Dispossessed

Dispossessed: To lack hold of..

Is contemplation leading me, as John Mains writes, to dispossession instead of another new possession….To fall back into Source will first feel more like losing than growing, more like dying than achieving, especially if you have been building and maintaining your personal container for most of your life.

Richard Rohr, Dancing in Stillness

When I read this passage during my morning Lectio Divina, I was thrown off balance.  I long for comfort, a safe landing place, a contemplation as cozy as sitting by the fireside drinking tea. Several months into a prolonged and unexpected unemployment, dispossession feels intolerable to me and much like dying than growing or transforming. That the spiritual path should contain such heartbreak can feel unendurable during times of loss.

All losses have their own unique and intimate shades and textures of darkness.  The pain and intensity of the event, where it lands in our body and psyche, will depend on what has happened and what inner and out resources we have to bear it. Still, patterns familiar across differences emerge. There is that first state of shock, a gift of biology perhaps, when the brain and body shut down so that we do not have to feel too closely what is happening.  In this shock, it can feel like we are standing outside of our own bodies and watching the events as they happen to someone else like in a movie. We ride like this on the surface of the event until little by little the experience starts to sink back down into the mind/body/consciousness as the lived experience of the loss sinks in.  Overtime, as we no longer hear the voice welcoming us home, no longer start a workweek on Monday, avoid stairs week after week because of a lack of strength or pain, the lived experience of the event makes itself known.

This is when the deepest grief starts to take up residence in our hearts.  The hoped for miraculous return to what was begins to lose out to what is. Despair and hopelessness begin to feel more normal. We become strangers, refugees in what previously was our safe and familiar homes because nothing is familiar any longer. The familiar and easy resting places have been wiped out by a landslide. 

This pathway from shock to the lived reality of the loss is not a straight line.  We fluctuate between the forgetting and remembering for a long while. Whenever we encounter a new experience of the loss, say through a change in season, the grief over what was lost can resurface in an even more painful way then when it first happened because it had begun to feel as if we were getting over and past it. In in this conversation between hope, despair, letting go, it begins to dawn on us that there may not be any getting over what happened. Only a getting through to an integration into the new normal.  The living with what happened to us must mature into the experience of what the loss did to us in ways that are always beforehand unknown. This makes us vulnerable, unsteady, and bereft for a long while after. 

We enter a place of no easy consolation.  In fact, there is likely not anything we can think of to help us to feel like we did, not so sad. And yet, just in these moments of the journey is when we can start to feel joy again.  A new kind of joy that does not come out of the effort of our own self-will but comes as a surprising grace.  The rising mega moon just as the green of summer splendor is dying off, a hot sweet tea on a cold winter’s evening, a swim in a cold October pond at sunset.  Feeling the ease to sit and knit while watching a baking show.  These consolations come welling up from inside my heart as unexpected, unearned, consolations that mysteriously envelope and protect again my heartache.

Whatever happens next will be intimately shaped in the alchemy of what has been lost, our circumstances, and inner and outer resources. Transformation or growth takes place on its own time and rhythm.  Healing, integration, belonging, (re)sheltering cannot be forced but love – to ourselves and from others -  allows a stitching together of the brokenness into a reconfigured wholeness.  In my experience through losses of beloveds, health, past jobs, I often get to a place where I can imagine turning a corner towards the light even as I know I am not quite there yet.  There is so much backsliding at this stage it can feel unendurable the longing to be free from grief while stuck with the parts that cling to it still.  Maybe to turning the corner requires the grace to let go of the hope of getting things back they were.

As difficult at loss is and for a long long time, it is also a potential time of renewed freedom and creativity. With the usual life torn asunder, there is no reason to stick to old rules and habits that offered comfort in the past but no longer work. Without any hesitation or shame, I might swim naked in the cold mountain lake, strap on snowshoes and climb solo up a five-thousand-foot mountain in February, take more time writing like this in the middle of an afternoon, feel the aching miss for my mother’s voice. 

Father Thomas Keating describes how in their infinite mercy, God reaches out to hold us during our times of greatest trial and need.  He writes, “God has an infinite need to show mercy. Mercy responds to need…Our need is what creates God’s need to reach out to us, even if we do not realize how needy we actually are.”

I do sometimes feel God closer to me now in my loss….in the cold pond of October, the russet oak leaves swirling back to the groundnote of their being, my mother’s voice. I feel my breath coming in from God and then flowing out with all of my worries and concerns, empty if only for a moment.