Transformation

                 

  Compare:

What happens to tears

which pour forth

hot and desperate?

They crystallize into

Stilletos of sadness

                    To:

Joy savored

Graces

And grows

Getting from the first question to the second certainly takes a giant leap. It's not as simple as asking, "Mother, may I."  It involves neither games nor gamesmanship, for the journey begins in an immensity of grief and indescribable loss.  From befuddlement to belief . Courtney, the younger of two daughters, died suddenly early on a Sunday morning.  We could not say "Goodbye." No chance.  It happened so quickly. 

To describe myself as bereft, forlorn, or in any of the language of grief clearly understates my anguish.  Although I wish I  could have been stricken with permanent amnesia, graphic moments still haunt me with crystal transparency.  I tried to bury memories countless times in innumerable ways; still, they intrude, more than two horrible years after she left this earth plane.  I seem destined to board the "roller coaster of grief" and ride until I'm too exhausted to alight.

I've written poems all my life.  As a young kid, I'd try to illustrate them but soon understood I didn't carry the artist gene.  Years ago admitting, "I paint pictures with words and hope they reflect in your being."  Never sketched after that.  Anyway, it became easier for me to express complex feelings in poetry and prose than in spending time trying to talk about whatever bothered me.  That's the genesis of the question that opened this Blog.

After Courtney died, questions sprang up like weeds in an untended garden:  the never-ending "whys"  and "if onlys" that grew stronger, not fainter; the idiocy of trying to bargain her death away; the reluctance to believe anything ever would or could get better; the arrow-sharp anger and blathering bitterness that settled like fog which never dissipated because the sun no longer shone.  And more.

How did I get from befuddlement to belief? I. Don't.Know.  My whole life had shattered and I was still tweezing out the splintery debris.  Death by a thousand cuts would have been a gracious exit.  I stopped eating, although I didn't realize it.  Evidently for most of my life my metabolism was "normal." My weight never ping-ponged.  I still wore the same size as I had in college.  It's true; wait long enough and styles revolve.  One of my sisters believes, "Spend good money on your clothes and they'll never wear out.  You may get tired of them, but they'll serve you well." Right, big sister!

It wasn't until my primary care physician, at a routine visit, looked at me, aghast, and asked, "What's wrong with you? What's going on? You look like a bag of bones!" She could talk to me that way because we knew each other that way.  She'd cared for me over a decade.  I. Didn't. Know!

I "dropped out" of church as a preteen (another story), and avoided formal churchgoing until I married (in the Pastor's office) and had my two precious daughters.  I wanted them to grow with a spiritual, not religious, understanding of God.  The fundamentalist church my parents belonged to had frightened me.  Graphic depictions of being eternally burned  in fire and brimstone unsettled me.  I'd use any reasonable or even far-fetched excuse to not to be tortured.  

Yet, something about being in church, absent the scary sermons, drew me like a Siren song.  I loved the music, Sunday School, the pageantry of children's programs, and friends I made.  Songs particularly influenced  me.  Just as fiery sermons frightened me because I could "see" them, hymns, anthems, and gospel fulfilled my need for safety, hope, and the promise of going to Heaven.  I learned a lot! 

While they were growing up, my daughters and I attended worship services virtually 52 weeks a year.  I served in various capacities, but remained relatively detached from active praise and worship.  What do I mean? I didn't immerse myself spiritually and emotionally.  There was work to be done, for sure, and that's how I treated it, as work.   Yes, I felt  something occasionally, although at the time I didn't know what it was.  More like the father (in the Book of Luke) whose son threw himself in fire or water.  When asked if he believed, like him I would say, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."  

No matter where I've lived, relocating as I did  from city to city as a job requirement, one of the first things I'd do involved finding a "Church Home".  Many years  later, I accepted God's call to the Ministry, studied and trained, and became an ordained Elder in a Protestant denomination.   No, not my parents.  I continue to  minister to those of us who belong to the unique club: victims who have experienced grief  (not only physical death), and the loss that accompanies it. This ministry had its genesis in the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) of my first-born grandson,  

No, being a Minister did not assuage my grief, but I do believe with Saint Paul that as Believers, we do not grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4: 13).  With death, so much becomes suspect., cloudy, confusing, and contradictory  It took reading the Book of Job to jump start insight that continues to expand.   It occurred while reading Job 38-41.  God begins by asking Job, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand, who marked off its dimensions? Surely, you know!"

Jehovah continued asking questions through three nerve-wracking chapters, ones Job could neither fathom, much less answer.  That was the beginning.  Praying for wisdom, insight, and understanding came first; Scripture searches next, quiet meditation, learning to ask God and trust Him (little by  little), waiting, and tears that flow without warning recur.  Only "Baby steps" on a journey whose end I cannot foresee.  Learning to rest in His promises.  "Be still and know that I am God," He reminds me.  Sometimes daily, sometimes minute by minute.

"Ask and it shall be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7) comforts me, as surely as "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths" (Proverbs 3: 5-6).  Just the tip of the iceberg.  Being a work in progress can be daunting, disconcerting,  and intimidating, but no more, I imagine,  than the slab of stone the first time Michelangelo saw it.  

Joy savored

Graces

And grows.

Dear Readers, I invite your responses, either here or at ordainedelder@aol.com.  Thanks!