Footprints on the Fridge

Looking Him in the Eye

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.

Digging in to Dig Out

After I posted a little bit about my struggle with dryness in prayer and learning to be lonely, a few people asked me what the remedy was to such dryness.  The truth is, that is a tough question to answer in general terms, because it is entirely dependent on circumstances, temperament, and the action of a Sovereign Lord.  That's a lot of variables to try to explain.  But I have spent a lot of time thinking about my spiritual journey as I sought to learn to walk again after the devastating blows of the last year.

I think when you are experiencing what people call spiritual dryness, where suddenly prayer is unproductive, you see no forward progress in your spiritual life, and you feel distant from God, you have to dig deep to the root causes of what is happening spiritually.  Periods of dryness in prayer are often quite normal and just the Holy Spirit disciplining our Spirits and asking us to persevere.  But sometimes, when a period of dryness seems to grow longer, go deeper, and feel heavier than a simple test of perseverance, we sense that something is wrong.  We feel suddenly awkward in a relationship with a Savior we've known and loved many times over.  We fumble through prayer frustrated with the lack of intimacy because we are hungry and desperate and we need Him and He seems far away.

That is where I found myself as I journeyed through my grief process and the weeks wore to months and we added suffering to suffering in our lives.  Suddenly the God I had known and loved deeply since my early teen years seemed a stranger to me, and prayer, the language of our romance, was awkward and stilted and frustrating.

The solution to that special brand of dryness alluded me for a long while until I dug deep enough to hit the nerve center of what was going on.  I knew that grief had changed me in ways both expected and unexpected.  I knew that it had changed my relationship with God.  While my faith had brought grace upon grace, tender mercy upon tender mercy as I grieved, it had also been dealt a blow, a challenge that knocked the wind out of me and left me gasping for breath. And there were many times I felt I was a spiritual feather weight placed in the ring with the heavy weight champion of the world. 

When I began to try to recover from the near depression that stalked me for much of the early summer, I began to try to trace this dryness, this lack of intimacy, back to its roots.  I read the prayer journal that I began in the weeks after Bryce's death from its beginning to the present.  I could see the progression, the slow changes in my conversation with my Savior, but I couldn't really pin point what had happened.

I said in this post that Eucharistic adoration was the short answer to the question of how I recovered.  In June, as uncertainty swooped in and added another death-defying plunge to our life's roller coaster, Greg and I made a commitment that one or the other of us or all of us as a family would be in front of the Eucharist daily, either in Adoration or in attendance at Holy Mass.  I confess, this was a new level of commitment to me.  Getting to holy hour on a regular basis was a habitual spiritual failure on my part.  I know well it is because the very dominant Martha in me is scared to death to have to play Mary for a whole hour, sitting and listening.  And yet I also know well, it is the better part.

And so I began a regular routine of sitting silently in the presence of my God.  Outwardly silent, anyway.  It is a struggle for me to quiet myself inwardly, and often takes me half of the hour just to settle in, but as I practice more, it comes more easily.

In that continual practice of stillness before the True Presence of my Living Savior, a flashlight shone into my soul.  The deepest, quietest spaces that I had missed in all my searching were lit in His presence.  And what I began to see in those corners of my heart were stones.  Far back, way deep down, the heart that had once loved a Savior so joyfully, so zealously, was atrophied and cold.  It was normal in all the visible places that others could see.  It was normal enough that I could function spiritually on one level.  But its symptoms were plaguing me, and I knew that if I left this condition undiagnosed much longer it was going to progress rapidly.

There in the safety of the presence of Christ the King, I was able to own the lack of trust I had developed, the anger and the blame I had placed on His shoulders, and the unwillingness I had developed to let Him go certain places in my heart.  I found the places where I was digging in my heals and saying "no" to questions He had not yet asked.  I found my fear. These were not the early, obvious wounds of grief, which had already been recognized and treated with healing balms.  These were deeper, hidden wounds that even I had not really been able to articulate.

