Muted

Time to stop speaking.  Writing feels OK.  Feel secure enough with how things are as opposed to how I wish they were to reduce the energy I am putting in to staying vigilant.  I know why I need to stop speaking.  I have a powerful sense of the injustice much of what those with mental health issues engender.  I have a sense that I need to be quiet with my psyche and listen.

Even in the Church which claims such a high motive in care and ministry is amongst the most ignorant and prejudiced regarding issues of difference.  I need to be silent because I am angry, frustrated and confused.  I feel as though I have splatted against a religious brick wall.  Faced with illness some of those who work for the Church like to spin vulnerability and difference as either incompetence or flakiness.  Unreliability; whispering behind hands with worried expressions and half truths; tut-tuts and shaking heads.  My dear brothers and sisters the greatest prophets and mystics in our tradition were depressives, bi-polar, perhaps with personality disorders or syzophrenia.  It may be much easier to isolate and segregate those who challenge our understanding of what the incarnation must surely be, but it cannot, surely be the divine way, can it?  Easier for an institution - but unrepresentative of the blessed, broken and given Body of Christ.

An incarnation which does not embrace the totality of creation and celebrates it only is a joy-ride into spiritual denial; a cosy club for like-minded people who cannot handle their own inadequacies and sense of failure and who do not want to live reality - suffering, poverty and all.  I can't handle my reality either - but I am committed to several rounds and even a knock out in the name of trying to better understand the process.  I will never know why, but I can have a sense of how.

Life is random, but my engagement with my God-givenness need not be.

Silence is where I must go.  It won't make the pain go away but it will help me to be with it.  Give it more attention and time.

Creator

Heal but not so quickly

That I fail to honour myself fully.

Redeemer

Befriend but do not take me too seriously

Follow your divine insight and lead off our dance.

Sustainer

Accompany me as we ascend into silence and

Listen to my heart.

Amen.

Comments

[carolynn]

Much love C