A Woman's Psalm (139) - Emily Nabholz SCN

You have searched me and know me.

I am a woman...on a journey through life
I am searching for my innermost self to claim who I am as a woman
I am going beyond reflection
I am a woman on an inner search

This inner search leads me to stop running away from you
      - to trust your ever abiding presence
      - to trust your inner workings in me as a woman

I am a woman full of light and shadows
        full of love and fear
        full of hope and despair
But you are there to lead me - to help me
You are the light of my life
I could ask the darkness to hide me
You call me out of darkness
Darkness and light are all the same to you
You accept me just as I am
A woman of light and shadows; love, fear; hope and despair

As I look around and remember your goodness to me my heart is glad
As a woman, I ever seek you in all your ways

You created every part of me
You put me together in my mother’s womb, 
In the womb of life, I am nurtured and nourished, protected and loved
I praise you for the gift of life - for the gift of being woman

I am a woman of remembering, I am a woman of reflection
I realize the days you give me are all recorded in your book
Your thoughts are so above my thoughts, your knowledge of me is too deep 
It is beyond my understanding

Examine me, O Lord, and know me through and through
Let me be naked and open before you, for you are my God
I am a woman in awe and praise of you
Teach me to pray
Pray within me, my Lord and my God

Merton's Prayer

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

— Thomas Merton from Thoughts In Solitude

The least of me

"What if the “least of these” that Jesus talks about turns out to be part of our own selves? The parts of ourselves that are sick and homeless and hungry and thirsty and naked.

We are called to love ourselves in our entirety: to honour every part of ourselves — not just our strengths but our manifold weaknesses. Even our anger and despair and doubt.

We are called to accept all in ourselves that we have abandoned and hidden or denied or undervalued, to drop the pretence and posturing we adopt to make ourselves acceptable, to reconcile our inner conflict and division against ourselves, judging ourselves harshly and badly, neglecting ourselves — to love ourselves as we are loved by God.

We are called to face our true centre, to resolve to live out of the selves that have been loved since the foundation of the world.

We are called, too, to love one other as we love ourselves. Indeed, how we love ourselves will determine how well we can love the other: we are all made in the image of God.

So who do we find most difficult to love? Aren’t they people who remind us of the parts of ourselves we fear or dislike?  We are called to love each other in our entirety. Even the parts, especially the
parts, we would prefer to ignore, deny or overlook. We are called to value each other equally. And we are called to love even those we make the outsider, who represent the things that we have banished."
-Sheena McMain

Edwina Gately's Balance

So much struggling –

realizing that I need a balance

between reaching out and reaching in.

I need to do some things just for me,

like paint and play

and read and build sandcastles.

I need to stop for a long time

to think about that.

Where did I miss it? Lose it?

For joy is the centre of ministry.

Joy should precede ministry,

nurture it and fulfil it.

But I am so intense about ministry,

and take it so solemnly

(as if I were responsible for it)

that I become weighed down,

by its ups and downs,

its disappointments and its failures.

I suffocate joy with

seriousness …

I imagine everything depends on me –

when everything is God’s business,

and God has already taken care of

all her creation

and all her people.

We are only to talk with each other

be with each other,

love each other,

God’s is the healing, the growing, and the fulfilling.

When I lose perspective

and imagine everything,

(or most things)

revolving around myself,

I make myself

a little god,

and lose my joy.

For I was never made

to be a little god – only

to be loved

by the Great God.

Perhaps I am too busy

trying to love other people

instead of learning to love myself.

When I can do that

I might begin to understand

how great God’s love is.

When I go through

darkness, heaviness and anxiety,

it is God’s invitation

for me to stop

looking outwards

and start

looking inwards.

And be loving and gentle

with myself.

I am called to minister

for my own joy.

When my joy diminishes,

so does my ministry.

When I have fun and

enjoy myself

God does.

Then I am most like God –

Who is joy!

Awaken Me -Joyce Rupp

Risen One,
come, meet me
in the garden of my life.

Lure me into elation.
Revive my silent hope.
Coax my dormant dreams.
Raise up my neglected gratitude.
Entice my tired enthusiasm.
Give life to my faltering relationships.
Roll back the stone of my indifference.
Unwrap the deadness in my spiritual life.
Impart heartiness in my work.

Risen One,
send me forth as a disciple of your unwavering love,
a messenger
of your unlimited joy.

Resurrected One,
may I become
ever more convinced
that your presence lives on,
and on, and on,
and on.

Awaken me!
Awaken me!

(from Out of the Ordinary)

Transformative Suffering

Richard Rohr excerpt reblogged from http://insilencewaits.wordpress.com/

Don’t get rid of the pain until you’ve learned its lessons. When you hold the pain consciously and trust fully, you are in a very special liminal space. This is a great teaching moment where you have the possibility of breaking through to a deeper level of faith and consciousness. Hold the pain of being human until God transforms you through it. And then you will be an instrument of transformation for others.