But it was in digging very deep and feeling out the cold stony places in the darkened recesses of my soul that I was able to come face to face with God again.  And realize that His gaze frightened me.

That was the beginning.  And it happened in His Eucharistic presence, where stillness and grace and tangible Divinity became the expert medical team that found what I had been unable to find on my own.

And Then There Was May

Well, the last time I wrote here, a long, long time ago, I really was trying, with all my heart, to live the Church's call to be an Easter people, to live life as an Alleluia.  And it was an earnest endeavor that went decently well for a while.  And then there was May.

May and all its dates and memories and birthdays that weren't.  May with all its hopes faded.  Nothing was as it should have been in May.  And embracing life as it was and letting it be enough was painful, so painful.  I woke up every day feeling as though I had been rubbed raw with the sand paper of grief.  I willed myself to function.  Or not.  I clung to the edge of emotional health while my feet dangled dangerously over the cliff of depression.

And there were no words in May.  No words to write here.  No words to utter in prayer.  Barely enough for daily conversations with those most dear to me. 

It has taken about this long into June for May to wear off.  Still we face our struggles.  There is the summer to be lived, full of anniversaries and memories and would be due dates that aren't and that all too awful day looms at the end of it all.  There is a family's life hanging in the balance of a flailing economy and total destruction of the Louisiana oil industry.  There are questions and uncertainties and instability.

But there are words once again. My faithful friends have returned with their own brand of comfort and consolation.  For that tender mercy, I am grateful.

Soul Sisters

I spent some time in my rose garden yesterday afternoon, tearing away a year's worth of overgrowth and revealing the hint of gorgeous color still encased in green buds.  I draped tendril up lattice and guided their climbing.  I pulled away the ugliness of weeds and drew attention to the beauty planted there. And I didn't wear gloves.

I couldn't have told you why beforehand or even have told you what, but I was compelled to feel every prick and scrapy scratch those thorns could mete out.  Something in me needed to feel their sting and process this whole relationship, the beauty in the rose and the prick of the thorn and their coexistence and the way that that relationship goes relatively unnoticed until I stick my hands in there to tend them, guide them, free them from entanglements.

And of course you know why. I had spent the weekend away. I had embraced a long time friend who had stood by my side from afar in my darkest hours.  As is our nature, we had spent the weekend telling tales and laughing, entertaining ourselves and those around us. I had made new friends this weekend, progressing from texting across the room to locate one another to standing talking for hours about everything from kittens to poop to schooling a dyslexic child.  I had shared lunch with a group of amazingly talented women whose sincerity, geniality and intelligence were refreshing and renewing to me. And I had joy. Most of these women had a peripheral awareness of all that has transpired in my life in the last eight months. I spoke my little one's name often and easily. Sweet Bryce. I accepted condolences and soft, tender embraces that spoke volumes and moved on.  This weekend was a weekend of joy.

And yet in the midst of all that joy, grief lives ever-present.  I have come to accept that. I have given up the faulty notion that one day I will heal and grief will be gone.  I will heal.  But grief is a permanent resident in my home.  Like my roses and their thorns, grief and joy inhabit my soul as sisters.  Each needs her moment in the sun, each needs tending, each barges in unexpectedly and catches me off guard.  For the most part, I have learned to let them dance their sisterly dance with acceptance and resignation. I would not have ever wished for this reality, but it is mine, and I have always held firm to the conviction that we are happier people when we just accept that we are who we are. I am a naturally joyful, funny, thoughtful, articulate grieving mother.  And all those adjectives inhabit the garden of my soul relatively peacefully.  Until the gardener steps in to do His work.

I needed to feel those thorn's pricks yesterday because it gave tangible reality to my experience this weekend and everyday.  I find a way to move forward each day, to take the next step, embracing who I am in the His perfect will for me. I know there are thorns.  But there are roses too, and they are reason enough to keep the garden going.  And then, in a most unexpected moment, there is the prick.  The stabbing, intense heart pain I did not expect.  And then its sting, the burn that lingers while I wipe back tears and try to refocus.  And sometimes there is blood, a little piece of me, of the life within me, leaked out in the agony.  These are humbling moments.  They come when I don't know they are coming.  They cause me to lose track of the conversation I was having or suddenly walk away from something purposeful I was doing.  They leave me raw and unsteady in the midst of an ordinary activity.  And they make me grieve when I want to be joyful--for someone else's pregnancy announcement or the birth of a sweet pink bundle to a momma of all boys, for someone's photographs of a gorgeous, growing babe and the siblings all smiles. 

