Reporting from the Eye of the Storm

Okay Life outs
I am aware that my posts may have seemed pretty dark lately.
Delayed reaction I guess of supporting a group of people in pain. And my dilemma of how to reconcile being a part of a church that sometimes wounds people and gets it wrong, and how when that happens people whom I imagined better of, scatter rather than respond and risk stepping into a sticky and painful place.

I am painfully aware of peoples support through lack of response.
If I have learnt anything it is:
• the importance of keeping doors open,
• of not backing away from those in pain,
• of the importance of my colleagues who have had the courage and gift of stepping forward so there are at least two of us in the fray.

I give thanks for my vicar for his calm wisdom and check ins. And now that the catch up I had made in my study has been lost through this, the need to find the mental resources to get back and try to make sense of my next assignment in a time when such things seem of little relevance.

There is a break for breath here.

I am not sure how this will play out. My mouth still feels dry for the Eucharist. I wonder what it feels like to do nothing at all, oh sweet desire.

Then again I could be at Lambeth! Meg reporting from the eye of the storm.

Finding the words

Today I have put head phones on.
Let music take over the twisted arguments that surround me
I play the music of the faithful fullbore
Let their words of belief and struggle
Speak for me
Fake it till you make it
Lord have mercy

To others in the same turmoil as me
I am going well
I can advise
Advocate for them
Make demands they have no strength to make themselves
It is only when a cavalry of one appears – a lone rider we would drag from the horse and hold dear
that my own trauma is revealed
She asks what I do
and I can no longer find clear words to say
I am unmasked
I am seen
And in the seeing my own desperation
My own ache is pinned to the board

So I search to reconcile injustice and love
Human weakness and perfection
I have yet to find the way

On the white board at work
I write
'Remember God'
A day later is added
'Remember each other'
Today
'Do not close your doors'
When I wonder if secretly in my calling to God
I write on my own whiteboard
'Please God remember me'
Your forgotten servant
Lord Have Mercy

Perhaps of no sense but to thee and me

If I were to explain to you how I am right now -
what the impact of all this is,
I would simply say
I have stopped taking the Eucharist.
That some dark grief has stepped between my hands and the cup.
Lord have mercy

I suspect I have entered a dark place
Not because of anything other than words on a page tell me it is so.
I still have a few words left
even if they do seem as though they should come with subtitles.
Touch for some reason, (that made total sense to me before)
has taken on a new significance,
stepping up to fill the places abandoned by words.
There is solace in the feel of solid objects.
The bark of trees brings comfort to the palm of my hand,
the wood of the healing cross under my pillow
reminds me of one whose agony leads the way forward.

To look at those suffering around me
And choose to stand with them
in the murk that is both fear and anxiety,
is to be invited to a place of excruciating beauty
and devastating love.
And I am transformed by them.
They are after all as family, so how could it be any other way?

To not loose myself in the fears of a damaged people
who can but call out “… each to their own”
is to plead that somewhere a door remain open to their voice
And to hear myself over and over again ask
Lord have mercy on me a sinner
Till I may come home to the cup