stop spinning or make the sun move around the earth. There were no secret magical incantations or prayers I could offer, no list of bullet points I could follow that would change any of it. He is not anyone's puppet. I knew it wasn't anything I had said or done that caused His seeming disappearance and in the same way, there was not anything I could say or do that would bring Him back to me.

But I still needed Him, and it still hurt.

And so I set up camp in the sorrowful mysteries. I was utterly alone and in the cold there, but it was the only place I seemed to belong. As I held each moment of His passion in my mind, I wept and prayed with Him, felt the rending and tearing of flesh from bone with Him, and felt with him the mockery of the gawkers. With Him, I carried my cross and cried out in agony as we both hung there, our arms pinned down wide, wondering out loud where was God now.



To Be Continued

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 1)

Depending on when you asked me over the course of the year between Ewan's death and the first anniversary of it, I might have felt everything or nothing as I realized that important anniversary was approaching. It's hardly surprising that losing my son and nearing the first anniversary of the night he died in my arms would give rise to a wide range of emotions, each of them bubbling up from the depths of me and popping when they rose to the surface, meeting the free air. Perhaps even less surprising is the number of questions I had for God to which his death gave rise.

Though "why?" is a natural question and one that, in the throes of some black and turbulent nights, was asked frequently enough, it was never at the top of my list. I can't imagine that there's a single answer God could give me that would satisfy the empty arms that had been prepared to cradle my baby, or the aching breasts whose milk had dried up. If my son wasn't coming back to me healed and whole, then even the best answer God Himself could provide to the question of "why?" would be utterly unsatisfying.

It wasn't the actual loss that I questioned, or even why God tenderly knitted Ewan together inside me with a heart too broken to sustain his life so much as it was the question of where God was in the weeks and months that followed. I read any number of Psalms or other scriptures that spoke of His care for the brokenhearted, or how He captures every tear. I read of a God who provided His brokenhearted faithful with comfort and solace and protection. So why did I feel so utterly abandoned? Why did I feel like, after He attended to us in those final moments of Ewan's life, that I was anywhere but beneath the shadow of His wings?

I can't tell you how many nights I sat in the rocking chair in a dark and empty nursery, clutching the armrests with white knuckles, weeping hard enough to break the windows. I can't tell you how many times I fell to the floor in a heap and pounded my fists until I thought they might break through the floor, begging for some form -- any form -- of comfort and solace. I can't tell you how many times James held me in bed, my body curled up tightly in the fetal position, my spirit wracked with a pain deeper and more exquisite than I had ever known as I kicked and screamed and thrashed and wept and clawed and begged. I wondered when the grief might kill me -- it was not a question of "if." It was the loss of my son, yes. But it was also that I felt like Jesus was leaving my broken heart unattended in the aftermath. If I ever needed some divine arms around me, it was in those moments. But if they were there, I didn't feel them -- not in the slightest.

My God, My God -- why have you forsaken me?

This went on for several months, this knowing but feeling nothing of Him, but feeling all that weight of hell instead. It was like having a husband you love, but never seeing him. You might see evidences of his presence from time to time: a plate with food left on it that you know is not yours, or his shirt hung over the chair. Perhaps you hear his footsteps echoing in another room or detect his scent on the pillowcase next to yours. He might leave you a note saying, "I love you," but it's been ages since you heard him speak those words to you in person. You know he's there, but you never see him. You have forgotten the shape of his face under your hand, and how his fingers feel interlaced with yours.

That is how it felt with me and God -- like the relationship that was supposed to be the most intimate and important of all relationships had been all but abandoned. I was doing my part, and it seemed that He was failing to hold up His end of the bargain.

I had been walking with Christ long enough to know that just because I didn't feel Him didn't mean He wasn't present. I prayed, I continued to attend Mass regularly and participate in the sacraments. I continued to open the pages of Scripture to read and to study. I recognized and thanked Him for the things He provided. My faith and my devotion were not built on feelings, after all. I reasoned that perhaps I was feeling too many other things to feel Him. I thought that maybe the unending, infinite grief in our lives had crowded out my very finite ability to sense the supernatural. I thought that maybe when the raging sea died down to a calm, that I would perceive at least a shaft of sunlight and in it, the God whose presence I craved.

Frankly, I was surprised when I didn't. I grew increasingly frustrated with trying to make sense of what felt like His prolonged and unmistakable absence -- trying to take something that felt so horrible and painful and make it out to be good and loving somehow. Oftentimes, having no words for my prayer, I would take to Him an image of me holding out my heart in front of him: dripping, shredded beyond repair, throbbing limply and weakly with what little life remained. Nothing ever happened, though. He never came and held me, never took my heart in His hands to mend it. He left me there, holding it with cupped palms and outstretched arms that ached and burned with its weight. It didn't matter how much I begged. He never took it from me, and never stretched out His hand to heal it.

It started to feel like I was making excuses for Him. It was infuriating.

I gave myself pep talks about keeping up faith despite my feelings. I knew with certainty what was true -- though in different ways, I had experienced enough crucible moments prior to Ewan's death to doubt His love and care for us in this one. But my fury grew, and I was having an increasingly difficult time understanding how His seeming absence could be for my good, or how it could be loving to leave me alone in the middle of a wide sea, heart dying in my own hands, when He had the power to save me.

To Be Continued