The pricks humble me.  They make me realize how much grief has changed me, how much, like my experience raising siblings shows to be true, her sister joy is different because of grief's birth in my soul.  And sometimes I am angry with her for her prickly ways, for the way she scratches at me for attention when I am reaching to embrace her sister.  Sometimes I wish she hadn't come at all, or that she could be different from who she is.

But yesterday in that garden, in the quiet processing of the weekend and the weeks and the months and the days since grief's birth, I realized that she has been given to me, like the gift of a child.  We don't get to determine the temperament of the baby we bring home. Our Heavenly Father examines us in His full knowledge and determines whether we need the baby who sleeps the day away contentedly or the one who must be held 23 1/2 of each day's 24 hours.  We are all quite sure we need the former, but rarely do we get that baby.  I am quite sure I'd rather the gift of joy, that she is a better companion for my soul, she who blooms in beauty and opens in color and wafts sweet scents that soothe.  But the Heavenly Father, in a wisdom I cannot claim to understand, has determined that joy shall have a sister and her name shall be grief.  And for the most part, she will be a quiet companion. 

And then there will be those moments, when the Good Gardener reaches in to tend my soul garden, to cut away the overgrowth of fear and anxiety, to pull the weeds of sin, and to guide my growing in the right direction.  And in those moments, grief's thorns prick. They sting, They tear.  But yesterday reminded me that those moments, humbling as they may be, are the way the Tender One makes room.  The sisters need guidance, they are small and sometimes unruly, and often unaware of whose turn it is.  So the Merciful Lord reaches in, allows the thorn to prick and the beauty to bloom all at the same time, sweet sisters dancing their dance of intimacy in my soul, so that He can make way for their mother. 

She comes to guide them, to show them how to take turns and be gracious and hospitable to one another.  She comes to show them each their unique gift and to console the less desirable sister, dear grief, and remind her that she too is a worthy and noble gift, noble enough to inhabit the heart of the Savior, beautiful enough to live in the soul of His Most Pure Mother.

And I am grateful for her coming, this mother whose name is GRACE.

Beauty in the Ashes

Lenten mantle reminder: Forty Days in the Desert

As we approach Holy Week this year, I am having to rethink the way in which I would normally do things.  Most years, the effort of Holy Week in this house is to find age appropriate ways to make the reality of the Passion of Christ real for my children, so that they may truly experience the joyful exultation of Easter.  This year, real life has changed the perspective a bit. And it's hard.

To be honest, I wish we had needed this Lent.  I wish that all the superficial reminders that we are dust were necessary.  I wish the reality of suffering and death were far removed from our lives and we needed a wake up call. But the truth is we've been living life on the Via Dolorosa for some time now.  Death's sting is palpable in this house. The transient nature of the world is all too real.  The reality that the only eternal joy is in heaven is unfairly ours.  And the deep, desperate hope of Resurrection is the rallying cry of our spirits.  It alone makes us rise each day and begin again. My kids know the horror of death more than I ever imagined they would at such tender ages.  They know what it means to close up the tomb and wait. And they don't need any further reminders.

Lenten Mantle: the Pieta and the Three Pillars of Lent

What they need this Holy Week are gentle ways to live the liturgy, to see the beauty in the ashes. The hope of Sunday's reality needs to be sweet and joyful and tangible, but the references to death and its sting need to be quiet and gentle.  So my regular rotation of Stations of the Cross and watching the second half of Jesus of Nazareth in the evenings and attending the very realistic Living Way of the Cross at the local university are put on hold this year.  There will be Mass and Confession at some point.  There will be Eucharistic Adoration and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.  But mostly, there will be gentle beauty and quiet, hopeful healing for little hearts (and bigger ones too, I suppose).

