groaning, day 6

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Lord, I was ever greedy of life, my attention always straining toward the parts of it that had not yet come…toward what was about to be, or might be, or hopefully would be, and especially toward those things that, by Your mercy, might turn out not to be after all.
I panted with longing to suck each segment of life dry of its pleasures. I plotted, with myself but despite myself, about tomorrow…about the “later” that was constantly morphing into now. You know how I worked, Lord, recklessly but prayerfully, to set time’s courses and, in Your name, to sculpt them to my intention, to my definition of good.
But I am old now, Lord, and my prayers grown old as well. So it is that daily I am drawn, as here, to pray, “Deliver me, My Lord, from this my great sin, and take me, free of doubt and other longings, into Your good plan.” (Prayer by Phyllis Tickle, Weavings, Volume XXV, Number 4)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 31

Scripture for the Day: 2 Corinthians 12:7-10

Reading for Reflection:

This is what I’ve been thinking: I contain pain.  It means several things.

     The first point: it’s all within me.  Contained inside of me.  There are no external symptoms.  (Except for its effect on my ambulation.  I am mightily slowed down.)  If I wish to discuss it (as here) people have to take my word for it.  And even then I am not sure I can communicate its quality, its intensity, its free motion through my skeleton and musculature.  (Hence the exercise through several paragraphs above.)

     Now I would have thought that such enclosedness of pain would make me the Lonely Hurter.  Bearing the burden all lonesomely, you see.  (Well, so it was at the beginning of my diagnosis, when people scarcely knew how to react.)  It should, I thought, grant me some sort of Byronic romanticism: “For I am as a weed, / Flung from the rock, on Ocean’s foam to sail / Where’er the surge may sweep, the tempest’s breath prevail”—poor, forsaken, solitary poet!  I, in my vale of pain, enduring the greatest limitation imposed upon sentient and singular lives—this, that each must die alone.

     Ah, what ineffable tragedy, to suffer alone.  Unaccompanied!

     Yet, no matter how often in the past I’ve permitted myself to sink in to such delicious self-pity, none of this has been my response to this pain.  I’m surprised at myself.

     For this is the second point: I find myself consumed by a truly interesting question.  Why doesn’t the pain which I am forced to contain—yes, essentially alone—increase my reclusive gloom, my characteristic tendencies to melancholy?  What allows me, rather, to respond with a measuring scrutiny, with a certain impersonal dissociation from this world of hurt inside my body—and with spiritual comfort after all?

     Groaning helps.  I recommend it.  Seriously.

     Transforming the pain into complete sentences, ordering it according to linguistic principles uttered aloud—especially when someone is there to listen, however little her comprehension, and especially while the pain is active—that helps.  I am fortunate.  Thanne is patient, nor does she think I’m begging sympathy.

     I believe this: speak a thing, and that thing is forced to be conformed to the speaker’s structures, language, grammar, weltanschauung.  Authority.  Even from primeval times, to know the name of something is to command it.

     On the other hand, altruism is not my consolation.  I do not draw comfort or strength from supposing that my pain serves anyone else, or else some cause beyond myself.  This is not a sacrifice.  I cannot come close to deeds in the imitation of Christ.  (I have lived in the hope of such sacrifice and such imitatio Christi.)  This just doesn’t happen to be that or to explain my genuine freedom from pain while I am in pain.

     The third point: perhaps the journey itself has brought me—my soul and my quieter contemplations—to matters less selfish and more eternal.  Matters in themselves larger than pain, larger than myself yet capable of, inviting me into their elevated community: a lifting of self out of self.  (Letters From the Land of Cancer by Walter Wangerin Jr.)

 

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: O Heart Bereaved and Lonely

 

O heart bereaved and lonely,
Whose brightest dreams have fled
Whose hopes like summer roses,
Are withered crushed and dead
Though link by link be broken,
And tears unseen may fall
Look up amid thy sorrow,
To Him who knows it all

O cling to thy Redeemer,
Thy Savior, Brother, Friend
Believe and trust His promise,
To keep you till the end
O watch and wait with patience,
And question all you will
His arms of love and mercy,
Are round about thee still

Look up, the clouds are breaking,
The storm will soon be o'er
And thou shall reach the haven,
Where sorrows are no more
Look up, be not discouraged;
Trust on, whate'er befall
Remember, O remember,
Thy Savior knows it all

Closing Prayer
Loving God, the earth moans, in need of your healing. Help me be a peacemaker today—one who carries your vision and takes the small actions that contribute to healing for the world. Amen. (The Uncluttered Heart by Beth A. Richardson)