In this post, I wrote that after digging to deep to find the root cause of the lack of intimacy I was feeling in prayer life, I realized that I was harboring fear, anger, blame, doubt and a host of other stony emotions deep in my heart. And so I was coming into the presence of God the way a little child who has been wounded by an adult she trusts does: needy for attention, yet eyes cast down, afraid to meet His gaze, afraid to let Him love me, because I had experienced the deep pain love can cause, and I didn't think I could hurt any more.
This is the part where I must confess that much of the wisdom that guided me through this process came from the help of a compassionate, wise spiritual director. I can't encourage you enough to find competent spiritual direction. In a tender mercy so deep I cannot fathom, the Lord saw fit to put me under the direction of a wife and mother who, I found out after Bryce's death, also has a little saint in heaven who died peacefully in his sleep as an infant. I know. Go ahead. Tear up.
Anyway, her consistent focus for me was to get back to the heart of meditative prayer and to really seek to see how deeply I was loved by my God. I struggled. I went to comfortable places in prayer. The Liturgy of the Hours. The Psalms. It was prayer. It kept me in the daily discipline of sitting quietly. It was reflective. But it was sterile. It was like the dating over the phone. I was making contact with my Savior and Redeemer, but there was a healthy distance that kept me safe. He couldn't see my deepest wounds from where I sat. And I didn't have to feel the pain of having them ripped open in order for them to be healed.
The direction kept coming to go deeper, think more, respond more, communicate more with Christ, who loves me. I knew where I needed to go. It is in His Gospels that we see our Savior, that we hear Him speak to us, that the stories play themselves out for us to delve deeply into. I thought of love, and I thought of St. John, always speaking of God as love, them being one and the same. And so I tentatively began a journey of opening my Bible to the Gospel of St. John every morning and meeting my Savior there.
If you are struggling to reignite a passionate relationship with the Heavenly Father, go through the Son. I have often struggled to come up with an appropriate mental image of God the Father, struggled to know how to communicate with such a one so mighty, so ambiguous, so mystical. And yet, Jesus, God made man, the form of God we can see and hear and know, says over and over again in the Gospels that anyone who wants to know the Father, should go through Him whom the Father sent. I know it may sound silly, but it was a great relief to me to know that I wasn't short-changing my relationship with my Heavenly Father by focusing exclusively on the Son. There's this weird dynamic to my people-pleasing tendencies that makes me feel it necessary to not let any member of the Holy Trinity feel left out when I pray. I know. I'm laughing at myself as I type it. Why does it sound so reasonable when you think it, yet so totally irrational when you type it?
And so, free to seek the face on my Father in the life of His Son, I began to dig deep into the pages of the Gospel. And I began to search out this Savior. This Jesus. This God man. And I began to turn His words over in my mind and ask myself what He wanted to say to me today as He spoke again, timeless in His existence and in his proclamations. And as my mind tumbled the words over, the roughness smoothed, their sharp edges ceased to prick those tender spots I was so afraid would be hurt again. Yes, Jesus challenges us. Yes, He says things that are hard to hear and harder yet to live. Yes, He does things that demand a response that we may wonder if we're ready to give. But none of what He asks wounds us in the way human love wounds us. Nothing He offers is on the condition of accepting brokenness, weakness, sin, and even death. Jesus offers to wound us with a perfect love. A love so deep, so pure, and so true, that our heart bleeds, not for the hurt it has caused us, but for all that we've held back from Him.
In walking with Jesus through the Gospel of John, slowly, sometimes for days at a time, turning over the events and the sermons and the relationships of my God made to look like one of us, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, I came to a new place. And in that place, I began to understand the love again. And in that understanding, my heart began to pulse once again with the joy of being loved, with the certainty that I wanted to hold nothing back from He who loves perfectly, with the assurance that it was not pain that awaited me in accepting the fullness of God's love, but joy and mercy and healing.
Finally, I raised my head, looked my Savior in the eye, and melted in His gaze. For what I found there was nothing to be afraid of. What I found was love.