Each day this week, we'll let a lovely picture book sharpen our focus and lead us through this week's reflections with gentleness and beauty.  Then we'll quietly create something lovely, another gentle reminder of the beauty in the ashes. 

Holy Week at Home 2010:

The Legend of the Easter Egg, Easter Eggs for Anya, and Rechenka's Eggs: We'll read these books and do a more age appropriate version of Pysanky here.  Using wooden eggs with a flattened out bottom (so they stand on their own), the kids will pencil draw a design, then trace over it a Sharpie marker.  Then they'll paint in the design with craft paint.  When that layer of paint is dry, they will go over their marker lines with puff paint to create a raised design.  I'm hoping the effect will be quite nice and the process rewarding for them.

The Little Rose of Sharon: We'll read this one and then make red and white ribbon roses.  We'll tie on day's prayer of the Divine Mercy novena to each of nine roses and put them in a vase on the mantle. We'll untie each prayer as we pray it and put it away.  On Divine Mercy Sunday, I'll put the ribbon roses away until next year and replace them with real ones.

The Tale of Three Trees: We'll follow this one up with a spring walk in the woods and pretzel making for Good Friday. 

Fiona French's Easter: This book, which contains the words of the Easter story from the King James Bible and beautiful stained glass illustrations will be our Easter Saturday read aloud. Afterwards, we'll make our own stained glass windows by coloring printed coloring pages of Easter scenes (not the bunny kind, the Jesus kind) and then covering the edges with coloring tissue paper glued down, and oiling the backside with baby oil on a cotton ball.  When they are dry, we frame them in black paper frames and hang them in the windows as Easter decorations.  We'll make a new Alleluia to hang across the mantle using the same technique.

I hope you all find some inspiration for bringing Holy Week to life in your home.  We will carry you with us in prayer this week and can't wait to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection with you.

Still

I have watched my facebook page update itself so many times in the last twenty-four hours with people bidding goodbye to 2009 with great relief and looking forward to 2010 with renewed joy and hope.  I have received countless "Happy New Year" messages for people that let me know they're praying for a better year in the year to come.  The truth is, I'm not sure how to say goodbye to this year and exactly what to hope for in 2010.

I don't really bid goodbye to 2009 all that easily, for it is the year we lived the anticipation of our wee one, it is the year of a little life that lasted only the span of a summer.  It is the year of Bryce.  And while there is so much sorrow in its dates, there is much joy that only the days of this year will know.  It's hard to feel relief in its passing.  A part of me wanted the world to stop with me in 2009 and not take one more step forward--ever.  But eternity demands that time progress, and 2009 also transformed into a woman willing to accept whatever the hope of eternity demands.  And I know well that to stand still in those days is deny that Lord's promise of "a future full of hope" is true.  And I'm all about holding on to the Lord's promises these days.  And not to move forward means not to heal.  We, even in the midst of the season of Christmas, are an Easter people.  We believe all that is dead in us bears hope of resurrection.  It is for this reason I am able to let go of 2009.  It's not, as some might have guessed, with a huge sigh of relief.  It is yet another painful goodbye that I only find the strength to say because of who He says He is.

We have ever so much to hope for in 2010.  There a lot of painful dates to walk through to reach that hope, to touch its face.  And there is a lot of vulnerability to surrender, fear and dread to let go of.  Do I hope for "better" year in 2010? I'm not so sure.  From an annual perspective, that may be easy to say, but from an eternal perspective, what could have been better than the year of Bryce, the year we birthed a saint into heaven?  Believe me, everything in me hopes we don't know ever know the sorrow of this year again.  But everything in me also knows, I walk a path determined not by calendar dates but by God love.  And my heart knows well He holds my tears in a vial that I hope to one day wear as crown of glory.  So I will walk in sorrow again this year, a new sorrow, a different sorrow.  And I will walk in hope again this year, a new hope, a different hope.  And I will fight the temptation to walk in fear and I will surrender the feeling of nakedness 2009 has left me with to Him who clothes me in radiant splendor. 

