ON THE ALIENATION FROM COMMUNITY

Grief strips us. According to the mystics, this is good news. Because it is only when we are naked that we can have union with the Beloved. * * * Few among us would ever opt for the narrow gate of grief, even if it were guaranteed to lead us to God. But if our most profound losses—the death of a loved one, the ending of a marriage or a career, catastrophic disease or alienation from community—bring us to our knees before that threshold, we might as well enter. The Beloved might be waiting in the next room. -- Mirabai Starr (from this morning's Rohr Meditation)

All the words we read that bring us understanding to the brink of enlightenment (we think) are just words. We really truly must experience the death of a loved one or alienation from community...experience unto rending of garments and gnashing of teach. Before God and everybody...our worst fear come to be.

I have experienced both of those this past year, death of a beloved and alienation from community, and I have spent great effort in acknowledging the pain...thus, to my reasoning mind, making it understandable. In short, I'm seeing, null and void. 

In reading Mirabai Starr this morning, I recognized that my acknowledging the pain was my ego Lucy's way to avoid feeling it. Miranda Lambert's words,  Get a grip, bite your lip...this ain't your Mama's broken heart, flashed through my mind. 

It felt like light slipping through the crack in my shell of self-protection as I read Starr this morning. Grief. Maybe grief is individualized, personalized, new and different and excruciatingly painful each time we are gifted with the experience of it. 

 I have no idea how to grieve from my awakened well of sorrow within. I have cried, I have talked. And talked. And cried. Interestingly, and I suspect, all for my little guy, but not for my alienation from community. 

Whoa! I didn't even know that was up for inspection. Much less grief. The fact I didn't miss it was close enough to perfect for me. But maybe it's not...maybe it's not even on the right path, much less heading in the right direction. Maybe this is the step up of which I know naught. 

This is the hardest part...detaching from my want-to, inviting my needs up and out into the open. It's the hardest part because there's not a snowball's chance I personally can do that. 

The instructions, however, are the same: Pray our thank you, sit and wait on the Lord, love and laugh.

Thank you.