Ignatian Accompaniment Through Grief

I've had a lot of time in the past fifteen months to reflect on what it means to accompany someone through terrible loss ~ what it means in general, what it means for me as a devastated mother, what it means for me as a spiritual director, as a would-be pastor or hospital or hospice chaplain. What is good and helpful and considerate? What is not?

This post, I do believe, is going to turn into a paean to Ignatian spirituality and to those whose lives it shapes, whether Jesuits or others who do spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition. In my case, it means two Jesuits in particular: my former director, who had the temerity to move away after helping me for two years, but has remained one of my great supporters through seminary and has been a source of wisdom and challenge via email and occasional visits during this past awful year, and my current director, who thought two-and-one-half years ago that he was signing on for a monthly hour of support and guidance for a seminary student, and had to turn into a consistent and faithful source of compassion, prayer, presence ~ and, yes, wisdom and challenge, too ~ during a year of such harsh and time-consuming need that I cannot even begin to describe it.

(And that description doesn't even take into account the many others in my life who have brought their Ignatian experience to bear upon our conversations and friendships. Maybe some other posts someday.)

What is so distinctive about this spirituality that makes it so pertinent to accompanying someone through the journey of grief?

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius suggests a wide variety of types and forms of prayer. Some lend themselves more to certain situations or meditations than others, but I've never had a director suggest that I should limit my prayer in one way or another. Flexibility ("accomodation" is Ignatius' term) is key, and I have been graced by finding directors who are fearless in their willingness to venture into unfamilar territory.

Given the range of prayer in the Exercises, it is nontheless the case that imagination is a significant hallmark of the Ignatian understanding of encounter with God. When a person makes the formal Exercises, there are many opportunites to pray, or meditate (Ignatius usually uses the term contemplation here ~ not to be confused with the emptying form of prayer so popular in contemplative prayer practice today) imaginatively throught the life of Jesus. Imagine the place, imagine the sights and sounds, imagine yourself as a person among his followers or family, on the edge or in the midst of his circle. Imagine yourself watching, listening, speaking, participating. Who are you? Who might you be called to be? Imagine Jesus into the circustances of your own life. What does he say; how do you respond?

You might be able to guess where I am going here. If you're a regular reader, you know that I have often bemoaned the statement so frequently made to me after our son died: that "I can't imagine" sentence. In fact, its repetition by a few individuals has resulted in my consistent avoidance of them. (The Lovely Daughter tells me that people are trying, and that I could be more generous, but I have my own problems with imagination ~ I find it difficult to imagine either that they are or that I could.) As a statement of intended solace, "I can't imagine" is not as bad as "I know just how you feel" ~ but it's close.

This past week it suddenly dawned on me why my Jesuit and other Ignatian friends have been such a source of help to me. Steeped in the practice of imaginative prayer, it never occurs to them to say, "I can't imagine." They seem to slide into imaginative accompaniment effortlessly. They don't have to be parents or to have suffered this degree of loss or faced this kind of horror; they can imagine it, at least well enough.

It's not effortless, of course; even as a neophyte director, I know that it takes considerable intentionality and attentiveness to imagine yourself into someone else's life and concerns. It also takes great generosity of spirit: as you share the Scriptural and prayer lives of others, you begin to understand how differently we all respond to, understand, and encounter God. You seek, always, to reverence both the other person's experience and your own; to absorb the similarities and the differences, to recognize that God is reaching out to each of you, and and to know that you can listen contemplatively and imaginatively even if what you are hearing is nothing at all like what you yourself would have come up with. It's not effortless at all.

But there it is. Just as even I, with some considerable practice, can access the notes to a simple Bach composition on the piano and with them, an entire tradition of music, so someone practiced in imaginative interaction with Scripture can access a tradition of prayer that makes it possible to walk with someone through the universal and yet endlessly unique pathway through grief.

I don't think I've ever heard someone well versed in Ignatian practice say, "I can't imagine." I know that these are people whose imaginations are at work all day, who are accustomed to drawing on their interior resources in all circumstances, and to allowing them to expand whenever they seem inadequate to a particular situation. God's gift of imagination is how we find God in all things, even ~ somewhere, someday ~ in this wilderness of sorrow.

