day 12 - death of the wish dream

"The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

i realized the other day this is truly what i am grieving - the death of THE wish dream, yes, the death of my own wish dreams, but the fact that ALL wish dreams must die... i just can't seem to stomach a world or a church, or a community where it's all just the nitty, gritty of life - and no hope for something grand, something whole, something that changes everything. i know that my wish dream of community, that group that met weekly needed to die, it was unhealthy and could have even become an idol of sorts, it makes me sad, but i can grieve that and move on. it's the death of the large hope, the big, glorious picture that i just can't seem to be able to stomach...

i realized also that this coincided with the death of my calling. i know that the two were linked somehow. i feel adrift, purposeless. as discouraged as i was after leaving bible college, being told that the fields were ripe for harvest and liam and i banging our heads on the door of every ministry we could find over and over and over again, a whole decade of disappointment and rejection.

i had such big dreams, such high hopes, so MANY ideas... but as DB says, better to be shattered, to be disillusioned, because god forbid, community couldn't bear it... but i don't know why. this echos the cry of my heart from yesterday - why isn't god big enough for this? why couldn't he dream bigger NOW, yeah, i get it, kingdom come... blah, blah, blah... but my wish dream was real and was going to feed people, and teach them better, healthier ways to be in THIS world, right NOW. so instead i collapse instead of community. okay, you win.

silver linings

i have been flat lately. remember when i said that i stood on the edge of the ocean in february and screamed "ha winter, it's february and i'm beach combing! you didn't get me!"?? well it was like winter took that as a challenge and reached out a long arm, scooped me up and said "wanna bet?"

ugh.

these past few months have been hard. some wonderful bright spots, but they just don't seem to push me forward, i enjoy them and then stall again. stalled. that is exactly how i feel.

my sponsoree K is wonderful. we have really come to have a great friendship, one that i cherish deeply. she is really good at finding silver linings. little comments that help me see things from a different perspective.

in talking last night with my sponsor i had a different perspective fall on me. i told her that even though this season has been difficult, we are being present to the yucky emotions that sickness, death and winter has brought on - i am not eating them or stuffing them, but sitting with them - and (here's the ah-ha) i realized that my program is working. i might be on auto-pilot some of the time, but my food plan, my daily routine and my tools are doing the hard work for me because in the good times i have worked my program. that felt really good. so that's my silver lining for today. what's yours?

unwrapped

i don't know how many times i've said today "i just want everything to be NORMAL again" - things aren't neat and tidy in my mind lately - they've gotten all unruffled by the emotions liam's dad's sickness has brought into our lives. i hate that about grief, death and dying. it can never stay in a nice, neat easy package. and it unwraps all of the other ones you've ever had in your life. it's like it dissolves the wrapper on everything somehow. i guess maybe i'm feeling unwrapped too.

it was much easier to hate and resent him. dealing with that resentment has left me wide open to the depth of emotion this has brought. i hadn't realized how tucked away i had made my heart. damn denial. i guess it's not helping that i got my period 4 days early... i'm just awash with emotion today and while i know that is okay i still don't have to like it. i just keep repeating "this too shall pass, this too shall pass..." i know that one day of deep emotion doesn't mean winter has me in it's evil clutches, but damn i am sick of it all. i think one day of warm weather and beach combing would fix everything.

we're headed up coast today to pick up liam from the airport. there are three spots where we pass the ocean. each time we do i say "hello ocean" - just seeing it resets something within me. maybe today we'll stop and i'll get out of the car and yell at the waves for a bit. the sun at least is shining. it's bitter cold, but for today, just for today thy will not mine be done.

seeing the size of the cloth

a reader of this blog and a new friend just sent me this poem - i thought it was so beautiful i should share it here:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and send you out in the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shehab Nye

via - tikkun

Marigold Path Grid Blog: remembering mom

image designed by adam walker cleaveland

It is still so new
& all we see is
the empty space,
but that is not
how it is in the
landscape of the heart.
There, there is
no empty space
& he still laughs
& grapples with ideas
& plans
& nods wisely with each
of us in turn.
We are proud to
have known him.
We are proud to
have called him friend.

for bob who put this grid blog together, from Story People .

grief and remembering is something i must do intentionally lately. it's been 18 years since my mother, the real bobbie died. i was 21, she was 43. there is never a good time to loose a parent, but this time for me was very traumatic. she seems so very far from me now. like a distant friend living in a far away town who i haven't seen in a very long time.

i never thought i would say this in the middle of all of my grief, but it has gotten easier. it's not easy - but easier than i'd imagined it would be.

she was a bundle of contradictions, my mother. i think it was her sickness that made that real. i got stuck for quite some time in the anger stage of my grief. a lot of unresolved emotions that i had to untangle. what was god's and what was hers? it took me years of therapy to figure that out, heck, it took me years of therapy just to be able to admit it. i guess that's why it was such a drawn out stage of my grieving process.

