Tag Archives: Loss

Singing Holy Songs in Strange Lands

Posted on November 7, 2014 | Leave a comment

By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Psalm 137

O God of Seeing, after we have swallowed the knowledge of good and evil and our eyes are opened, how can we sing your song? When the scales have dropped away, when the clay has been washed off, when we put on the soft garments of grace you made for us, we stumble dazzled by the light, hearts aching for home.

Wayfaring strangers, exiles, we wander here in these soft skins yearning for a better country. We had bit down and tasted, chewed and swallowed that fruit. Our eyes were opened and we had seen. We had witnessed something that we could not speak of, yet must tell. We really weren’t absolutely sure what it was we had seen, but we thought most of the time that it was God. It is true we asked for it, prayed for it – to see God and live, that is. Perhaps it would have been better to have died. Perhaps there are very good reasons why persons who see God rarely live to tell the tale. For now how could we sing a song in this strange land – this earth where gravity weighed hearts to the soil; and mind lay flattened between the pages of time?

What happens if you do not sing? What happens if your eyes are blinded by the light, and it all unfolds before you? What happens if you know the Lord’s song by heart yet do not sing it? Does it rankle in your soul, turn sour, spoil and grow soft mossy mold? Does it take on a parasitic life of its own, feeding on your body, stealing your joy, eating up your hope?

______________________________________

Diana, 32 years ago when you were born, they brought you with swollen eyelids, wrapped tight in the swaddling cloths for the first feeding. When I put your mouth to me, you shuddered. For two days you shuddered as I held you, as one exposed to a chill or some horror. “Lambie pie,” I called you then.

It is too much for us. It is all too much for us. To have eaten what we have eaten. To have seen what we have seen. To know what we know. One day I prayed for hours and could only pray: “Yes, Yes, Yes. Yes there is light. Yes there is hope. Yes there is love.” Even though I felt none of it.

How do you sing a sacred song in a strange land? Maybe you just sing it. Maybe you don’t attempt to be understood. Maybe you just sing what is so, because it is so. For the song’s sake, for the singing’s sake. Could I sing for the song’s sake – for your sake, my sweet Lamb of God? Could I sing you a lullaby as you lie cradled next to my heart shuddering in your mortality?

Once, Diana, you brought me a gift. “This is a prayer stick, mom. I made it for you.” It was a large stick with flowers woven round the top. Could I let the stick pray for me? For I do not know how to pray aright. I lean the stick against the old trunk. “Pray stick,” I say. “Pray now.” I go off to other things, while the stick holds the offering pointing toward heaven. Dare I trust creation to pray for me, to bear my prayer? Here stone, pray. Here river, pray. Here moon, pray. Just by being what you are, a maple branch salvaged from last fall’s ice storm, wrapped round with pink petals, transformed by the touch of a child’s hand into something sacred.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? That is the question. For our hearts are heavy, and we, captive by this mortal flesh sit down and weep.

I believe that
always
in the face of Noes
the Song must begin with Yes –

yes
body
like
a tube
a culvert
carrying
the
earth’s
refuse
twigs
garbage
whines
knotted, clotted, congealed evil, wads of anguish, passing
through the yes into eternity, cleansed and free. The yes
like a filter, a rinse of spray. You can look at the sin or you
can look at God. If you look too long at the evil, you will
freeze
mesmerized
by it.
So head
on into
perfect
and
funnel
the defiled
to
the undefiled
by virtue
of
your
yes.

Not my will but thine.

Link to Sweet Honey By the Waters of Babylon

This post is excerpted from a chapter in my book, Letters from the Holy Ground – Seeing God Where You Are. Some of these phrases and images have been returning to me lately. As a culture, as a global society, as families, and as individuals we may find ourselves in various contexts of alienation, estrangement, or even captivity. This sense of dislocation and disorientation may be experienced both externally and internally.

Reflection Questions

Are there ways you feel like a stranger in a strange land, taken to a place you did not wish to go?
How do you express your grief?
How do you sing a holy song in alien places and times?
How do you consecrate and make holy the strange lands in the heart and in our world?
Of what does your song consist?

