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On Saturday morning, I sat down to meditate for the first time in a long time and for the first time in an even longer time, I wanted to sit down and write.

Since Molly’s surgery for scoliosis on February 22, there has been a lot of doing, but not a lot of “sitting,” thinking, writing or anything else really. I have been “in the moment,” instead of worrying about it. And in that way, almost a month had flown by and I found myself wondering where it had gone.

It seems like it just went.

It went into the maze-like halls of the hospital with its fluorescent lighting, and the beeps, whirs and humming sounds that create an otherworldly time and space.

It went into hours of doing simple things that under normal circumstances take only minutes, things like showering, or eating a meal, or going to bed (by which I mean how one spends the night-time hours, not that you actually stay in bed).

It went into days on end of holding hands with a child, who was trying to lose herself in mindless TV, so she wouldn’t have to be present to the pain and anxiety that was present in her body.

It went into afternoons of reading out loud, coloring pictures, telling family stories, listening to music, or imagining the adventure we will go on when all this was over – somewhere warm and sunny and on the water.

In other words, this last month went by just loving Molly Grace.

But finally last Saturday morning, I sat alone, quietly and gratefully, for a full thirty minutes. The house was still asleep; there were no pills to organize, or meals to prepare. There was no place to be. There was just me and a Divine invitation to “be still.”

I sank into my favorite chair with a cup of coffee. From years of habit, my sacred phrase welled up from deep within.

“I am Yours,” my heart sighed and along with it came the reminder, “So is she.”

That was the phrase that came to me, during the long days and nights in the hospital, when I could not stop Molly’s pain, her vomiting, her hot flashes, or her tears. There was no time for formal meditation, but I would find myself sitting at her bedside, breathing deeply and intentionally.

Without a conscious thought, “I am Yours” became “She is Yours.” I would inhale and exhale those words, over and over again: “She is Yours. She is Yours. She is Yours,” a rhythmic prayer of Love and surrender, belonging and grace.

She is not (just) mine. She is not (in any way) alone. She belongs to God and God was holding her more closely in Love than I ever could. But in that prayer of letting go, I also recognized how intimately I was getting to hold on.

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My hands were the ones washing her face, spooning her ice chips, adjusting her pillows. My lips were the ones kissing her forehead as she slept. My voice was the one lulling her to sleep, telling her it was all going to be okay. My heart was the one beating next to hers. What a privilege it was to just be there, Loving her, however the need manifested itself. Though sometimes tired, or scared, or frustrated, my overwhelming emotion was deep, deep gratitude.

We would walk the halls and see children who would be there for weeks and months on end, whose injuries and illnesses were not some temporary disruption from their normal life; it was their normal life. I was grateful we were in the right place for a while and that soon enough, the right place would be home. I was grateful we had such compassionate, gentle nurses there with us and such loving and generous friends and family supporting us nearby.

I can’t tell you how many people were praying for Molly, but I can tell you how much we felt the power of their prayers. We might not have gotten what they asked, or hoped for, but we got exactly what we needed. We felt loved; we felt brave; we had the energy to face the challenges of each day and when we didn’t, we had a soft place to land and a shoulder to cry on. Though we saw only a handful of people in those weeks, we were never alone.

At a difficult time in my life, “I am Yours,” began as a plea to God to not forget me, but it has become a reminder to myself of who and whose I am. When distractions and difficulties arise during my sit (or in my life), “I am Yours” sets me free to return my attention to what I was made for – what we are all made for –to be in Loving relationship.¹ “She is Yours” became my prayer for Molly this past month, but “We are Yours” is my prayer for all of us, not because God has forgotten, but because we have.

While I was finishing this blog, I heard about the attack in London and it brought to mind the wise words of Mother Theresa: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

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We are Yours, God, and we are each other’s. Help us to remember.

Amen

  1. My favorite book about the Trinity and how the Divine relationship is the model for all relationship is The Divine Dance by Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell. It’s insightful, accessible and I highly recommend it!