No, I don't hope for a better year in 2010.  I hope for a year in which the life I live honors 2009.  I hope for a year in which my faith, my hope, my love reflects the eternal perspective I gained when the world stopped turning in 2009.  I hope for a year in which a family full of hope rejoices in two new lives, one eternal and one anticipated. 

There is a bit of a trend lately for people to pick a word or a motto for the New Year.  Often it reflects a virtue they want to grow in or a habit they want to cultivate.  For some, the Spirit demands a a new answer to His ever-present question.  I have spent an awful lot of time in 2009 telling the Lord "I can't do this."  And then doing it anyway.  I have spent many a painful hour realizing that jump-starting one's life after it comes to a screeching halt is really hard.  I have stomped in fury at how stupid bills and taxes and paperwork seem in the midst of eternal realities.  I have resented the stuff life demands of me--errands and groceries and social outings, when all my heart desired was to curl up in a ball and never move again.    And I sat in fearful silence at the call to love again, to call to open my wounded heart afresh.  And every time I have said "I  can't do this" and waited for His voice to boom back in impatient insistence, I have hear Him quietly whisper, "I know, but I can.  Sit. Be still. Let me move." 

I am not rushing headlong in 2010 with a new lists of hopes and dreams tied to my back, a weight to heavy for my body, worn from this year's walk.  No.  And I'm not idling casually into 2010 without a care in the world either.  I'm sitting right here on its threshold, my finger tips still rubbing the edges of 2009 one last time, and I'm waiting.  I am still.  I am letting Him move.  That is my word -- STILL.  Still as in "be still" and still as in "I am still who you know that I am" and still as in "Bryce is still your wee one" and still as in "I wait in joyful hope still".  STILL.  I seek Him in the stillness and He is still there and He loves me still and He still has plans for my welfare and not for my woe and there is a whole eternity that awaits me still. 

And so I dedicate this solemnity, on which we honor Mary, the Mother of God, to the prayer to know her stillness.  To be a woman who ponders the great spiritual mysteries of this life and the next in my heart.  And I place this year in her hands, open, waiting.  Dearest Mother, make my like unto Thine.  Lover of my soul, be still this beating heart, that it may never be moved from You.

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Outdone

Well, I'm certainly feeling a little outdone lately.  When you walk in grief and cling to faith and pray that one day in the future, a future that seems so very far away, that you will know the joy of sweet baby love once again, and then God surprises you with a most unexpected blessing at a most unexpected time, you realize his generosity cannot be outdone, and that He has indeed outdone you in His wholehearted response to your fearful, feeble request.

When you share the news with your husband and confide in him that you would like to hold the news close for a while, until it has had some time to settle in your heart, and then in his profuse joy, he can't resist telling his parents, the children, and changing his Facebook profile picture to a stork holding a baby, you realize a father's joy is not to be hidden, and you have been outdone in child-like faith.

And so you make your own sheepish announcement, try to couch the news in hidden terms, tell the world that "you are laughing like Sarah laughed" even though you maybe are not quite ready to laugh and are still a little confounded by the whole thing, and then your family, friends, neighbors, all race to laugh with you, to shed tears of joy of your behalf, to appreciate to Lord's generous love, and you find yourself again outdone.  The news of new life shakes the heavens and the earth with celebration bells, there is no quiet way to celebrate the creative miracles of the Lord.

And then you sit with your afternoon cup of tea and open your staunchest supporter's blog to see what she's up to today, and find that she too cannot contain the wonderment, the encouragement, the sheer happiness she's already given to you in the last few days.  And you are grateful for her love, for a friendship that has been a healing balm and a pillar of strength, for a voice of experience that has consistently reminded you that making babies is an art of sacrificial love that always produces profound lessons of joy and humility.  And once again you are outdone.  Outdone by her wonderment, outdone in the gift of friendship, and outdone in creative blog announcements too.