Together we plow the light.
So much love in my heart for all of you.
loretta

Severed

Posted on April 23, 2013 | 6 comments

Drawing her arms
through the salt sea
legs straining
giving her body
to the task

she swam among
the floating limbs
reaching after them
before they turned
to sink slowly down

to shocked shipwrecks
astonished clams
coming to rest in a cloud
of silt, the softly yielding
residue of other remains.

She heard no sound
but her breath
and the slip slosh of sea
as she ploughed the
surface of their sorrow.

She thought
she could retrieve them
gather the fragments
siphon up the spilt blood
return to all donors

bring mothers
their sons and daughters
reborn,
wrapped in seaweed

take this leg, uprooted,
to the young man
Here it is yours, she’d say.
I found it in the sea.

So deep, so wide the wound
of flesh and bone
so piercing, urgent the ache
to be re- membered.

__________________________________

for those whose lives have been blown apart
for those who must pick up the pieces

Loretta F. Ross, 2013

6 Comments

Posted in Contemplation, prayer, Prayer, spirituality, The praying life

Tagged Boston marathon bombings, community, Compassion, Grief, Loss, sorrow, suffering, Texas explosion, West

Love – in Small Doses for the Sin Sick Soul #6

Posted on March 15, 2013 | 2 comments

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
– William Blake

Thin Ice

The interviewer probes,

so do you think the economy will get better?

Fear leaps up from the gut

climbs to her throat

voice shakes, melts into tears.

Fifty two,

back in her bedroom

at mom and dad’s

turning over at night

she sees the puzzles, rock collection,

Girl Scout Handbook

stacked on the shelf beneath the window,

teeters between now and then

on the brink

of circumstances beyond her control.

Better to practice walking on thin ice

before we find ourselves there.

How does one learn to trust

your life will bear your weight?

The grey sheet shrinks from the shore.

Dark water laps milkweed stubble,

slopping over hoof-pocked mud.

Could she step over the translucent border

to opaque surface a few feet further out?

Oh to put her future in a box,

tie it with a pretty bow

and place it next to high school

yearbooks on the shelf.

The fortune tellers circle,

bracelets jangling, bright skirts swinging,

leaning over their tea leaves crying out:

Alzheimer’s, incontinence, poverty, ruin!

After millions heard her cry on public radio,

after her immersion into choking humiliation

possibility awoke.

She saw what they had seen

and loved it now.

Come, she said, as she took her nakedness

into her arms like a lost child,

a beautiful melody.

I will teach you how to walk on thin ice.

Let us go to the spring woods

and learn to pull uncertainty and loss

to our chins like a blanket of oak leaves,

sweet pine needles, mushrooms,

and the milky blooms of May apples.

All the best and most beautiful things

are willing to go under at any moment

and take us with them into the dark

to be carried back again,

laughing sheaves of light.

Child of my heart, listen.

Don’t turn away from my face.

Nothing perishes

when born by the arms of grace.

Don’t ponder ancient history
Look! I am doing a new thing. Isaiah 43: 14-21

Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears
reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves. Psalm 126: 4-6 NRSV

______________________________

Note to readers: This blog is part of a series of Lenten “short takes” on the themes of lent, which follow more or less the lectionary Scripture lessons for this season. Like a note you find tucked under the bark of a tree, a lozenge to let melt in your mouth, an amulet to wear around your neck, I hope these little reflections may hold a small dose of truth or comfort or challenge for your life on the way to Easter.

In the abundance of words which inundate us daily, it is easy for the message of redemption to be buried under the latest disaster, outrage or scandal. Likewise the familiar stories and passages of lent may grow dull and trite to ears and hearts already stuffed with words.

I have noticed in my work as spiritual director that it is hard for many of us to take in the goodness and grace, as well as the challenge of the story of Jesus and God’s redeeming love. Perhaps we need to titrate the gospel. Sometimes a well- timed, tiny dose, carefully administered, may be what the Physician orders for our healing. And so slowly we build up our tolerance for love and more and more joy finds the faith in us through which to invade our being.