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We are finally at the end of this linguistic journey through some of the central themes of creativity. Thanks for going with me. We make so little time to explore subjects that make us uncomfortable; we’d much rather tread on familiar ground. But pushing ourselves to write these letters, (instead of just thinking about writing them) is one way to check out the terrain and see where new roads might lead. We can decide later if we want to take those roads, but if we never get a bird’s eye view of the area, we’re not likely to set out on the adventure.

And so, DIVINITY.

Liz Gilbert was really intentional about choosing this word. She didn’t want to use God, because it carries so much baggage and can also be limiting. In any given audience of real life bodies, or readers, there may be atheists, agnostics, Christians, former Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and others. We all have a different word for the Ultimate Source of Life and Love, and each word carries a different nuance. The Divine has as many manifestations as there are people on earth, birds in the sky, flowers in the field, or stars in the universe. While a mystery is something “ultimately unknowable,” the Divine Mystery might be better described as “endlessly knowable.”1 We’ve been describing it for millennia and it’s pretty clear we’re not losing steam.

Now, a mystic has a very important job. A mystic is someone who has had an intimate experience of the Divine, and it is their sacred duty to share what they learned from that experience. Some do it well and publically, while others do it quietly in their everyday lives, but no matter what time period a mystic lived in and no matter what faith tradition they came out of, virtually every one of them shares the same message. If we believed what the mystics have been saying for thousands of years, it would change everything! While I might have shot for more poetic language, Liz Gilbert nailed it.

We’re all fine! It’s going to be okay. Don’t be afraid.

Let me repeat that mystical message for the 98% of us who didn’t get it.

We’re all fine! It’s going to be okay. Don’t be afraid.

That, my friends, is the “fall out” from a Divine experience. You know you are safe; you are secure; you no longer sweat the small stuff.

As you can imagine, this makes mystics difficult to live with. They come back fearless, taking on their culture and traditions, theologians and authority figures. They don’t want to destroy those things; they just know those things are beside the point! Religious leaders believe it will all be okay too, at least for some of us, at some point, but they believe the only way to get there is through rule-keeping and discipline. Mystics just jump ahead to the finish line. They want to share the gospel, the good news, that it’s all going to be okay and since it’s going to be okay, IT’S ALL OKAY RIGHT NOW!

See what I mean about changing everything?

What would you do? How would you behave? What risks would you take if you knew that the story ends with you in Love, existing happily ever after?

Despite what you might be thinking, this isn’t pie in the sky, airy-fairy stuff! Knowing that it’s all going to be okay doesn’t let us off the hook from trying to change things in this world. Rather, it inspires the mystics to work harder to make what is Ultimately True more true in the here and now. If I believe the mystics and I see my sister struggling, I can’t just say “Chin up; it’s going to be okay!” Rather, I have to engage in her life in such a way that it actually becomes more okay. If my brother is oppressed, I want to get down under that pressure with him and help lift his burden. When it is all said and done, the mystics inspire us to act in ways that make our current reality a greater reflection of the Divine Reality, (which they experienced as the Ultimate Reality during their mystical experience).

So in the final moments of this really special day, LG asked us to consider:

What would you do if you knew it was all going to be okay?

Holy Crap! That’s a big question!

While it might be nice, most of us will never have a mystical experience. We probably won’t levitate, have visions, or experience “union with all that is.” But that’s okay! The mystics can be TRUSTED, Rob and Liz insist, because they never change their story! We are all going to be okay!

If we were willing to go with that idea, then we were ready to write our final letter to our FEAR from the DIVINE. The first letter we wrote in this series was from our FEAR, telling us all the reasons we shouldn’t live and respond from our hearts, whether it was in art, work, or life. This final letter was an antidote to that narrative.

Yes, FEAR is right. We might fail; we might screw up and get our ass kicked, but you know what?

We’re fine! It’s going to be okay. Don’t be afraid.

We might lose a job, get our heart broken, be disappointed, but you know what?

We’re fine! It’s going to be okay. Don’t be afraid.

I like that message. I like how it made me feel. My heart simultaneously swelled with hope and shrank with dread, but that’s a paradox I can live with. That is the kind of creative tension that leads to evolution, to change and growth, inspiration and COURAGE.

