This morning, Fr. A. preached about how, when you are going through a seriously trying time (like with his sister who just lost her son) you cannot rely on what you think or what you feel about God or anything. You have to rely on what you know. (The reading from 1 John used the phrase "we know" several times.)
That's true for me right now.
I can't even put into words what the last three weeks or so have brought to pass to make me feel like What the hell just hit me? I know that these are the days that I will look back on in the future as a major transition for the positive. I know it because I know God is good. I know it because of the conversations we have back and forth and that He has never, ever brought me anything but good.
But for now, I am sitting with a new light shining. It feels dark. Like practically blinding. My heart is suddenly incredibly exposed to myself and all of my judgmental bearings are sort of in free-fall. I feel like every trauma I've ever known is retriggered, though because I'm aware of it, it's also true that in real time I am learning how to regulate, and that I need to. It's not optional. I just feel incredibly vulnerable, especially in the interior and exterior settings that had felt the most solid and secure just not that terribly long ago.
But at the same time, I am more surrounded with support than I ever have been in my life. Honestly, I chalk much of this spiritual movement up to the Spiritual Direction formation program I'm in. My life has become the curriculum and my Interior Teacher is hard at work. I have people. But there's no way through but through. My core is at peace but my nervous system is in massive flight mode. It's not pretty and frankly it is scary to mentally be back in places I left long ago.
I remember vividly one of the last sessions of my SDFP training in September, when a group of five of us were doing a contemplative practice together. We were given various passages to read, 20 minutes of solitude, then we were to come back together and share about what had struck us. I did not even get the entire first sentence of the first passage read, and it had hit me like a ton of bricks, and even after the 20 minutes and into sharing about it, it was still powerfully rocking me, and the line was this: "At the heart of the Carmelite Rule there is a call for us to commit ourselves to Jesus..." It hit me like an intensely personal call, and I thought of Aslan, how the child asks if he is safe. Oh, no. No one said anything about safe. He's not a tame lion -- but he is good.
I have maintained myself in a kind of safety. For sanity, we all need safety. But humanly-built safety can smother and suffocate. I think God is calling me to something more akin to His definition of safety, which is going to take a lot of faith, trust, letting go and hanging on. And just simple openness to that which I don't know.
But it is worth it, isn't it. To be with the King. It's worth anything.