As an example of holding the pain, picture Mary standing at the foot of the cross. Standing would not be the normal posture of a Jewish woman who is supposed to wail and lament and show pain externally. She’s holding the pain instead, as also symbolized in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. She’s trying to say, “There’s something deeper happening here. How can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Until you find a way to be a transformer, you will pass the pain onto others.

Jesus on the cross and Mary standing by the cross are images of transformative religion. They are never transmitting the pain to others. All the hostility that had been directed toward them—the hatred, the accusations, the malice—none of it is returned. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery. It takes our whole life to comprehend this, and then to become God’s “new creation” (Galatians 6:15). The imperial ego hates such seeming diminishment.

Unfortunately, we have the natural instinct to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego always insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until you move to a deeper level where it all eventually makes sense in the great scheme of God and grace.
— Richard Rohr adapted from The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered

Making Safe the Shadowlands

I got the loveliest piece of affirmation lately- and in work of all places! A wonderful woman with whom I had an authentic conversation suggested jokingly that I should carry a "Warning You Are Entering a Safe Zone" sign. It left me thinking that when I am at my best, I create a safe space for others to be fully themselves, in hurt or in joy, in play or in anger. In authenticity. When it happens, I am humbled and privileged to share the space with them. My inner light is in this space, where others' inner lights are laid bare and nurtured.

Wayne Hutchinson laid bare his inner light, strength, insight and solidarity this week. What struck me is his reference to depression as a "companion". I know there is something in trying to accept some of our struggles so that we don't lose so much energy in denying them. However, I still see mental health challenges as more of a cross than a companion. The true companions (or angels) that I saw in his story were his niece, his mum and his GP:

As I walk downstairs, drying the tears on my cheeks, I encounter the most beautiful of smiles, worn by my beautiful two-year-old niece, whose face bears the look of someone without a care in the world, the way all kids should be.

I ask her for a hug and she lovingly obliges. This small hug from a little girl will get me through this day. That hug felt like the best one I’ve ever received. It’s just what I needed.

...

I called my Mother for help – she’d been in and out my room to me for days, trying to help, but I was too scared to even speak to her. Really f**king scared. 

Eventually I found my voice in her company. She listened to what I had to say and we both cried together. It was tough, so tough, but she promised she’d do all she could to help me. Mothers are great that way.

...

You talk, he [the GP] listens. You feel a level of relief in the face of  all that pain you’ve been through: the sleepless nights, the tears, the empty soul, the darkness that surrounds your world. 

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about a moment some years ago when I experienced the nurturing security of companionship at a time when I felt like I was falling apart. I was experiencing debilitating depression, had lost my confidence and sense of self and felt unable to face the world and unworthy to inflict myself upon it. I was not getting out of bed let alone leaving the house. A friend of mine called over and didn't tell me to look on the bright side or list all the things I had going for me or drag me out into a world I wasn't able to deal with. Instead, he got into the bed beside me, put an arm around me and joined me in my darkness. I was not alone.

Thank God, it is a while since I've been so low that that level of lethargy, fear of the world and letting down everyone in it (including myself) have been so unrelenting as to block out the light. Admittedly, I still have real panicked moments where I cry to God that I cannot bear to live my life with this as a persistent feature. In my more even moments, I see the blessing in how this enables me to sense others hurting, be compassionate and journey with them in solidarity, understanding my brother or sister's fear and darkness as my own. (We are one in Christ/humanity/whoever your God). It allows me to do, in my own way, as my cherished friend taught me- to get in under the covers and hold others in my heart, join them in their hurt and hold on until, God willing, the grip loosens just enough to fathom that no shadow can exist without light.

Somewhere in all of this I grew in faith. I came to know a Jesus who joins us in our suffering while promising ultimate triumph over the worst of it.

In the inner chambers of your heart, God steps past all your talent and hard work — all that you would think he values. He goes straight for the messy, broken places in you because it’s there that you can truly discover him. This is the way he frees your heart to love, to risk, to grab hold of life for the joy that’s there. — Paula Rienhart from Strong Women, Soft Hearts

I'll finish with a prayer from Michael Leunig's A Cartoonist Talks to God:

Abba Father,

We pray for the fragile ecology of the heart and the mind. The sense of meaning. So finely assembled and balanced and so easily overturned. The careful, ongoing construction of love. As painful and exhausting as the struggle for truth and as easily abandoned.

Hard-fought and won are the shifting sands of this sacred ground, this ecology. Easy to desecrate and difficult to defend, this vulnerable joy, this exposed faith, this precious order. This sanity.

We shall be careful. With others and with ourselves.

Amen