“Finally, finally the tears blew out of me into sobbing in the barn, the cats waiting impatiently for me to leave, Morgen quietly munching her hay. The light softening the wood beams. A hay bale holding my butt. I hoped Bruce wouldn’t find me.
“Bruce and I had just been talking how Christmas was a hard time. It’s like a sink hole in our path, that we need to walk down and then up and back to normal time without the pressure to celebrate like we see on TV, or like our friends who gather their families together—with their happy group pictures on Facebook. I was tired of writing Merry Christmas. Just outside of memory, childhood Christmases haunt me.” This is how I opened my last year’s Christmas blog: Tears at Christmas.
But this year, there are no tears, only stillness, and companionship. I’ve enjoyed the festivity on television both commercials and holiday movies.
This Christmas Bruce and I are enjoying the quiet of the holiday. The terrible bouts of loneliness have receded, partly because I’ve learned when the refrain, “nobody loves me” starts to circle, I’ve learned to catch the stink, and block it with: “Lord Jesus, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Loneliness has been a refining fire, burning away my need to apologize for who I am, my unease with my present life, and feeling like I have to be a “healing presence” which can warp and break friendships. It’s easier being on the outer edges of groups because of my lack of emotional intelligence.
Being a healing presence is one of my values, but it needs to fade into presence, stay in the back of my mind, when I visit with people. I am not a spiritual companion or therapist or pastor. (My own spiritual companion has done good, prayerful work in helping me find this place because she listens and asks good questions.)
I see this blog like pastoring a small country church. Every time I write, I hope these blogs speak some kind of grace. Listening can be a good gift, especially these days when people are full of their own stories. But I’ve learned sometimes people don’t want to talk about whatever it is that hurt them. There are people I’m happy to listen to that I don’t trust with my stories, though I am puzzled by how few people return the question, “how are you?”
Loneliness has burned away my need to be useful, which has very deep roots in my early faith, where we continually asked God to use us. Use, what a dehumanizing word, that doesn’t belong in our walk with God. I don’t have to be useful to please God. I can just be.
I learned that I can talk to God about stuff like I would talk with a friend and He has heard me, and shifted the relationship. He has done this with my husband Bruce. I have learned some things are best not shared with others.
Henri Nouwen has talked about letting our loneliness turn into solitude where people can come. I have seen it as a desert exercise. In his book Reaching Out, and HenriNouwen.org he has said: “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
While some pastors say that we should be in community, otherwise we’re in hell, I think that sometimes we are called to the desert, this work of loneliness, this work of grieving and crying out like they do in the Psalms. Seeing my life as a sort of desert has been a healing perspective. Here’s what the Psalmist says, speaking the pain and finding God at the other end.
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress;
my eye is wasted from grief;
my soul and my body also.
10 For my life is spent with sorrow,
and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my iniquity,
and my bones waste away.
11 Because of all my adversaries I have become a reproach,
especially to my neighbors,
and an object of dread to my acquaintances;
those who see me in the street flee from me.
12 I have been forgotten like one who is dead;
I have become like a broken vessel.
13 For I hear the whispering of many—
terror on every side!—
as they scheme together against me,
as they plot to take my life.
14 But I trust in you, O Lord;
I say, “You are my God.”
Ps 31: 9 – 14
In the Great Rite of Renewal, Martin Shaw has written, “Someone said to me Jesus’s greatest temptation may have been to not come back from the desert. It chimed with a thought that was in my head years and years ago. The wild’s not the problem, it’s the return.”
The richness of communion with God can be hard to give up. I wonder if the Holy Spirit flapping his dove-like wings in Jesus ears, was as much to drive him to forty days of sweet communion with God and the wild animals, as it was to end with those fierce temptations. I wonder if those forty days drove down the words at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” so he knew it as deep as his bones, so he knew what Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3: 17b – 19, ESV).
Maybe we need the desert loneliness, those tears at Christmas, that very season that echoes with the greeting, “May Christ be born in you.” draws us to know how we are deeply loved. Maybe loneliness leads us to know this for ourselves. Maybe we learn like Jesus to know how to respond to the bad thoughts, the assaults by the powers of darkness, when they bat against our ears. Maybe the Shepherd’s rod and staff turns us towards the light, because we know we too are beloved sons and daughters.
Maybe last year’s tears at Christmas have brought this year’s quiet and thankfulness. This Advent we took cookies to a neighbor and friends. We had lunch with our neighbor at Jason’s Deli after our Thanksgiving plans fell through. We spent a few hours with our niece and nephew. I hope to talk to my cousin. This year we set up both Christmas trees in the living room so we can enjoy the memories hung on both. Things like the blue pitcher from the first Christmas after my brother died when we went to Arkansas and the glass ornament from when my dog won his class at a dog show. There’s the sheep face from when I took our first Aussie sheep herding and the Native American vase we received from Amtrak on our trip to the southwest. And I could go on.
On Christmas day we will take Jesus into our bodies when we take the bread and wine at church. We will greet people there and return home to our own feast. We’ll walk the dogs, feed the horse, open presents. (We know what we’re getting.) And hope there are holiday movies we haven’t seen. As always there are books to read.
Since my eyelid surgery a week ago, I’ve stayed quiet in the house, out of touch with my morning routines: the mile long walks with the dogs and tending to Morgen. At night I slept in a chair for the better part of a week, entertaining odd dreams where a pastor I know and a bearded man showed up on separate nights. I don’t remember their words, but they stayed through several wakings, and I wondered if their appearance was more vision than dream. I’d forgotten that my chair sits where they laid out Mrs. Jesse, the woman who owned the farm, before the people who sold it to us.
I’ve been impressed by how tight with routine Bruce is. He gets up, walks the dogs, and gets right out to the barn. He says it’s because he’s not distracted by a gadget like I am. He’s right. I’ve stepped back a tiny bit so that picking up the phone isn’t automatic. I’ve become annoyed with the noise. But I wake up starving for words. So there is work ahead of me to not let my phone pull me under with its own thoughts, which can follow me out the road, and become a kind of false scripture, to meditate on. This week mornings yawned, wide and lazy with the disorientation of not quite knowing what to do with Bruce doing chores. There is work ahead of me to list how to fill those hours the day before.
Because of the surgery my eyes are opened wider, so people can see them, and I don’t feel the heaviness of my lids drooping like they do for sleep. Finally, I can wear mascara. My eyes have been opened to the good people in my life, the gift of being useful through my writing, and the walks where I can settle and to offer thanks. As always thank you so much for reading my words, and showing up for them regularly. May Christ be born in you this holiday season.
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