Welcome each visitor...

Two quotes and a link. My own thoughts are just not fitting for public consumption. I've laid on the couch for nearly a full day. I'm feeling slightly more rested, and but still deeply sad and exhausted. Tomorrow morning I'll go back to work and start again. This is a season of breaking, of shattering, of wondering if wholeness will ever happen again, and do I really want it anyway? Of evaluating the high costs of various decisions. Of questions and elusive future possibilities. Of silence and oftentimes loneliness (even in the midst of crowds). Of fasting. Of thinking and praying and wondering and waiting. Of agonizing and weeping. Of opening my life to the thousand and one sorrows that surround me, and letting them change things in my heart. Of crying out to God in the desperate hope that he will hear and respond and send peace.

I'm going with my best friend to a panel discussion on genocide - in Rwanda and Darfur - in a few hours. We'll eat together first, and then listen, and once again I'm sure my heart will shatter.

So, two quotes and a link. That's all I can manage for public consumption.

Sara Miles describes a conversation soon after she'd become a Christian, with an old friend, where, as he shared the pain in his life, she recommended he pray. She writes:

"When you told me to pray," Jose would remember later, "it was incredibly earnest. You said prayer was like having this intense, profound longing that you just had to be with. That you put the longing in the hands of God, in a certain way. That it was important to be receptive to the unfulfilled, and not fill it or deny it."

I had to be receptive or go crazy - because even as I kept going to church, the questions raised by the experience only multiplied. Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you, and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially and politically awkward, as well as profoundly confusing. I wasn't struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the "truth." If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized.
(Sara Miles, "Take This Bread", pg. 70)

The poet Rumi writes:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival

A joy, a depression, a meannness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for
some new delight.

I first came across that poem a few years back, as the inspiration for this story, "The Crowded House".

To be receptive to the unfulfilled spaces and not fill or deny them, and to welcome each visitor, even if they're a crowd of sorrows. This is the space I am working to occupy.