GC: All My Love has ever planned, all My Love has ever thought, you shall see each day unfold. Only be taught.
Just be a child. A child never questions plans. It accepts gladly.
I have been binge watching a Canadian drama about a detective and his k-9 partner. I am four seasons into the show and the dynamics between characters are getting to me. Innocently I thought…
Until this morning…
I woke up in that gray space between sleep and wake, when reality meshes with dreams. I couldn’t tell the difference. The last thing I remember was watching the friendship between Hudson and Sarah grow slowly. Baby steps. Sweet. Perfect.
Then in one episode they agreed that the friendship had grown into something deeper.
We, the audience, knew it would happen. How could it not? They were perfect for each other. Besides Sarah loved the dog.
The next thing I knew, I had woke up in tears.
Feeling overwhelmed with loneliness.
The dreaming part: Witnessing Hudson and Sarah huddled together as I stood in the doorway, like Jesse the IT tech, observing the obvious connections being sewn together between them.
I completely woke up.
My tablet was dead.
The woodstove had gone out.
The room was blue dark and cold.
So was I. Inside and out. Not knowing where they came from, I let the tears pour, crying myself back to sleep.
I have been down this road before. Some of those years were the darkest years of my life. Loneliness is a hidden disease that eats away at one’s joy without warning, without any outward signs, like a snake weaving is way in the dark until it strikes and the tears pour, the crying becomes weeping, from sobs to heart wrenching cries in the dark.
“God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.” (Buechner)
It has been years since this feeling has overcome me. I thought because of my latter age I was over this wanting, this needing a someone special to remind me that indeed I was special, loved just for me and not for what I do.
I’m not ditching the love my kids have for me. They are the best human beings on earth with hearts of gold and strengths both physically and mentally beyond anything I ever had. Emotional rocks. God’s gifted mountain of joy and pride to me, who was and is still unworthy of such beautiful gifts.
I used to cry out to Him when loneliness crushed me, being careful not to ignore the gifts He had given me, all of them unwarranted. Single parenthood speaks for itself, with all the untying of family dimensions that go with it.
Food stamps
Welfare checks
Medicare
Even after that period in my life, not wanting the kids to want for anything, I was living paycheck to paycheck, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’, and the social stigmas that are connected with delinquent payments, overdue rent, breakfast for dinner. etc.
I remember after being laid off, throwing all the bills on the floor, dropping to my knees and begging God for help. He did. Another job came soon after. So I cannot shake a fist at a God, the God who has always cared. Yet the loneliness remains. It stings, hurts and crushes just as it did in the old days. It was just buried too deep for me to notice.
The Christian reaction is always, “Don’t forget about Ruth.” How can I? Once a year when I read her story I am reminded of hope, but it is her hope and her mother-in-law’s hope.
“I am Christ’s lost cell
His childhood and desert age
His descent into hell.
Love without need and without name
Bleeds in the empty problem
And the spark without identity
Circles the empty ceiling.” (Merton)
God must hear my prayers. All of them. For all these years. And yet…
I have noticed that all the tv shows that I have been obsessed with, the characters I have adopted as my drama friends, are all those whose friendships within the dramas grow the most; hearts made of kindness and caring.
And the Disney movies? Happily ever after!
It doesn’t matter if subconsciously I have defined marriage as a sham. I want to be loved.
It sounds terrible, but I want to be loved by a someone…not just God.
I’ve tried to fill the empty spaces with Him. I’ve read. I committed to memory spiritual verses and uplifting songs. I do. I give. I love. I thought I had filled all the empty corners; that loving God was enough.
This morning when I woke up in tears, I realized that despite all the preaching to the contrary, for me, loving God isn’t enough. I need a someone, a human, to come home to that might lavish just a smidgen of love that I have gifted out. Knowing what Jesus Christ sacrificed for me, it sounds so selfish.
I was in my early thirties when I first read any of the books by Mother Teresa. It was the words about loneliness that hit home the most because I lived it. She said it was the disease of the west. Indeed.
I guess I still live it. I can only ask God to take it away and let me live in peace, satisfied with my life as it is.
It is a good life.
It is a full life.
It’s just sort of empty.
I surrendered this to Him so many years ago. Yet the seed remains.
I go through the day blocking the loneliness out, giving my all to all I come in contact with, loving hard, working hard, and finally sleeping hard…so I don’t have to feel like this again.
“…every burning morning is a prophecy of Christ coming to raise and vindicate even our sorry flesh.” (Merton)
God is good.
Life is good.
This life is good.
It is just empty.
“Yet it is difficult for anyone, once he has received from God the power to will freely, to give up his will wholly to God and not rather to will things for himself. Perhaps it is impossible. He is tempted to treat what he has been given as his own and clutch it to himself..”(Bernard of Clairvaux)
Someone just for me. and how would I treat him? I would clutch him to myself. Perhaps God would come second. Maybe I will never be ready for love and companionship. That’s a sobering thought.
“…On the contrary, the faithful know how utterly they stand in need of Jesus and him crucified. They wonder at and reach out to that supreme love of his, which passes all knowledge. They are ashamed not to respond to such love and deserving with the little they have to give…” (Bernard of Clairvaux)
I haven’t even had a coffee yet.
I can smell it brewing in the next room.
Just another day.
Our destiny is to go beyond everything, to leave everything, to press forward to the End and find in the End our Beginning, the ever-new Beginning that has no end. (Merton)
I’ll try!