Dose titration: adjustment of the dose until the medication
has achieved the desired effect

Love – in Small Doses for the Sin Sick Soul #5 (theprayinglife.com)
Love – in Small Doses for the Sin Sick Soul #4 (theprayinglife.com)
Love – in Small Doses for the Sin Sick Soul #3 (theprayinglife.com)
Love – In Small Doses for the Sin Sick Soul (theprayinglife.com)
Redemption Titration* – A Gentle Dose for the Sin Sick Soul (theprayinglife.com)

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Posted in Christianity, Contemplation, prayer, Lent, Lent Devotion, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Practices

Tagged Christianity, faith, God, humilation, Isaiah 43, Jesus, Lent, Loss, poetry, Psalm 126, Religion and Spirituality, suffering, William Blake

The Closing

Posted on July 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

A life time is like a flash of lightening in the sky
rushing by like a torrent down the steep mountain. Gautama Buddha

It is done.
The message glowed in my palm.
The screen went dark.
The home full of light and memory
had passed neatly out of our hands.

Half a day’s drive north
we rose with the birds
to wash our faces
walk to our cushions
sit in stillness
as the sun came up.

Occupied with the throb
and slosh
of humans being,
minds alert
to the swell and surge
of experience,

we did not gulp or grasp,
but lifted our forks slowly
to savor what was on our plate.

Carrying our cups attentively
like offerings of fragrant brew
we got insights
we got bored
our necks ached
our necks really ached
our legs cramped
our minds sank.

Fur grew in our brains.
A cat named Torpor climbed up our bodies,
stretched herself across our shoulders, purring.

We stepped carefully along the drive,
the wooded path, the lawn.
When the bell startled
the still air and the finches flew,
we returned to sit
and then to walk
and sit again.

Up against our limits for the taste of God,
we picked up our hand held devices
just to check the time
and well, maybe, any messages
and then like hopeless junkies
shot up
with the news.

And, Lord, like Peter, (say it)
we slept.
We could not stay awake one hour
to watch our own suffering
let alone yours.

And the tall ones,
full of grace, like some exotic species,
came and moved among us.
We tried not to grasp
their beauty with our eyes
or covet their youth.

When they left too soon,
we, shoulders shaking, sobbed,
Oh no. Oh no.
Oh please don’t go.

But they with other roads
to travel and business
of their own stepped easy
over the threshold, saying

Let go. Let go.

And Mary said,
They have taken away my Lord,
and I do not know where they have laid him.

And the angel said, He is not here. He is risen.

And Jesus said, Don’t
cling to me.

And raccoon, rotund and tight with bloat,
lay on the side of the road
and said, See my insides are turned out.

And Coyote
trotting briskly across the clearing in bright midday
paused to look behind his shoulder
then disappeared into the woods.

A thick snake of ancient sorrow
rose up in us from miles below the surface
twisted, heaved us double with its force.
A wind whistling loneliness
whined and keened through all the spaces
in our bones.

every
thing
is going
back
and forth
across
a threshold

coming into existence
and going out of existence

while the dying rising one stands ever
on the brink
offering
a torn fragment of what is so

lost opportunities
things we have done we cannot change
our loved ones whose graves we want to tend

we gaze at the ragged piece of our existence
resting in his tattered palm

Jesus, how will this ever be enough
to satisfy our hunger,
or slake this sorrow?

Take. Eat, he says.
Be healed of thy affliction.

Thou, who gives and bears away,
grant us mercy
to take each moment
to our lips
and drink the cup you give
bitter, sweet.

Give us,
O Sentry at the terminal,
where all things come and go,
the appetite and wit
to swallow and digest
entirely
what is so.

________

You sweep people away like dreams that disappear. They are like grass that springs up in the morning. In the morning it blooms and flourishes, but by evening it is dry and withered. Psalm 90: 3-6 New Living Translation

This existence of ours is a transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A life time is like a flash of lightening in the sky rushing by like a torrent down the steep mountain. Gautama Buddha

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not let them be afraid. John 14:27

The Writing Exercise

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 6 comments

Write a letter to a landscape or scene you pass through today.
For example, “Dear Branner Trafficway.”

Dear Mom,

You rest now in my way.
The plastic cartons I put you in
clutter the path
from
kitchen
to office.

I step around the contents of your dismembered
life
trying not to trip,
coffee cup in one hand
sheaf of papers in the other.

Squeezing past a bin
I stumble upon
your journals
tales of trips
to the woods
wildlife sightings
what happened last Tuesday,
and how Gladys brought over a pan of sweet rolls,
still warm from the oven
poems about birds and babies
dragonflies
and things you cannot change and break your heart
word snapshots and watercolor sketches –

scattered orange road construction cones
confuse the once familiar scene.