And so, finally, from the DIVINE:

Dear FEAR,

I see you. I hear you. I feel your pain and I know you are doing your best to protect Ali. But let me tell you, it’s going to be okay. FEAR, dear one, I’ve got her and I’ve got you too. There is no place she can go that is separate from Me, outside my care, or Love. What Ali does best is Love people and when you are in charge, she stops Loving others and starts trying to protect herself. That’s not good for her, or anyone else for that matter. So FEAR, please remember, Ali wasn’t an ugly duckling. That’s what you called her. She was a swan all along; she just didn’t know it and she doesn’t need your Chicken Little shtick amplifying the drama. The sky isn’t falling! Let her remember what she knows deep down anyway:

We’re fine. It’s all going to be okay. Don’t be afraid.

DIVINE.

 

  1. Richard Rohr spoke about this nuance recently at a Living School Symposia and I found the distinction really helpful.

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Was it just me, or did anyone else confuse a Tasmanian Devil with a whirling dervish in their childhood? When I was younger, I knew of only one difference: Taz was an actual star of a cartoon show. That was it. I had no idea whether a whirling dervish was man or beast, good or evil, though I tended to think the latter. Whenever the phrase was used in my childhood home, it had a negative connotation. It meant I needed to slow down, to stop being so wild. For the sake of my mother’s nerves and my backside, I needed to be still.

I hadn’t thought about my juvenile transposition of those terms for many, many years, but recently a friend posted this picture of me on Facebook, which was taken at her wedding last summer.

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Uh-oh, I thought, but I figured that it might get even worse, or better, depending on how you look at it. I was right. Apparently, we were just getting started. This moment followed.

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My partner and I were like turbines picking up steam. Though I haven’t seen the photographic evidence, I have vague memories of being sprawled across the dance floor, on our bums, laughing hysterically.

When I saw these photos, my mother’s phrase “whirling dervish” immediately came to mind. It had been 30 years since it had been used to scold me for playing so wildly with my friends. It was always followed by an encouragement to read instead, to pick up our messes, or at the very least to go outside! And since I am now an adult with access to cool technology like the Internet and Wikipedia, I decided to look up the term for myself. Imagine my surprise when I saw beautiful images like this one below.

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Whirling dervishes are not a menace to society, some wild, uncontrollable animal, or a tic that overtakes someone like a seizure, or a stroke. A whirling dervish is someone who dances in circles in order worship and discover God. They don’t even refer to themselves by that name. Technically, they are the Mevlevi sect of Sufism.

 In my research, I also discovered a beautiful quote by a member of that sect, Sherif Baba. He said,  “The dervish whirls so that the true form of the world can be seen. When we whirl, all the individual pieces we think are separate blend together and we begin to sense the totality that is God.”

Amen to that. When I read why a dervish whirls, my need to spin on the dance floor with my lovely friend on my arm became crystal clear. We had joyously celebrated her marriage a few short years before and now, she is going through some events that are unexpected, unwanted and frankly, unpleasant and yet together, we were celebrating the marriage of another friend. The bride’s childhood had been marked by a tragic loss, but her commitment to her new husband signified a belief in hope, joy, love, and the promise of all those blessings in greater measure in her future. Life spins on its axis and we are constantly called to accept changes in our circumstances and perspective.

 I tend to seek God in stillness, in the slow, silent moments of the dark morning, or the star-filled night. I find it difficult to see the Divine Presence in the fractal events of my life, particularly when they are upsetting or tragic. I am more likely to view them as something to be borne, something to be gotten through, rather than an opportunity to “sense the totality of God.”

 But the dance floor offers me another way. If I follow the example of the whirling dervishes, I might remember that sometimes, God can best be found in chaos, in change, in the very eye of the storm. If the Divine Presence is the centrifugal force of life, then sometimes we must spin in order to lose our own egos as the central reference point for all things. There is wisdom in letting go, in dancing through life, “so that the true form of the world can be seen.”