Because now it seems there are so many loving friends ready to take up your news, utter prayers on your behalf and weep in solidarity with you as you ponder God's wondrous gift, that you give up.  Your fear has been outdone by faith.  Your feeble yes has been overshadowed by his resounding one.  Your shyness has hidden nothing from a circle of family and friends who are unabashedly excited for you.  And in the combined wisdom, experience, suffering and joy of a circle of women who have lived this life of openness, there is a bond of solidarity and a powerful chain of prayer that outdoes your silent begging for health, joy, and healing.

And so today as I share with you the news of our Advent, the anticipation of new life, the still difficult task of carrying the cross of grief, I realize a new tender mercy.  I am outdone.  And for that I am grateful.

I'm opening comments here because, in all honestly, I am relying on your prayers and support in a mighty way and want to come back over and over again to the reminder that they are with me.

From The Papa's Pen...

...straight to my heart.  I read these words from Pope Benedict XVI today and could not have been more struck with the depth to which they speak to my heart this Advent.  There is much to ponder here.  I'll be spending a lot of time with this over the next few weeks I think:

"In contrast to that, true believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves….

“We are rather too inclined to forget that in the Book of Job…God declares Job to be righteous — Job, who has hurled the most outrageous accusations at God — while he rejects Job’s friends as speakers of falsehood, those friends who had defended God and had found some kind of good sense and answer for everything.

“Observing Advent simply means talking with God the way Job did.  It means just seeing the whole reality and burden of our Christian life without fear and bringing it before the face of God, as judge and savior, even if, like Job, we have no answer to give about it all, and the only thing left is to leave it to God himself to answer and to tell Him how we are standing here in our darkness with no answers.”

– Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, What it Means to Be a Christian, pp. 15-20. Ignatius Press, 2006.

Please take the time today to offer prayers for the December intentions of Our Holy Father, who guides us his Church is such wisdom and holiness.

December's Papal Intentions:

General: That children may be respected and loved and never be the victims of exploitation in its various forms.

Mission: That at Christmas the peoples of the earth may recognize in the Word Incarnate the light which illuminates every man and that the Nations may open their doors to Christ, the Saviour of the world.
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Soul Nest

Today as I go about my work, I am simply stunned by the tangible presence of God around me.  I have spent my morning coffee time lately praying Blessed John XXII's Decalogue for Daily Living (you can find it on Elizabeth's sidebar) as my morning offering, reading the Psalms and journaling, and reflecting with Ann Voskamp on His presence in the ordinary.  He has moved in my soul.  And today as I go about my tasks, He speaks to me in so many small, humble ways.  I wash dishes beside a lit candle and an open window, soul-soothing piano whispering in the background.  I am so struck by the beauty of my tea mug and yellow pottery bowl perched atop a pile of dirty silverware, I almost stop to take a photo of it.  I scrub dishes, Ann's poetic reflections turning themselves over in my mind.  Her voice in my thoughts.  I am thinking, and it sounds the way she writes.  I am scrubbing the big soup pot, half full of warm soapy water and thinking about how the top half looks clean but underneath that water lies the worst of the stuck-on residue...then thinking about my soul, half-full of God, half clean, my dirtiest and most stuck-on residue still hidden from Him, waiting for a good soul scrubbing.  I pledge to lay myself bare to Him, let Him scrub me all the way clean. 

Then I am sweeping, the bare wood of my bedroom floor, finding a small group of coins tucked ever so stubbornly beneath my Victorian baseboards.  I swipe at them once, then twice, then decide to just leave them.  What difference does it make?  His voice presses into the ordinary again.  I remember the widow of the gospel who searched the dark and dimly lit corners for her one lost coin.  I stoop to free each one, gather them up collectively and place them neatly in my dresser drawer.  It's not about the value of the coins today, although I do smile at the joy they will unexpectedly bring the preschooler the next time he is deserving of praise.  But no, not about the value of the coins or the completion of the task to perfection, it's about the stooping today, taking the time to bend low, go slow, seek Him in the darkness and the dust of my life.  For His tender mercies are not as apparent as they were in early weeks of grief.  They are quieter, more intimate.  They require a certain disposition of a soul to be noticed, then to be treasured.

