Friday, 29 June 2007

Dont Fault Others for Your Fear of Tumbling Into Something New

Okay so here is my dilemma.

There is this calling which I respond to (finally).
This Discernment of calling which I fall into, and now after months of being in the discernment process I am discerned for priesthood and what do you know, I'm paralysed! Discerned for priesthood one week, signed up for study a BTheol in distance education the next (oh yeah I learn best in group situations by the way) as well as working full time.

In some strange way its like watching oneself dissolve before your very eyes. I've done tertiary study before but the courses were always practicum based, now I am here with these assignments looming and I can't even focus to study! My brain races a thousand miles a minute, every sentence raises more and more questions and possibilities and then hell there is the stuff that is so dry the pages fare crumble to the touch.

I feel thick in all of this theological language which leaves me spending most of my time in my Oxford dictionary of Theological terms trying to understand what inevitably turns out to be something that could be said in far more accessible terms.

Okay so I am sabotaging myself here, scaring myself really. There have been times over the last week when I have sat at my laptop weeping at my lack of understanding. Okay to be fair I have had a bereavement, a cold, and now blessings a stomic flue.
BUT COME ON MEG GET IT TOGETHER.

No profound poetry here no gentle words of God, cos quite frankly the warm moist salty God of my understanding doesn't seem to terribly interested in the Historical Critical or Literal or what ever way of dissection. Just of nudging me in the night, sitting with me when I am in my bathroom vigil and I wonder what on earth I have done in saying YES God pick me!
Have they made a mistake?

In a moment of watching Deadwood my current favourite dvd series I hear the line "Don't fault others for your fear of tumbling into something new" and just think buggar.

Any assistance or comments for those experienceng the terror of study greatly accepted and appreciated.

Monday, 25 June 2007

What does it mean to Forgive?

I had this friend...

I am not sure what he is now.
A few years ago it came to light that he had abused the daughter of another friend of ours.
I still remember this young women coming to my door on the way to the police to lay a complaint. I looked at this beautiful young courageous women and all I could do was cry and say things like
"I am so sorry this happened to you",
"I am so sorry we didn't know",
"I'm so sorry we let this happen and didn't protect you and you had to go through this alone".

What followed next was very public the guy confessed, was sentenced, fined, and basically lost everything and everyone.

At the time I did a lot of soul searching, there was a lot of grief for the young woman and her mother and also for the friendship that my husband and I had had previously with this guy who had now shown a face we hadn't anticipated.

We never made contact with him, I myself was so angry with him, this was a guy who had been my first Christian friend, who had shown me that maybe God was an okay way to go.

Anyway he has been on my heart of late. I have been left pondering such questions as "how as a Christian do I practice what I preach?", "how do I have forgiveness and act with compassion to one who has acted in a way repugnant to me and indeed those I love?"
All rather knaw your arm off stuff really.
Over time I have moved from holding rage and betrayal, to acid bitterness, and now somtthing a kin to a pool of sadness that sits in my belly.

And God, being God is quite happy for me to sit with this dis-ease with just a simple ...well?

In the end I had to act.
I contacted his mother. She was so suspicious, so incredibly fearful of me and the world. Her brokenness over what has happened manifested in moments of terror at the end of the phone and a high pitched hysteria which in one moment was spewed out and in the next swallowed back deep into herself .

I left a number and today some weeks later when I tell myself that it is all over he phones... of course!

We skirt around things at first, me not sure what to say to this person in some ways so familiar yet so foreign. There is a barren loneliness in him yet what I hear is about him, not about what he has done or who has been hurt. I am torn between wanting to shake him and ask if he really knows what he has done, and in another moment to tell him it is okay.

A phone conversation in the middle of an office is not the place to speak of such things.
To a point we are superficial touching on agonies briefly and without depth, aware the whole time of the cautiousness in us both. We talk about meeting to talk more about this, then there is this long pause and I don't know what it is I am supposed to say but I know that this is what all the unease over the last few weeks has been leading up too.

"You are not hated (name)" it is all I can find to say
"Know you are not hated"

there is a pause and down the end of the phone he sobs "My God you just made me cry..."

We hang up I go into the bathroom and am sick.
Sometimes forgiveness is hard.