The blue china sectioned dish you fed me from,
when I kicked my legs in the high chair,
peeks over the top of another box.

Photo albums, the ducks you carved,
and all the letters and cards I ever sent you
occupy the landscape of my life
and I am no longer sure
how to get from here to there.

Periods of disorientation are part of the spiritual life Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann tells us. Such periods precede what he calls new orientation. Brueggemann charts how the history of Israel tells the story of orientation, confusion and loss of direction, and new clarity over and over. The story culminates in the crucifixion and resurrection and then continues with the church and our individual journeys as well.

What are the inner and outer landscapes you are passing through today? Take a moment to share what you are witnessing so we all may grow closer to seeing the big picture.

Thanks to Melissa Sewell and Leah Sewell and the Topeka Writers’ Workshop for inviting me to pay attention to my landscape.

6 Comments

Posted in Christianity, Contemplation, prayer, Spiritual Formation, Spiritual Practices, The praying life

Tagged Christianity, confusion, dark night, disorientation, God, Grief, Landscape, Loss, spiritual journey, Walter Brueggemann

How the Light Gets In

Posted on July 12, 2010 | 2 comments

Weeping before the box, she lifts out the pieces and places them on the counter. All but one or two are broken.

Two weeks before when the boxes arrived, I had carried, heartsick, this one filled with the chink and clatter of broken pottery to the basement. Then I forgot all about the box of broken dreams, until I heard her carrying it up the stairs, shards rattling like a chest of huge coins.

She moves the pieces on the counter, sorting and fitting parts together.

In a distant city another young woman also picks out the ruins of herself from the broken jar of illusion.

So much is broken – plans, relationships, jobs, dreams – and rattles around inside us. We take out the pieces, hold them to the light, and try to fit them together. This confrontation with our fallibility and that nothing earthly lasts forever brings deep suffering. Loss is always more painful than the books can say, the scriptures convey, or the prophets of prosperity preach. We need a picture.

A man at the end of his own dance with mortality, hunched over on his knees in a dark garden, tears rolling down his face. He says to his father, the Heaven Dweller, “Take this cup from me.” And to his friends, “Can you not stay with me one hour in this agony?”

There may be something harder than watching one’s children suffer, but on this day I do not know what it is. The hardest thing I do in this work of ministry, prayer, and listening to souls in their journey to God is staying awake with others in their pain. This is to say, that the hardest thing is staying awake with Jesus as he suffers in others.

Some days I fail. I numb out. I fall asleep. I deny the suffering, blame the sufferer, quibble and become annoyed and irritated with how the person expresses her pain. The other day I thought of one family, “Always lots of drama in this family system.” I suppose, applying the same cynical criteria, one would have to say that Jesus was the all time drama queen.

Can’t you just stay with me in this torment? Can we just be there, trusting God and the soul to figure things out? Respecting the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in the awesome autonomy of an individual life, while lifting up the candles of faith, hope, and love seem to be my task.

I fidget. I want to fix things, pass out band aids. Leaning over her shattered treasures, she tries to wire one sculpture back together, fashioning a frame of cardboard.

“We need some glue. I’ll get some glue,” I say. “Let’s go to the store and get some good glue.”

She refuses.

Finally I stop.

Several days later I ask about the box of jumbled shards on the porch. “Oh, I don’t care what you do with it,” she tells me, as she heads off with her eyes on new heights.

To love, to know passion, and bliss is also to have our hearts broken. I know of no way to get around this and anyone who tries to tell you different is a liar. To live, we must die. To touch transcendence and eternity is also to gaze upon and weep over the box of our own finitude, our broken handiwork, our illusions, and limited understanding. “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” sings Leonard Cohen.

The man in the dark garden gets up. It is time, he says, to be broken.

It is time
for us to be made whole.

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Dear Hearts: Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up. For fun – A couple of video versions of Cohen’s Anthem.

You Tube: Cohen in concert singing Anthem

You Tube: Photo interpretation of Anthem

When Hope Fails

Posted on December 17, 2009 | 2 comments

Hope is what gets a lot of people through the Christmas season. And the failure of hope is what leaves some souls shipwrecked on the treacherous rocks of the sin and imperfection of this world.