In the midst of the work of this day, my mind is tumbling over and over the season of Advent, the living of it, the listing of it, the anticipation of it, the slight tinge of manic mental list-making it usually evokes in me tugging at my heart-strings.  Advent tends to bring out its own nesting instinct in me.  I have a tendency to prepare for the coming of the Christ Child in much the same way I prepare for the coming of a new wee one of my own.  I think of the the lists of years past, and the nesting lists of this past year.  A wound is touched, a pain is freshly felt.  I can't do it this way this year.  I don't have the strength.  It makes my chest hurt just to think about it.  Suddenly, I am fretful, fearful.  I need to be able to ride the rhythm, grasp the familiar this Advent.  Lord, don't throw me off kilter again, please.  Don't send me to my knees again.  Don't look at the brokenness at the bottom of the my spirit, look at the top part that I have shined up so nicely for you.  Don't search into the dark, dusty corners of my heart room.  It is clean enough.  Don't stoop so low, Lord.  He stops me.  He calls to mind the refrain of my grief: "Tender is His Mercy."  He is stooping low, He is sweeping underneath my comfort zone, He is bringing to my knees.  And He is asking me if I will spend the season of preparation, the season called Advent, nesting in soul.  And I am begging for the grace to say yes, and making a different kind of to-do list this year.

• Instead of vacuuming the crumbs out of kitchen drawers, I will vacuum the crumbs of broken trust, of shattered dreams, the residue of fear from own spirit.  I will make room for the future full of hope He has promised me.
• Instead of sweeping the dusty corners of the chambers of my house, I will sweep the dust from the chambers of my heart.  I will shed light in the corners and humble myself to show Him the brokenness that hides itself there.  I will wait for His tender mercy to polish it to a shine.
• Instead of making room in my home for trees and decorations, packages, and the company of men, I will make room in my heart for the company of a humble family seeking refuge, a woman on a donkey and her hero carpenter, and their little one -- the Little One, for the company of shepherds and animals and gift-bearing kings, and for the grace they bring.
• Instead of finding comfort in new sheets, quilts, comforters, sofa throws, I will find comfort in the straw bed and swaddling clothes that wrapped the Word, the Living God.  And I will accept that salvation is not so much about human comfort as it is about the very real, very hard task of being holy, which sometimes call us to lie down in the hay, to accept the pricks of suffering, the pokes of persecution, the sad stench of our own humanity.
• Instead of seeking to light the season with plastic strings that twinkle and wax that burns into pleasant scents, I will light the season with guiding glow that leads to Him, the heavenly Hosannas of the choirs of angels, the Heavenly radiance of my Savior's little face.
• Instead of endless chatter, tinny music, and the roar of the crowds, there will be the quiet of a soul preparing with reverence, the way she prepares to receive the Eucharist, and the awed of hush of a sinner beholding her Savior's birth.

The Feast of All Saints: Tender Mercy for a Grieving Heart

Sigh....

It seems this won't be easy no matter how many times I've written the post in my head, no matter how appropriate the feast, no matter how much time passes.  There are just some things that won't be easy about this process.  This is one of them.

I have wanted more than anything to find a way to send a message to the great cloud of witnesses that have held us in prayer so faithfully that we are here, hanging on, hoping, praying, healing.  I did not want any of you who have so sincerely prayed, offered support, sent words of encouragement to think of me curled up in a ball somewhere in despair.  I hope my silence did not lead you to think that.  

