Waiting for the cool

The last few weeks, I've been writing privately.  I've always had the desire to be an evangelist of sorts, but I think perhaps. in the topology of living, for the moment I felt a desire to leave the path of encourager to walk a path of being encouraged. I took a big leap of faith on Tuesday, jumped into the deep end with a new priest, I wasn't sure how I would feel about it, or if I was ready for it, but I know that I needed to restart my spiritual engines.  I didn't much care for where I had wandered on my own.  I needed a companion, a fresh one, hoping perhaps that, if I was careful, I might not wear this one out too soon. 
It all boils down to trust.  And a leap of faith. I suppose I 'interview' so many priests, I am not really shocked when most of them let me down.  What I have found, though, in the path of spiritual direction, is that women SDs often seem to me to have a personal agenda that I am not willing to accept.  The truth though, is that I expect different things from women than I do from men. I might truthfully say that perhaps I am not yet ready for women SDs. 
Yet I have women who are friends and spiritual companions. I am truly grateful for these women.  I will need them in the days ahead, as I allow my teachers to cut deep into my heart, so that I might bleed out the remnants of mistrust and fear and jealousy and envy, to name a few.  I will need them as God exposes my truth to me.
And that truth, seems for the moment, to be focused on forgiveness. Not uncommon, I've preached it often...but around October 1st, I've become more and more aware of how often I do not forgive.  And even more frighteningly, I am more aware of my need to ask for forgiveness.
It begins with some new faces on FB.  Not friends, but friends of friends.  People I have wronged long ago, some sins, I have asked for forgiveness...but others, faceless people who I wronged because I was hurting, or had been wronged by them...now, by the gift of technology, have faces.  Things I would have preferred to forget, are finding their way to the surface...and they aren't pretty.  Such a humbling experience, to have the story I created shown up by the truth.  Now, the sword that wounds is two sided.  Sometimes it is a merciful sword: what I thought I was guilty for, I discover I was not; but sometimes it is a sword of clarity, where all the rationalizations are stripped away...and the truth can be brutally painful.  But only through the wound can the healing begin. 
We can do it while we are alive, or we can wait for purgatory...but we will not get to heaven without seeing our truth, befriending it, and offering ourselves the mercy and grace of forgiveness. 

You would think I've been listening to "The Great Divorce," but in fact, the last three nights, I've been listening to "The Screwtape Letters."  In the GD, the truth of the books, for me, is that only good can get into heaven.  In SL, we are shown how the devil uses our fear of the truth to keep us from ever wanting heaven.  Screwtape suggests that we continue to live in our illusions of Christianity, feeling good about ourselves, rather than living out humility and hospitality.  All the rosaries in the world won't open the gates unless we allow God to transform us into loving, giving beings. 

As I begin to face my truth, and as it scares me, I woke last night to the hooting of an owl.  Being a person who believes in signs and wonders, this hooting around two a.m. brought cold into my bones.  I thought of the book, "I Heard the Owl Call My Name." I don't remember much about it, I read a lot that summer, but I remembered that death followed the call of the owl.  I have lived in this house for 18 years and I had never heard owls in my backyard.  It was a sign, perhaps my time was up.  That happened earlier this year, too. Oh heavens, I was growing into one of "those" women!  But the owl in October was haunting. 
I decided to confront it. 
I walked out in the yard...the sky was brilliant from a moon on its way to new.  The shadows of the leaves on the patio felt wonderful in my heart.  The hooting continued. I began to pray. 

 

Of course, the cool has finally arrived. I really do not know how to walk this next path. When I was 18, I woke at 4 a.m., got out of bed, put on my overalls and walked in the forest until dawn.  I never thought about it, I simply did it. It was a part of me...a great longing to be free of the house (the not so metaphorical cage of fear and unpredictability that I grew up in) and to just "walk in the woods" where I believed wild creatures were really friendly because they were allowed to be wild. They were "born free."  We humans are not born free. Even before we pop out of the womb, someone is alread making plans for us. Someone has decided whether we will live or die, most often based on whether we are male or female. Females get killed more readily and males, my priest frient told me. He didn't understand that.
I understood. A woman who finds herself inconveniently pregnant and without a protector will kill off a female because she knows the odds are good that the child she would give birth to would have to endure the same sufferings she did...so in the mother's mind, that is mercy killing.

I recall the M.A.S.H. episode that sends Hawkeye into the mental ward: He's on a bus with native civilians during the Korean War...ahem, Conflict... They are in enemy territory. The bus is broken down. They hear the troops marching, not to far off. If they on the bus remain silent, they just might survive the day. Hawkeye hears a chicken clucking and and he whispers out, strongly, comandingly as harsh as he can, "Shut that chicken up!" and then, after some time in the mental ward, he knows the truth: It wasn't a chicken, it was a baby.  And the mother did what she needed to do so that the rest on the bus might live: she smothered her child.

 

A dramatic representation of a story that is probably lived out every day.  Where is the guilt? Who is responsible? How have we offended God in this scenario?  Is anyone right?
Yes, we have the many Catholic Pharisees and Baptist Pharisees (and whoever else wants to put in their tradition) quoting their understandings of THE LAW and Holy Scripture, but is the LAW sufficient and sustainable in this situation? Is the LAW truly God's will here? And then, once the ones who have to be right get done with their arguing...we come to the question that matters most to me:

How do we find healing in this great suffering and pain?  How do we reconcile ourselves to God, if we choose to want to reconcile ourselves to God?
You see, I have put you in a very difficult situation. I told you the story, as I remember it. Now you are stuck with it. If you simply dismiss it, that is your answer to God about it. If you judge it, then that is your answer to God about it.  And whatever your thoughts...good or bad or indifferent...you can't unring a bell, you know...the story becomes a part of your story, however small...and in it there is a judgement, a guilt, an innocence and a truth.
For me today, this is the hard work of forgiveness. Yes, I think it is possible to choose to not do it and that life can be quite beautiful without going to that unhappy place of rough edges.

But I have chosen to go back into the woods.  This time, not as an innocent or ignorant, but willingly, knowing only a little of what I might find there.

In some way, I have turned my head and my heart back toward Jerusalem.  I recognize that there will be a death, but what kind I haven't a clue. I know I must do this because...somewhere in my bones, I know this is what I was born for, why I survived...

Not nearly as important as it sounds, I am turning back on that road to find my authentic self. It will mean a bloody death to things I have cherished: my sins. 
Can you follow me? Do you see how we cherish our sins? We protect them because giving them up, who might we become? Something worse?  And freedom from guilt and sin is such a scary thing...
I'm not talking about the sunshine and kittens and falling leaves kind of freedom.  I'm talking about looking our enemy in the eye (whatever that enemy might be) and perhaps fighting that last fight that God knows we need to fight...because (if you are like me, you want a good fight...I can think of a thousand examples in movies where we absolutely have to live out the battle first before we can rest) we must make ourselves tired of holding that which is still binding us to the fear (and anticipation) of hell.  Only when we are tired of doing it 'our way' do we even have a chance at forgiving and forgiveness.
For me, in some ways, it will be sorting out that bus scenario.  Who was I on that bus?  How did I help build up or tear down?  Can I forgive...myself...others...God...for what happened?  That is my work of October.
Growing every closer to God. Staying truly, madly and deeply in love.  And sharing it as best I can.  That's about it.
For now.
Guess I'll write about the owls later.

Love, Cindy