Words Returning

I'm back! And I'm so glad to be back!  The past year has been a rough one in many ways. Mom passed away on January 7, 2012, I helped empty Mom's house in August and have been going through her things box by box, we sold the house in October, I took all 3 of my comprehensive exams between September and December (and passed all 3 of them!), and if that all wasn't enough I injured my hands and have started using dictation software so that I can avoid typing. One of the unfortunate side effects of this tumultuous year was a loss of words. As you can tell by looking at my blog, I haven't written an entry in quite some time. But that's all changing now.

While I found it difficult to write anything personal over the past year, the words seem to be returning. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I'm healing from the grief, I'm no longer stuck in that year and a half long perpetual studying for comprehensive exams, and on the whole my life feels more calm and steady. In fact, I'm ready for adventure.  So I invite you, whoever you are, to read the Percolations of this new year of life– some will be about grief but they won't all be tears and frowny faces.  I hope this blog can be a place where writing provokes laughter, tears, consternation, curiosity, frustration, inspiration all at the same time because complexity and ambiguity are some of the things that make life most beautiful.  

I wrote the entry below just a few days ago as a guest blog for my friend Christopher Brown (ChristopherBrown.WordPress.com). If you're curious about the conference I mention in the final paragraph, you can learn more about it at houseofstmichaelthearchangel.org. So here we go! New year. New font. New words.

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I am a person who expresses herself best and most often with written words.  But for the past year since the death of my mother on January 7, 2012, I have had no words to write. My heart and mind have been full of experiences, full of images and moments which I will never forget.   I have longed to release them onto paper or the computer screen so that I can give them new life--speaking them into community, so that I can make room for new growth inside of me, so that I never forget the work that God has done as He led me through facing my deepest fear.  

Finally, a few days over one year since her passing, words are beginning to trickle in.  With these brief paragraphs, I hope to begin a practice of using words (some public/some private) to record, to listen to, to grieve, and to treasure the memories and transformative moments of Mom’s last year of life and of my first year without her.  I begin with 2 moments both of which occurred in the first week after her passing and for both of which I heartily praise God. 

The first occurred the morning of January 8, the day after she died, as I stood, emotionally and physically exhausted, in a Sunday morning worship service with some of my dearest friends in Lebanon, PA.  I felt utterly full of power.  I’ve never experienced the Holy Spirit that tangibly before that moment. The Spirit was literally not just sustaining but was coursing through me, overflowing my heart with a truly inexplicable joy—the kind that can only be felt in the midst of the deepest sadness.  And I knew this power while surrounded by people who had journeyed with me through the darkest of years and who knew the depths to which Jesus had been transforming my heart.  I would never want to re-create the circumstances that prompted the Spirit’s striking internal takeover—Mom’s passing marked the culmination of, for her, 6 years of struggle with cancer and dementia, and, for me, 6 years of caretaking and slowly losing the person whom I loved most dearly.   But if I ever again experience that evident, close, exhilarating, and sure knowledge of the Spirit’s presence, I will rejoice.

 Just less than one week after Mom’s passing and the shock and the preparations and the services and the relatives and the friends, I returned to Pittsburgh where I live.  I had planned to attend the House of St. Michael Devotional Conference on January 14 and 15. The grief was strong, the emotions were still at the surface, and the physical exhaustion was ever present. But that sustaining power, while it changed in degree of intensity, remained.  I remember choosing to go to the conference in spite of the freshness of the grief because I knew that I would be surrounded by dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, and space to feel, to hear, to rest, to simply be.  I spent much of my time at the conference nestled on the floor in the midst of a room full of old and new friends, wrapped in a blanket, made still by grief but lifted up by music and meditation, my mother’s Bible open in front of me – her handwriting in the margins and my own tears marking the pages.  As the conference closed, a woman named Lisa whom I did not know well at the time but am now grateful that I can call her friend, crossed the room and took me in her arms allowing her own warmth and presence to offer the comfort for which words were inadequate.  Power, comfort, sustenance: I have known these things through the welling up of the Spirit inside and through the external embrace of the Spirit in the arms of a spiritual sister.