Reflections on Suicide and the Holocaust

I write this with hesitation, and with apologies to those who may be offended. But there is a sorting process that occurs in grieving, as we try to discern what is true and what is not, what to hold and what to discard, how we might someday embrace life again and where death has caught us in its tangled grasp.

A couple of months ago, the journal published by Spiritual Directors International, Inc. contained a wonderful piece about accompanying suicide survivors in our journeys. The writers have both lost sons to suicide and, between the two of them, three other family members. Their article stresses that this particular path is a very long one, and emphasizes the time and patience demanded of the spiritual directors who venture across its rocky twists and turns with those who have no choice but to walk it. I know a couple of people who can attest to that.

At one point in the article, and here the exact words escape me, they claim that the experience of surviving a child's suicide is akin to that of Holocaust survivors.

Now, I do not believe that we can compare and contrast experiences of loss, or slot them into a hierarchical framework. Mine is worse than yours, and yours than his, and on and on. But I was startled enough by their argument that I gave it a great deal of thought in the ensuing weeks, and now I have returned to it.

I know a number of Holocaust survivors, and many of their children, and many more of their grandchildren ~ my former students and colleagues, their grandparents and parents. I have listened to many stories. A few years ago, one of my high school freshmen, who did not know much about that part of her heritage, opted to write and perform a soliloquy as a history project based on her World War II research. "Ms. Gannet, Ms. Gannet," cried my students as she finished her presentation, "Ms. Gannet, are you all right?"

All I had been able to think about, as she spoke, was that two generations earlier, it would have been them. My beautiful students, murdered in horrific ways, with perhaps a few of the boys surviving the "Left, right, left, right" as they disembarked from the trains as Auschwitz. Most of them, through, would have been gone.

One of the grandfathers, on Holocaust Remembrance day, came to an assembly to tell the story of his own experience. As he spoke, I was somewhat baffled; the details of his liberation story sounded so familiar, but I was sure that I had not heard it from him. And then he mentioned that he had been in the same compound as Elie Wiesel, and I understood ~ I had taught the book Night on more than one occasion, and my students and I together had explored not only the events of the Holocaust but the range of human response to the questions of faith that arise in the context of a nightmare life.

And so, when I read the article linking my experience to theirs, I was taken aback. And I thought, No. I have not witnessed the murder of my entire community, have not hidden, trembling, as terrorists burned it to the the ground, its inhabitants trapped within it buildings. I have not had to absorb the discovery that members of my family died in agony as Zyklon-B hissed into their nostrils. I live in a comfortable home and I sleep into a warm bed every night. This is nothing at all like Holocaust survival.

And then I thought: they have a point. It lies in that question of human response. It lies in the questions that seep, unwanted, into our consciousness and settle into every corner of our lives. Questions about who God is and who we are. About what matters to God and about how people treat one another. About what we once took for granted and never can again. About who bears responsibility, and for what, exactly? About how time seems to move forward and about how we long for it to reverse direction. About who or what, if anything, is reliable. Or good. Or graceful.

I stand in the cafeteria line, wrinking my nose at meatball sandwiches or smiling gratefully when linguine with Alfredo sauce comes up, and I ponder those questions. I sit in class, taking notes, and they fill my head and cause me, upon occasion, to write "No" in the margin next to one assertion or another. I take long walks and try, in my prayer, to place my thoughts before a God whose priorities are no longer apparent to me.

One of my colleagues once told me something of what it feels like to live in a world in which the Holocaust happened to your family. I was stunned by what he thinks of the culture in which he makes his way, by what he anticipates people like me might do in circumstances like the one from which his family emerged. Stunned. "It's difficult to hear, isn't it?" he said. And then he added, "This is the first time I've ever discussed these things with someone who isn't Jewish."

"You should do it more often," I told him.

We should all share our stories more often. It is only in sifting through our stories that the answers to those hard, hard questions emerge.

Elie Wiesel was once a devout young boy, eagerly studying Torah with the neighborhood rabbi. He became a hardened adolescent, indifferent to the suffering of his own father he witnessed in the concentration camp to which they were both sent and in which most of his family died. He grew into one of the most wise and compassionate of men, someone whom I described to one of my students who was off to sing in a Carnegie Hall concert at which he would be in attendance, as one of the giants, one of the great heroes, of the past century.