What is it for you this year? Death of a loved one? Spouse in Afghanistan? Unemployed? House foreclosed? Cancer?

Hope is the presentiment that the imagination is more real, and reality less real, than we had thought. It is the sensation that the last word does not belong to the brutality of facts with their oppression and repression. It is the suspicion that reality is far more complex than realism would have us believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the present, and that miraculously and surprisingly, life is readying the creative event that will open the way to freedom and resurrection. Rubem Alves

She was fourteen. She sat next to me as we drove home after the Christmas Eve service. Lights sparkled from distant homes across the snow covered fields. Shattered with pain and trying not to show it, I tried to focus on driving. After a while she spoke out of the darkness, “Mom, things aren’t ever going to be the same, are they?”

That year, our family had been struck by a blow from which we would never fully recover. In spite of brave efforts, prayer, and sacrifice we could not put back together what was broken and, perhaps, fatally flawed.

During that season of suffering, hope became nearly eclipsed by fear, anger, shame, and pain. Each evening I turned briefly from my grief in defiance of “the brutality of facts with their oppression and repression,” and lit a candle for hope. Even though I felt no hope, I let the candle hold my hope for hope.

In those days I clung to the verse of scripture the minister preached at our wedding. Remember thy word to thy servant in which thou hast made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that thy word gives me life. Psalm 119: 49-50 What an odd text for a wedding, you may think. Yet as the years unfolded it became more and more meaningful. I prayed it, holding God accountable to the goodness promised to me in scripture and whispered to my soul. God’s promise of joy, peace, and love comforted me and gave me the ability to keep breathing in my affliction.

Carmelite writer Constance Fitzgerald writes about the movement in our spiritual journey from “naïve hope to theological hope.” Through experiences of loss and suffering, naïve hope in a Santa Claus god and other illusions nurtured by our egos give way to a different, richer kind of hope. We let go of placing our hope in our own efforts, our own goodness, our own “luck” or deservedness. We let go of our “right” to ourselves and our way. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, we numbly watch our way wrenched from our grasp. We face our helplessness and the truth that we are not in control. Hope in oneself and one’s little plans and projects dies on the cross of our life experience.

It is there in that stillness of a drive back home on the worst Christmas Eve in one’s life, while a child’s heartbreaking question hangs in the air, that hope in God is born.

You may miss it at first, especially if the pain is choking you. But refuse to let the last word be the brutality of facts. Go ahead and light that tiny candle. Defy the darkness. And pay attention. A baby is on its way. Something fragile and new and unimaginably sweet is making its way into your consciousness.

I tell my daughter, “Yes, honey, things will not be the same. But I believe somehow or other, things will be all right.”

And they were.

Special thanks to artist Anne Emmons for her permission to use “Hope” in this blog. You can reach Anne at anneemmons_8@msn.com or on Facebook.

Here is Anne’s story about this painting: I was trying to think of one moment in the Biblical narrative which captures the theme of hope. Each year I have made a new image for Christmas since 1997, and in 2000, I was struck by the idea of hope as the source of light. The images in this series reflect the thought that Christ came, the Light of the world, into darkness. So I was thinking about one single moment in the story and I realized the moment Mary heard the announcement from the Archangel Gabriel must be the moment hope found a form, in her face. At the time, my daughter was almost 14, the estimated age of the Virgin Mary, and I suddenly connected with the story in a particular way. I kept her home from school that morning to have her sit for the painting. What struck me, and this has since been confirmed from other sources, most recently Anthony Bloom’s book, Beginning to Pray, was that the Incarnation was possible only through God’s will in union with the “yes” of the young Mary, who became the bearer of the Uncontainable God. Just after I painted this I saw the Pontormo Annuciation in a small side chapel in Florence, and Mary had the same sort of look of wonder I tried to catch. Now my daughter Claire has a two year old son, Theodore. She is a single mother who said yes to the birth of this child, whose name she chose, not knowing it means “gift of God.”

Read more about prayer at www.fromholyground.org

Contact Loretta at
lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary

Follow at http://twitter.com/lfross

2 Comments

Posted in Advent, Christianity, Christmas, Contemplation, prayer

Tagged Grief, hope, Loss

Tag Archives: Loss