faith

 

Dear God,

I have been angry at you for a long time now. Even as I have moved forward on this grief journey, my faith & willingness to trust in you has remained stagnant. I forgave my father for leaving me, for leaving our family, the way that he did. I came to accept that it was the illnesses of depression & anxiety that metastasized into his soul and his spirit, blinding him to anything but his distorted sense of self and the pain that he carried. His soul withered under the constant barrage of falsehoods that depression shouted at him, a daily mantra that grew so loud, it drowned out the voices of love that surrounded him. His inner light flickered, growing smaller & dimmer, until it was extinguished by the anxiety that consumed him. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t really his choice. He wanted only to stop the pain.

But you see God, the soul that I speak of, the spirit and the light within him, those are the very things I wanted to believe that you would tend to. So many of the prayers that I uttered to you in the course of a lifetime reflected that belief, that sense of faith that though you did not control the world with a divine hand, you could, when called upon, lift up the fallen and tend to the weary. The soul was within your purview. And reconciling that belief with the way in which I lost my father has felt next to impossible.

And, let’s be real, it has been no secret to you that I have maintained the need to place blame for this senseless tragedy on someone, somewhere, to lay it squarely on the shoulders of an entity that could carry it.  And you simply fit that bill. I don’t know that it was a conscious choice in my part, perhaps it grew out of the conflicting feelings of the God that I was called upon to exalt and praise in prayer, and the God that I could not find or feel in my deepest moments of trauma. I couldn’t reconcile those two things and it made me angry to have to work so hard at trying to. So it became easier not to try.

Perhaps I laid blame on you because I knew that you could take it. You could carry my rage, my outbursts, my railing against you and you wouldn’t leave. You would bear it. You would wait for me. Somewhere deep inside, maybe I believed that. So why not saddle you with the blame?  But the blame became too high an obstacle.

And I’ll confess God, I don’t even know if my father called out to you. He was a pragmatic man, not deeply spiritual, and it is possible that he never once turned to you in prayer as the darkness descended upon him. But what does that mean? It doesn’t make it easier to let go of the anger, because surely you could see his pain. Must we ask before your loving presence comes to us? These are questions with which I have struggled. These are the questions that bring static into my fractured sense of faith. They are the impediment, the stumbling block when I have tried to find my way back to you. They are questions without answers.

I wrote recently of that very thing, finding my way back to you. The broken pieces I have carried with me, were laid down in front of you and you implored me to entrust some of my pain to you. And I did. The tenuous first steps of our reconciliation had begun, with a single baby step; trusting a piece of me to you.

I still do not trust the universe God. I don’t know that I will ever trust in it again. Life as I knew it was shattered with one phone call. And I do not trust in the ground beneath my feet, for fear that it will shift once again. But I have found the strength to push through that sense of distrust, to not allow it to define me or narrow my experiences in the world. I may inch forward with trepidation, but my feet still carry me toward life. And somewhere along the way, in this past week, I found myself ready to forgive you.

I don’t want to blame you anymore God. You loved him. He is with you now and I want to believe, no I choose to believe, that you have tended to his wounded soul and brought him peace. He is held in your loving embrace. He is not alone. And when he weeps at the devastation his suicide caused to those he loved the most, you wipe his tears.

I still do not know how to talk to you God. I do not know if prayer will ever be the same for me. But I suppose it will take time to figure out our new relationship with one another. The language of reconciliation is sometimes difficult to decipher. So I continue to entrust you with my pain, bit by bit and piece by piece. And I open myself up to the blessings that you have instilled within me; strength, resilience, hope, courage and an abiding love of life. You have surrounded me with a family and circle of friends that embody your divine spirit. They are all the reminder that I need that never once, have you turned away from me.

Forgiveness is about letting go, and I no longer want to carry with me anger toward you. It’s too hard and it hurts too much. I need you in my life God. My father died of an illness. It will never make sense and I will never make peace with his suicide. But I can learn to live with it, ever so slowly. And you and I can find our new normal one breath, one prayer, one letter at a time. Our covenant is weathered, cracked and touched by the most painful elements of life. But I see now, that it is not broken.

For too long I have felt shattered. I tenuously set the fractured pieces in place. I tend to them so they may heal. I strive toward sh’lemut (wholeness) and shalom (peace). And neither is possible without you in my life. Rumi said, “The wound is the place where God enters you.” So I open myself up anew to receiving your divine light and love.

Adonai is close to the brokenhearted, And helps those crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:19