she was so ugly to me before she died. they told me it was the medicine. the mass doses of prednisone and constant frustrations with her inability to care for herself. i think that by finally admitting how angry i was at her i was finally able to have her back again.

that's what i tell people now when they speak to me of their grief. that it's okay to feel any way you need to - even angry. it doesn't mean you don't love them any less. anger and love are both valid, deep emotions that can co-exist within a heart at the same time. and by admitting the anger i was able to deal with it and move it out of the way to make room for the good memories to show up again.

one of my mother's favorite things to do was to go out for breakfast. i don't know how many saturday mornings she would awaken my teen-age self and try to coax me out to go junkin' with her by first bribing me with breakfast. that's probably when i miss her most. in the simple things. like finding an amazing antique at a yard sale and knowing she would be right by my side if she could have been.

or raking and burning leaves together. how many times the smell of burning leaves brings her back to me. i can see her with her red bandanna on, flaming rake in hand, carrying the fire from one pile to the next in our old back yard. she loved to burn those piles of leaves.

i smile as i remember her sitting with a golf umbrella in the sunshine of the bleachers watching me play first base, while others stared, wondering if this woman thought that it was going to rain. she was allergic to the sun, her lupus made her so sensitive and the sun took so much energy from her. but she wouldn't miss a game if she could help it.

the clacking of the typewriter will forever remind me of her. sitting at her smith corona desperately trying to write something that someone would publish. it was her greatest dream. she would have LOVED blogging. hitting that 'publish' button would have fulfilled a great void in her life. she was never so sad as when the mailbox held the large envelopes with her manuscript, rejected, inside. i could never understand why she kept doing that to herself. i do now.

i wish she had written about her pain, her struggles, her journey through living with terminal illness, that would have been something that could have captured a publishers eye. there aren't even journals. just forced poetry and sad pre-teen, christian romance novels. she so desperately wanted to figure out what the magic combination was that would get her words read.

i know she would have loved recovery too. i think she longed for it her whole life. serenity, wholeness, healing. she died with so much unresolved. so many questions, resentments and bitterness. i wonder if it exacerbated her sickness? did that emotional baggage weigh her down and she bore the consequences of that in her body?

i know she would be proud of me today. thrilled at the level of healing and wholeness i have found. rejoicing with me in the choices i have made. i also know that i wouldn't be where i am today if she was still here. i think realizing that was one of the biggest helps to my grieving process. we had quite an unhealthy co-dependent relationship. i think i am stronger and healthier today because i don't regularly have to navigate a relationship with her. i hope that doesn't sound bitter. it's not meant to. i just know that she who installed 'my buttons' knew how to push them like no one else.

so today, i remember you bobbie. thank you for the life you gave me. thank you for your strengths and weaknesses. i have learned and continue to learn from them both. i miss you mom.

read other's stories here: Marigold Path Grid Blog

a religion of denial

preacher man nails it tight here:

a religion of denial

rdiva made me cry again

ragamuffin diva: Dead Monkey Babies and Butterflies

a day for the struggling

from 1988 to 1996 i loathed mothers day. my mother passed in 1988 and i was infertile for the eight years following. for women who are single and wanting to be married, married and struggling to conceive, those grieving the loss of a child or mothers with prodigal children this is the most difficult day on the calendar.

i loathed being forced to go to church, listen to some man give lip service to females one day of the year and then have to walk out as they 'honored' mothers with a cheap lousy carnation or bookmark. i wanted to beat them with it. one year i actually refused to take one.

the memory of seeing the blood each month, proving i was a failure, not fit to bear children or mother them - it's truly devastating. your own body becomes your enemy.

so today, i stand with you. i know it is only a gesture - but i remember the pain, the grief and the longing. i stand with you today.

spiritual terrorism

most of you have already read this. i couldn't make it through the first paragraph. it felt like poison seeping into my brain and traveling throughout my body. how could anyone be so ugly? how could anyone make such claims?

all i could think about was kyle's wife, his children, stumbling across this cruelty and having to not only deal with the loss, pain and grief that comes from loosing your soul mate and father, but to have it made into such a public spectacle, milked for notoriety and any internet fame it might bring. it is phariseeism at it's worst. even the slimiest of ambulance chasers wouldn't stoop this low.

i kept thinking, 'that could be us'. anyone could have made the mistake, reaching out, adjusting the mike - how very sad someone is using this tragedy to catapult himself into the public eye by making such horrid claims. it is spiritual terrorism at it's ugliest.

people who need fear and power to promote their cause are the weakest of minds and the most to be pitied. the problem with terrorism is that it never gives those using it's methods what they desire. it only strengthens the opposition.

mr. proctor, the only consolation that can be had is that you have to live your sad, miserable life. you must serve and worship your horrible, angry god, and you must look at yourself every day as you shave and prepare to live out your small, pathetic existence while the rest of us enjoy grace, life and a god of abundance and love. i only pity your family, your children raised in a home where god is such a bastard and life is so demoralizing that you need to inflict the pain that you carry on others in this deplorable way.