Deserts

We have just spent time considering desert life in Sunday's readings. That inevitable bleak, awfulness that seems to invade everyone's life at some point. Like Jesus we are often driven into the desert but I go unwillingly and with great resistance. For this desert place of desolation is familiar to me as the hair on my head.

I reflect today that for all its familiarity, for all the well known ache of it it is not something I ever talk about.

Why?

It seems to me that if you are driven to despair by an addiction to drugs or by anorexia or by an abusive husband or cancer that these are topics that can be spoken about and which will as often as not receive a sympathetic hearing. But when your particular desert leads down the road to self destruction, well then. Perhaps not always. I am not talking about that fleeting suicidal fantasy that a person might experience but rather that well planned and carefully thought out option that is amongst the deck of cards that I hold as a response to any given situation on any given day.

I recall one deep dark night a couple of years ago searching blogs on suicide. There were remarkably few. Curious I plugged in "sexual abuse" and was overwhelmed by the mass of choice out there. By some remarkable circumstance I landed on Gannet Girl's blog "Desert Year", written about her response to the death by suicide of her beautiful son. I began to learn what suicide might do to others, not something that had occurred to me then. I learned that I am not alone in these self destructive feelings and began to chart their origin with in me, in the hopes of heading the downward slide off before it got really dangerous.

Now it occurs to me that this painful process might be made easier if I had someone else's experience to add to my own. And perhaps that I might feel less of an outcast.

That you may have Life

If I have felt unprepared and unready for Lent, well that is only me. I should have known that the Lord would be prepared and ready. All I had to do was sit in stillness and quiet and acceptance and listen. A friend gave me a small book using writings from the great Saints - Saints that include Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Francis de  Sales, Teresa of Avila and so on as a guide through Lent.

Lacking anything better but with little inclination I began to read and to meditate as the book suggested.

Today opened with these words from Hildegard of Bingen.

We are born, each of us, with a desire for good

and a lust for evil.

We are called to life

and attracted to death.

We hear "do good"

and we respond "choose pleasure"

Sometimes when God reaches out to us

we disdain him.

Finally it occurred to me to look at the title of the book I was reading and I was stopped in my tracks to discover it. "That you may have Life" was not what I was expecting, given my recent preoccupation with death. 

I wonder anew and with gratitude at the Grace, the Saving Grace that enlightens my small life.

Unprepared and unready

I am unprepared and unready for Lent.

Ash Wednesday Mass this morning was a change again from last year. Mercifully a gentle, reverent liturgy, hallowed by beautiful voices and solemn dignity. It should have set the scene for a focused, prayerful Lent. That it didn't was not in the Liturgy but more within myself.

Reflecting, I consider that perhaps it has been an uncharacteristically long and deep bout of depression these last few months that leaves me too fragile to face the symbols of Ash Wednesday. Death and sin. Sin, I am too uncomfortably aware of but death is another matter. Death is much harder to make sense of when I have been coming far too close to self inflicted death. Not of course that this suicidal impulse is new, nor sometimes does it matter that over time I have learned to manage it so that it doesn't actually result in death.

It stalks me.

Haunts me.

And I wonder what grace has kept me from such terrible self harm, when others, especially my young nephew succumbed and died of suicide.

And now I must find a way to move through Lent, and allow this saving grace to work within my life once more.