He has somehow, absorbed the living of those questions into his very being. Who is God and who are we? What matters to God, and how do we treat one another? Who bears responsibility? Who takes care? What is reliable? Good? Graceful?

It is these questions which we share in common. Our experiences of a world turned in upon itself, of tumult and catastrophe, weight different scales. But the ultimate question, and the text, we do share, remains. We sink into its regret and anguish and then, perhaps, we will stride forward, changed by its challenge: How then shall we live?

(Image: Ezekiel. Source Unknown.)

Surviving Loss

I'll write later about the conference I attended today, but for now, here's what I doodled to myself this morning:

What You Need to Survive, In No Particular Order:

1. You have to acknowledge the reality.

2. You have to immerse yourself in the grief; you have to go deep down, all the way into and through it.

3. You have to have companionship ~ outside companionship, not just those caught in the same sadness.

4. You have to have work (defined as expansively as possible) that is challenging and absorbing.

These are my personal and of course, brilliant, conclusions. They have evolved from decades of observing and participating in my family of origin's frequent failures and sometimes successes in dealing with loss, and from several months of reading and listening to other parents who have lost children, some of who are finding their way, and some not so much.

I believe that you need all four things. Not necessarily all simultaneously, or in any particular order, or only for a specified period ~ although in some ways they are all interwoven.

Yesterday I spent some time with my spiritual director and I realized that he is the companion who makes it possible for all the rest to fall into place. I could not go where I go into my grief without his consistent presence, and I could not be in school without his support and encouragement. Maybe for someone else the source of stability and the interplay of the four necessities would look very different ~ maybe, for instance, someone else would find that the challenges of her work serve as a foundation from which she finds companionship and is able to face and explore her loss ~ but I'm pretty sure that they are all necessary in some kind of way.

Of course, I could be full of it. Maybe what you really need are the Ruby Slippers, and the problem is that they are in Kansas somewhere.

Anniversary Day

The morning is sunny and clear and crisp as she wanders into the back of the church where she meets one of the priests who have been her mainstays for the past year. The two of them sit in one of the pews of the cavernous sanctuary and talk and pray for an hour. That makes how many hours in the company of Jesuits over the past few days? She has no idea where they have found the time and the patience to listen and listen, and read email after email, month after month. She is not asking.

She spends the day taking walks and reading her email and FB notes and listening to multiple versions of Hallelujah over and over again. Her brother calls, as he does every couple of days. Her father doesn't. At noon the regular mail arrives, bringing more cards and one of the most extraordinarily beautiful letters she has ever received. Blogging has its rewards.

It seems that candles are being lit all over the place. Her own candle is lit and re-lit, as she and her husband come and go during the day.

As the afternoon turns to evening, she and her family go down the hill to the university, where with about 30 friends they take a leisurely walk past places meaningful to her son. The auto and aviation museum where, impassioned about planes, he volunteered during the summer before high school. The Gehry building which had fascinated him. The university soccer field, emblematic of the many fields on which he played across several states and two countries. The art institute where he studied photography while he was in high school. She spends most of the walk deep in conversation with her son's lower el (1st-3rd grade) teacher. He clearly treasured that small boy, and is trying as hard as everyone else to put the pieces together.

They start back up the hill through Little Italy and spend the rest of the evening on the outdoor patio of one of the restaurants, tiny lights twinkling above them. Friends from 20-plus years of Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Friends and teachers from Montessori days. Grown children who, until last year, had spent nearly every Christmas together. It's interesting to see where the longest and strongest connections have been soldered together; they seem to have been borne out of the preschool and elementary school parenting and teaching years. Those magical times somehow created the possibility that adults and grown children might one day face down sorrow together.

The day is filled with love and compassion, friendship and presence. If only her son had remembered in those dark hours how filled with riches his life was.

This Happens to Me a Lot

In two weeks my class in the spiritual direction program will "graduate," and yesterday I had to call the program secretary about some of the details.

"You know," she said, "when you wandered in here last fall to talk about coming back, I thought, No way; I wouldn't even be able to stand up if I were you. And then ~ you did an incredible job."

"Well, those first months," I responded, " every hour or two of doing something was followed by several days in bed."

"I'm so sorry," she said, sounding somewhat startled. I suppose she had thought that if I were dressed and articulate for an hour or so at a time, I must have been like that all the time. Instead of almost never.

