I am an accountant...maybe

I am an accountant. I say so on my sidebar and for all my working life I have been able to say this quite unequivocally. Accounts is not what I do, is is what I am. I know that I think like an accountant in many diverse areas of my life from parenting to praying. I was born to a family of accountants and soldiers, going back four or five or six generations. Sometimes the two lines even mixed when some members were quartermasters to this Imperial army or that. So you might say it's in my genes. Diner table talk in inclined to revolve around economics and finance and budgets and deeply technical aspects of our work. Something that drives Vetboy mad as no one really shares his interest in science and things veterinary.

Beyond the genetics and the family history being an accountant has always made me happy, and I have not ever really wanted to do anything else.

But I discover that if you get mixed up with them Jesuits and with Ignatius then your perspective on things begins to change. Not dramatically at this moment in time but enough for me to be aware that my longing for God is stronger and more demanding than I ever imagined it could be. I find that perhaps I am being shifted out of my happy, simple life as an accountant into something quite Other.

Only just right now I can't say what that Other might be.

Well I have learnt this much. Breathe. Wait. The Mysterious God walks with me in the Darkness, perhaps.

And the Other will reveal itself.

Doctors, vets and nurses

Isn't it odd how things bunch together?

I have had a little too much of doctors and vets and nurses this week and the whole medical go round is quite exhausting.

Originally it was only planned that my dear little black cat be spayed but it didn't turn out that way. On Monday Vetboy's large but gentle warmblood cross was taken to the horse hospital for surgery to save her eye which had become inexplicably ulcerated. At this stage the surgery seems to be successful.

Little cat was spayed yesterday and still is wandering around very gingerly but will heal.

And today Small (who only saw the surgeon yesterday) had surgery to sort out a torn cartilage in his knee. Surgery on this boy is never simple as he is diabetic and asthmatic but again he has come through it just fine.

Too much surgery for one week but a great deal of gratitude for the surgeons and nurses and hospitals that accommodated and cared for various two and four footed members of my family and that all are recovering well at this point.

Four horses and a lost sheep

Small came home at lunch time today with several friends. They, like all eighteen year old boys were hungry, very hungry so they lounged around my kitchen as I made lunch. Not that their presence would make lunch cook any faster! They began to discuss their Religion Class this morning where they are learning about other faiths and had had a Buddhist from the local Buddhist Centre. Other than their feeling that he did not much like Christians and told them that Buddhism was a way of life rather than a religion they were intrigued with his story of the Four Horses and their response to a riding crop. In his version the

excellent horse sees the shadow of the riding crop and moves forward
good horse feels the crop on its hair and moves forward
average horse feels the crop on its skin and moves forward
and the
poor horse only moves forward when it feels the crop in its bones.

The boys all wanted to be the excellent horse, but decided that they were most likely were good or average. I thought that I was like them but in truth was more like the poor horse. And surprised myself by realising that Jesus came for the "poor horses" of this world.....judging by the stories He told. Stories of sheep that wandered off or coins that got lost or sons who returned home in shame.

Suddenly being a poor horse wasn't such a bad thing after all.

A little light

Today after Mass someone I know, but not well, came up to me and said thank you for my recent posts. I must have looked like a stunned mullet as I didn't even know she knew my full name let alone that I had a blog. Carefully I asked what about them had made such an impact. She said that she too has suffered from the same self destructive urges for years and had been deeply ashamed of how she felt. She said that she was in many respects a fortunate woman whom many would envy yet she still suffered from this bleak despair.

Then I read my comments to discover that another suffered the same way.

I had not set out to break any taboo, I am not that kind of person. Not that brave anyway. Yet one small crack  has let a little light in.

Grace at work again.

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.