It was not a silence of despair that you found here in these last eight weeks.  Eight weeks.  That's so hard to believe.  At first, it was the silence of a family whose world had stood still, for whom time and place were inadequate, insufficient and surreal.  Then it was the silence of a mother summoning all the energy and mental focus she had on healing the heart of her family, trying to keep her shaking knees up long enough to give little mouths and hearts all the nourishment they needed.  As the fog of the early weeks lifted, the silence became that of a mother searching out her voice, trying to remember how she used to pray, what she used to talk about, what she taught her kids, and to evaluate what was worth saying in light of the infinite reality in which she now finds herself immersed.  And then the silence of a family gone away, retreating to heal, remembering that there is still much to be joyful about on this side of heaven.  And then the awkward silence of a writer with so much to say and so few words of worth.  And so I start with sigh.  And then I sigh again.

What I wanted to share with you most in all these weeks is this.  We have endured two months of unutterable sorrow and incomprehensible grief.  We hurt, every day.  We have known pain, fear, worry, confusion, guilt, doubt, and horror beyond any I could have ever imagined.  But we have never once been far from the tender mercy of our God.  I have used the phrase over and over again, since I first spoke to Elizabeth in the early hours after Bryce's death--"Tender is His Mercy."  There is no way for me to recount the vast majority of those mercies here--they are far too many and far too intimate.  But there is one I will share.

In the immediate hours after we lost our dear baby, as we huddled in shock and grief, an army of believers from around the world gathered and prepared itself for battle.  Soldiers were set to task, some taking the lead, some handling the communication, some delivering supplies, and some on watch, the constant watch that prayer warriors stand so faithfully.  We got snippets of information about the work you all were doing, but an even better testament to the job you did was that we knew very little of it all.  We were whisked from one momentous mountain to the next on the wings of grace, and every obstacle had been so carefully moved from our path that we were often not even aware that there had been any in the first place.  As I sat near Bryce's burial spot this morning, I prayed for all of those whose efforts made those first incomprehensible days a time of healing, a time of grace, a flood of tender mercy.  As much horror as there is the memory of Bryce's death, there is a flood of consolation in the memories of the tender mercies that were poured out to us as we gave him to heaven.

And though most of you found yourselves stationed at your posts far away in those moments, I know you were united to us in prayer.  I know because I know the grace that flooded us and I know it was won for us, an abundant, generous supply of grace, that carries me still tonight.  And so it could make its way back to you, the Good Lord saw fit to mobilize one sweet soldier to stand by my side, exercising that special gift she has to find the beauty in all things. She snapped away in those two days, documenting for us the healing and hope our faith brings.  They are images I am eternally grateful to have.  They are tender mercies.  I have wanted to share them with you for a long time, but I have been unsure how.  Today, as I sat at that spot for the first time since we buried Bryce, I knew it was time.  The soldiers who never made their way to the front lines deserve to see the victory.  And so here it is.  Here we are.  We are today much as you see us here, wounded and broken, and yet full of love, full of life, full of hope--fellow soldiers still engaged in the battle.

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While I am grateful to have found my voice and finally been able to say some of what I have wanted to say, I cannot assure you of what the future will look like here in my little corner of the internet.  Most days I find I am still a bit of a stranger to myself.  But this blog was always first and foremost about a family.  It was a place for me to share the memories I wanted to keep.  It was a place for me to think out loud about my life, my God, and my mission--how I was going to get us all to heaven.  Those things are important to me now more than ever.  Some days you may come here and find me pensive and grieving, I won't be able to help that.  Some days, many days, you are likely to find me silent.  I hope you will understand.  And then there will be those days when you find me much as I once was, teaching math with sweet gnome friends and frosting cupcakes for a feast.  I welcome your kind words and encouragement and reminders of prayer, but am hoping you'll send them via the e-mail I've added here.  There's no way for me to know what each day will bring and comments seem an all too time-sensitive means to communication.  I hope that no matter what you will know that I have come back here because of you--because a grateful heart has beckoned me back, because a world that has confounded me so often with its ambiguity and potential for harm has proven that at the moment of truth, we who seek each other in this world for like-minded conversation and inspiration, are in fact, an army, capable of great things, capable of carrying one of our own, wounded, across the battle field to safety, and then waiting until she finds the strength to speak.  Today, I say utter a weak, quivering "thank you" that seems not enough, because you deserve to know that I can.