Other times, people have been far more negative, and told me I have "done" too much too fast. They, too, see only what they see.

What is enough? Or too much? Or nothing? It varies for each of us. There are two families linked on this blog who have moved cross country in this past year , soon after terrible losses. That seems like a completely impossible feat to me. But I have driven the 2.5 hours to school and spent three nights there every week ~ which works for me because both here and there I spend most of my time either with people who know and shelter me well or in complete solitude. And it requires very little organization ~ none at all in comparison to a household move.

I haven't come close to acknowledging all the flowers and letters and contributions that arrived last fall. I work at it steadily for a couple of days and then I stop for a much longer period. I can't believe how much energy a short note takes. Far, far more than a 20 page research paper. I haven't even begun to deal with my son's belongings. Surrenduring his car was so traumatic that it will probably be several months more before I can open a closet.

As far as I can tell, everyone is about the same in that they deal with the concrete details of death and the getting-back-to-life erratically at best. Some things are accomplished quickly; some perhaps never. Some kinds of work one can do, and do well; some kinds are not possible. Some people almost immediately take up tasks that require considerable concentration; others can't even read trash novels ~ for years, they say. Some go to Europe; others can hardly go to the grocery. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of it.

I think I mentioned that I was once asked whether I have used other things as a distraction. I don't think so. (Well, maybe some things!) I do things not because they are distracting but because it seems to me that I am invited to do them, because I am part of something more than my small self. And if they help me to regain my footing and find life, then they are steps forward rather than mere distractions.

One can only focus on loss and grief for so many consecutive minutes or hours or days without going quite mad. It is life-giving rather than death denying to step forward, and and also to retreat as necessary, both in whatever measure one can. Self-awareness, I suppose, is the key. The reality is that I cannot be distracted. I can, however, focus on some of my work, and I think that that is a good thing.

Retreat After Devastation

A typical Ignatian-style retreat is made in silence, and includes a daily conversation with a spiritual director who listens to what you have to say, makes a few comments or asks a few questions designed to help you deepen your experience of prayer during the week, and then suggests some material for you to pray with over the course of the next 24 hours.

Your director might suggest just about anything ~ art, music, poetry, other reading, pretty much any kind of prayer or contemplation at all ~ but the hallmark Ignatian form of prayer involves imaginative interaction with Scripture.

Last year I met with my director late in the morning and we agreed to meet again before supper, since we were just getting started and only had five days. He suggested a few passages of Scripture for me, passages which I'm sure he uses all the time to help someone start a retreat.

When I returned late that afternoon and described my day, he asked, "Why do you think it is that no matter what text you encounter, everything that emerges is about Famous Giant Hospital (where I had just completed the summer chaplaincy program)?"

I looked at him and said, surprised by my discovery, "Because I have been completely traumatized by my summer there."

We talked a bit more and he suggested some more readings, but told me to lay off until the next day. "This has been a little intense," he said "Take a complete break tonight."

Our son died during the night, and I found out the next afternoon and went home that evening.

Words like trauma and intense hardly describe the subsequent eleven months.

And so day after tomorrow I am off for another weeklong retreat. Not to last year's place ~ I can't imagine ever returning there ~ but to Guelph, where I went two years ago.

"What do you desire from this week?" Always one of the first questions.

I have no idea.

Scavenger Hunt

I don't usually write about my encounters in therapy but perhaps this one would be of help to someone.

I am about about to wrap up several months of bi-weekly meetings with a grief counselor and last week she asked me whether I felt that I had returned to seminary too soon. I wasn't sure what she meant; everything seems too soon, but I think ten years from now everything will still seem too soon. Including getting out of bed in the morning.

There is, it seems, a school of thought that by returning too soon to some semblance of regular life, whatever that once was, a person might be repressing her experience of grief, only to see it emerge in destructive ways later on.

As I've thought about her question, I've concluded that I've made good decisions. I remember little of the winter quarter of seminary, but I know that I was supported and encouraged by friends who, had I waited a year, would have moved on in their classes and activities. It was terribly difficult in many ways ~ my husband, a web designer, pointed out that while his work is something of a break, mine ~ Christology, ethics, pastoral care ~ is relentlessly about exactly what our lives are about: life, death, meaning, meaninglessness, purpose, despair, hope, anguish. No wonder I reassesed what I was doing pretty much minute-by-minute.

It's worked, I think, because I have tried to be honest and open without monopolizing center stage. I haven't, of course, always been successful. I have left classes and chapel services to cry in solitude and peace. I have been less than encouraging to hopeful pastoral care classmates who would like to believe that they can bring words of comfort to a grieving family. I am sure that I have offered unwelcome doses of reality from time to time.

I've learned to ask for what I need. More time, more space. Deadlines for papers and the stimulii of others in a classroom during a test are often just over the edge of what I can manage. More help. I realized this week that my spiritual director, an exceptionally quiet and reserved man, might best be described as heroic. I know this has been and continues to be a time-consuming and long and painful and frustrating slog for him.

I have discovered that people respond with surprise, even astonishment ~ or, rather, of course ~ when they learn the circumstances of my life, but that a degree of candid openness seems to dissipate fear. Yesterday I met with the senior pastor of the church where I will be doing my field work next fall and one of the topics that came up was my participation in funerals. He seems completely unintimidated by the challenge, appropriately aware of the need for sensitivity and also appropriately aware of the need for me to be able to do the full range of work in a church ~ all of which contributes to my own sense of hope and confidence.

Next week I meet with the committee which will (I hope) approve me to go forward with the next step for ordination. When I met with them in December, I spoke for nearly an hour about the events of the preceding three months, and then waited for them to say, "No way can you do this." Their reaction was quite the opposite; I hope that still holds. Assuming it does, I go before my entire Presbytery a few weeks later. A few weeks ago, in the first of this three-part meeting process, I met with my own church session, and our senior pastor came right out with a question about my son and how the past year has unfolded.

I speak, at times like that, about the same things I write about here. The bewilderment, the guilt, the frustrations. The communities and individuals who surround me. The work I am surprised to find myself still called to do

Did I short-circuit grief by scavenging for pieces of life too soon? I don't think so. After my mother and brother were killed in that car accident at the ages of twenty-eight and one, my grandmother coped for awhile by reading an Agatha Christie mystery a day. But she also took care of us, my surviving younger brother and me. Only on the rarest of much later occasions did she find the courage to speak of that bleak year. But she did live it, and she did much to give life back to us.

Perhaps the gift that emerges for others in the "return" ~ and I guess I wouldn't really call it a return, since that life is gone ~ is the honest demonstration that the pieces you recover are smashed and jagged fragments of what once was, but hold the potential for being soldered back together into something else, as long as you are willing to experiment with undesirable materials and shapes and to accept a finished product that looks ~ um ~ a little battered and wobbly.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend asking about my willingness to accept an imperfect gift. He had made something for me and then messed it up. It's not ruined ~ it's just not what he had planned.

He recognizes, I think, that I am the Queen of Imperfect Gifts ~ in both the giving and the receiving.

So no, I haven't short-circuited my grief. I live it every moment: on long walks alone, in hours of prayer, in classrooms in which I speak out and in meetings in which I listen. Wisdom does not mean pretending. Courage does not mean waiting until your pain is resolved (which would be when, exactly?) or the pieces of your life fall back into place.

So maybe I have learned something about wisdom and courage in spite of myself.

Wisdom and courage ~ picking up those slivers of glass that cut your fingers, rearranging them into patterns that defy conventional standards of beauty, and recognizing authenticity and generosity as the measure of wholeness. Wisdom and courage ~ the recognition that you will never succeed in reaching some destination of impeccably elegant completion, but that you will be utterly delighted when someone asks, "How are you at accepting imperfect gifts?"

Fantasy Life

1. Move to island community a couple of hours and a ferryboat ride away.

2. Pastor small church there. Host occasional island retreats of a day or a few. Write.

3. Come into the city for two or three days a week to do part-time chaplaincy at Giant Famous Hospital and some spiritual direction, maybe teach a college class as an adjunct, see my friends and go to dinner or the orchestra or the art museum (not all in the same weeek!).

Needs met: Solitude. Quiet. Church. Migratory birds. Kayak. Intensity of hospital on a reduced-time basis. Just enough big city culture and companionship.

Gifts offered: Worship leadership, preaching, teaching, congregational and hospital pastoral care, spiritual direction, writing.

Questions: Is there even a church of any kind on one of those islands? Would GFH take me on as a part-time chaplain? Would anyone be interested in publishing my writing?

In between me and there: Summer Hebrew. One last year of seminary. One year CPE residency. Debt. The garage that's falling down.

Just some thoughts, inspired by today's Friday Five.

Mother's Day Week-end: So Far

Friday morning ~ Really, a pretty excellent morning ~ all of it involved, one way or another, with the practice of spiritual direction and the ongoing Catholic-Protestant dialogue in my life and with my friends.

Afternoon ~ The day fell apart. Big plans for accomplishing something academic, but several hours were filled with the continuing (and perhaps after several weeks finally successful) effort to surrender our son's car to the dealer. And all for want of a fax. The young man at the dealer has been unfailingly polite; it was someone on the other end, or perhaps many someones, who has not seemed able to perform their job(s).

Evening ~ After a bit of a rant, about how whenever I accomplish one of these minor but emotionally burdensome tasks, I think it's time for my son to come home ~ "OK, that one's done, we got over another hurdle ~ now can we go back to our lives?" ~ I crawled into bed and spent most of the evening reading. Gregarious Son got home from work early and I could hear him and the Quiet Husband laughing over a movie in the living room.

Saturday morning ~ Drove to the university library to find it closed for the week-end, so came home and set up shop in the dining room. Email from a friend whose son also died by suicide. I emailed back that my basic plan for tomorrow is to hibernate, and to cancel most of the next several months, when all of our family anniveraries of all sorts will take place. ("You already tried to cancel Christmas and Easter," my spiritual director pointed out last week.) She sent a wise response,urging me to " just plan to be doing something. And include in the plan time to cry, scream, yell, write, pray, talk, be alone, whatever." I plan to go for a walk and then clean the house and clean out the gardens. No public appearances and no academic work.

Saturday afternoon ~ Managed to delete 8 pages of 22-page outline of paper. After an hour of quiet panic, realized where I had another copy on the computer. Still took an hour to recreate.

It's gray and windy outside, but it's walk time. Enough of sitting here working.

Five Things: Shock

I can talk only about what it has been like for me. My husband, my son, my daughter -- perhaps they would see things differently, perhaps they would be able to order them in some way. Perception , response -- no doubt even those earliest cave paintings in France tell us something about the variety of human perception and response. I have only my own story to share.

The shock. The suddenness of a loss that blots out your entire universe. I read a couple of weeks ago that only 20% of deaths in the United States today are completely unanticipated. I was surprised, since my personal experience has been so different. My 28-year-old mother and year-old brother killed in a car accident. My 48-year-old stepmother killed in a fall. My 49-year-old aunt dead almost instantly of a stroke or heart attack. My 24-year-old son, dead by suicide.

There is, of course, a sense of shock even when the death has been expected, even when its imminence has been the focus of life. That reality first became apparent to me when I was in law school and my husband's uncle died of cancer. He was at home, where his family had cared for him during the last weeks of his life, and his wife's response was one of such overwhelming anguish and agitation that I realized that even when you know what is going to happen, you can't quite accommodate it until it does. I saw the same thing over and over again during my CPE experience at Giant Famous Hospital last summer. Probably close to 75, maybe many more, of my patients died while I was actually there on the campus, usually with them. I can't think of a single survivor who wasn't visibly shaken, heartbroken, devastated ~ and it made no difference whether their loved ones had been in the hospital a matter of hours or a matter of months. The completeness of death startles and undoes us no matter the circumstances.

But a completely unexpected death brings its own set of horrors. The ground has shifted, the sky has turned dark, and the requirements of your life have been altered, all in a single second. You have to absorb information that you cannot find acceptable, you have to make telephone calls you will not remember making, you have to make decisions no one wants to make.

As far as I can piece together, in the first hour or so after learning of my son's death, which had happened the night before while while I was four hours from home at a retreat center, I talked by telephone to my husband who was at home and called to tell me, to my daughter's college advisor and then to my daughter in Oregon, to my brother and son en route to our house from the southern part of the state, to a detective in Chicago, to my spiritual director who was at home, to my son's girlfriend in Chicago, to our pastors who were at church, and to a good friend at home. Some of those calls I can remember, some I only know must have taken place because of information I seem to have acquired in the first hours. The only person I knew at the retreat center, where I had been for a little more than a day, was the Jesuit who was my director for the week I had planned there, and so I talked to him off and on through the late afternoon and early evening, as I waited for friends to come for me. He offered his office and computer, and so I sent a few emails to others to whom I am close, knowing that within another few hours I would be unable to manage anything of the sort.

I felt encased in some kind of impermeable shell, into which the faintest knowledge of an ominous reality had somehow seeped, a reality that was gathering the steam that would enable it to crash its way into every corner of our lives and explode that shell into thousands of pieces.

It feels as if that explosion is still reverberating. I guess it will always feel that way.

Holy Week Reflection: The Short Version

I am experiencing a remarkable Holy Week.

I don't think I can do it justice, but I will begin by saying that, a year ago, one of my seminary professors questioned the value of spiritual direction in terms of effective results vis-a-vis preaching, describing the former as "inefficient" in comparison to the latter, by which you can "reach hundreds of people at once."

I have given that remark a great deal of thought in the ensuing ten months, recognizing that the comparison is of the apples-to-oranges variety and yet, wondering what it says about how we spend our time and what our orientation to results is about ~ what the word "results" even means. My initial conclusions had something to do (1) with the fact that both of my spiritual directors (two years each) have been Jesuit priests who preach regularly and are engaged in a multiplicity of large-scale tasks ~ one is a university administrator and professor and the other a parish pastor ~ and yet consider one-on-one companionship with individuals to be a critical component of their ministries, and (2) with the recognition that much of what I am able to do for others is sustained by my prayer life and the opportunity to explore its unfolding dimensions with someone else who has cared for me over a long period of time.

Anyway. This week has been bracketed by a couple of hours spent with my current director last Friday and yesterday morning with my former director, who is in town for the week-end. In between and interwoven with my own turmoil have been a couple of conversations with other people about their suffering and about all of our inadequacies, and about their new insights into their relationships with God. And in the last couple of days: the Tenebrae service in my own church and a Catholic Good Friday mass.

I find that I am not yet remotely ready for Easter Sunday. In the Bible version, the Sunday joy comes much too quickly upon the despair for those of us who are in our own Friday-Saturday worlds to absorb. But ~ but ~ I am seeing things a bit differently this morning.

This endless conversation, this endless listening and watching for God, this careful vigilance to the pilgrimmage of a solitary person ~ whether I am the focus of the attention or the one trying to offer it to someone else, it is a remarkable experience of the presence of God's Spirit.

I don't think "efficiency" is the standard at all.

Incapacity

I'm beginning to understand at a new level why we find hospital chaplains, spiritual directors, therapists -- anyone with the skill to ask open-ended questions and the capacity to listen to the answers without feeling compelled to comment, fix, teach, change, or make better -- so valuable in our lives. Anyone with the ability to name names and to hear feelings and experiences for what they are.

My father has been widowed three times, divorced once, lost a child. You might think that he would be one of those people.

He hasn't said my son's name aloud to me in months.

He called last night and peppered questions at me in a booming, jovial voice. How's school? Your exams are finished? Everything go well? New classes? How's your other school? What exactly are you studying there? How's the young lady in Oregon? When is her graduation again? The young man at home? The husband?

My answers: Fine. Yes. Fine. Yes. Fine. Spiritual direction. Fine. May 17. Fine. Fine.

The real answers: Very difficult. Two weeks ago. I did well and and what difference does it make? What difference does anything make? Yes, and I am appreciative of the chance to study Matthew with one of the world's great experts, terrified of attempting Homiletics at this juncture in life but possessed of enough of a sense of self-preservation to want to go forward, perplexed as I finally begin to look at Calvin in depth and address the endless series of paradoxes and dichotomies that mark my faith. It's wonderful and I am incredibly grateful to the people who urged me to go ahead with the spiritual direction program, telling me that I might find healing there. Would you like to know sometime what spiritual direction is and why I am investing two years of my life in formal training as a director? She's doing well and busy and productive and her heart is broken. He's confused and struggling to get a handle on life. He's sad and angry.

My father and my former spiritual director are almost exactly the same age. One of them could tell you quite a bit about me, before and after; sends me things that help sometimes; can absorb it all. The other can't even go there.