the hellfire of the mind

“Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if we are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.” Maria Popova, The Marginalian

She’s not wrong but I couldn’t be reborn. I wasn’t enough. It has consumed me.

Grief is like a hard fall, to smash head-first into the cement repeatedly. Bruised and bleeding, utterly destroyed, but still getting up and on with life.

But what is there to get on to?

I made a grave mistake in the “getting on,” an amateur foolish error, believing I should be strong…

For the children, for the company, for my mother, for my sisters, and more children.

All these minutes, hours, days, months, years, and decades, I’ve been devoted (beyond what’s humanly possible) to those who needed me. I thought that was a good thing. I thought I was superhuman. I was lauded. I was built up as “amazing.” I had no boundaries. And I believed being superhuman was achievable.

But I’ve paid a price. I’ve traded for strength and lost my soul—as tragedy, suffering, and heartache collided inside me. And I’m left Empty. Hurting.

I’m done crying out to God who is all-powerful. Got it. YOU ARE GOD. I don’t disagree. But fuck it. Help already?

I tried the Church and a few people to tell my story.

And I found no one cared.

Where was a container wide or deep enough for the ocean of tears and heartache? No one could receive my fury, my destruction.

I have found comfort only in solitude and in the great cavern of nothingness.

My body, the vessel of nerve endings, hurts. My brain holds an ache. Calling it a headache is too benign. My brain was broken by pain. I can no longer think rationally. I told my shrink I won’t kill myself. And I won’t, I don’t (think I) want to, but sometimes I want to be there, with them, less alone.

I live in the void where sorrow lives, where life has no purpose.

When others try to understand, reaching for me, I cringe and pity them. I am defeated.

One can’t get to me because I am gone. This physical vessel that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, she is empty.

I am no longer courageous. I am no longer strong.

The void is surrounding me and those who know seem too frightened by my weakness. They leave me be. And I am grateful because my body, heart, soul, and mind are destroyed. It’s too late.

I was strong. It broke me. Now I am vapor.

Survivor’s Guilt and Finding Some Joy

We want in fact not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who liked to see us enjoying ourselves. And whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
page 40 The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis

This is by far not the most profound CS Lewis thought, but it hit me today hard between the eyes. My thinking has been a bit convoluted so bear with me and I will try to come to the point.

I have been living the last five years in a coping mode, sheer survival really; and not “having a good time” not even close. Life has been hard. And it hit me after all this time I still have survivor’s guilt.

Holly deserved to live and by contrast I am less worthy of my life. She was so amazing! I’m a depressive, a recovering alcoholic, sarcastic, some (okay, one sister) would say mean, introverted, easily persuaded that life sucks to be honest, completely a cup half empty person and all the rest. Whereas Holly took hold of her life like a storm, she ran toward life’s opportunities with joy and verve. She was about to go for her PhD for fuck’s sake. I have done nothing with my life by comparison.

She should be alive. Me perhaps not so much.

So, I’ve had this idea of getting all these chicks flying out of our nest and then fade into the proverbial sunset. Be the rock, be the strong one, be what everyone needs from me, until they’re off. And then, what does it even matter?

In my new church, the Black led one, I have found that I cannot stop weeping. I’ve got some deep, deep grief I suppose and well, having decided it didn’t matter what happened to me, a sadness, and a spirit of having given up or just surviving. One Sunday, not long into attending, the usher put us in the middle of the sanctuary – the 50–yard line. There was no hiding, and so I just sat there with tears streaming down my cheeks trying to stop or be invisible. A small, elder Black woman came over, and started praying with “a word for me, did I mind?” There was a word for me today in the sermon. She prayed a powerful, amazing, incredible amount. I don’t remember it all in my mind, but I am sure my spirit remembers. And I did hear something in the sermon – that God doesn’t want me to simply survive these hard years, he wants me to thrive! I heard it and I wanted to believe it. But it has been months and as I have slowly been weeping my way through services, I am starting to understand and believe.

I don’t know what next week, next year or the next several decades holds but I am not going quietly.

I haven’t been having a good time, back to the Lewis quote. I kind of felt that I was owed a good time in life, I have been quite entitled to be frank. But that’s ignorant shit too. This life is hard. People die. People are broke. Companies fail. People foreclose on homes. People can’t afford homes. People lose their jobs. People get divorced. People are murdered.

The problem of pain is that life is full of it.

And there is joy.

There is joy and that’s okay too! I know that it will be okay to grow a garden, gardens are hope. It will be okay to go on a trip. To celebrate 30 years of marriage. To build a study. To buy a camera, to see beauty again. Because even though I can’t promise myself that things won’t go wrong, as someone said to me recently, it might be great! I might find joy.

Thou has created all things and for thy pleasure they are and were created. That’s my core truth. Not my pleasure, God’s. And as I experience joy along the way that makes the creator joy filled too.

The Problem of Pain is Not Pain

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.

We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.

Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.

My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.

The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.

The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.

And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion. And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.

I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.

Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.

I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.

The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.

The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.

On Aging, On Living.

We’ve returned from visiting my in-laws, who are 82 and 80. They are very spry. So alive though slowing. I admire them. They’ve traveled the world together. They’ve had such curiosity, such courage.

When did I become so afraid? Life’s beat the courage out of me without a doubt. The deaths. My mother’s physical pain and suffering. My headaches. The mental health challenges in myself and my family.

Sobriety taught me not to trust myself. Or was it alcoholism? My family’s unraveling after our parent’s deaths. My sister who chose not to have me as a part of her life. The ultimate failure to be quite honest when your own flesh and blood rejects you. That pain is insufferable, on the daily, sometimes.

I’ve raised the white flag. I surrender to loneliness. Fear has me in a chokehold. I’ve been hiding out. I have never felt more alone in all the years of my life.

My therapist is frequently telling me that’s not who I am. I owe it to myself to be courageous, to be curious, to be learning, and to create. That I have something to say. That my creativity matters. The world is worse off for my muteness. What I see in the world is unique. I used to believe that. My father conveyed an idea that we all have something unique to offer the world, our mark. I’m just no longer convinced that we’re all special.

When you are quiet for such a long time, you don’t trust your voice. Clearing my throat before speaking startles me. It better be worth it. Fraught with doubt. Frequently, I think never mind. Who cares?

I have a partner that creates no matter what, no matter if no one’s listening. That’s bold. That’s brave. That’s also ridiculous to me at times. You wouldn’t believe how much time he spends toiling away alone in his studio with no clue as to what’s happening in real life, in my kitchen, with the kids, with me.

Everything in me, how I was raised, says that’s selfish. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. My therapist says I need my own space. Where I can shut the door and be. I’m finally making it.

“You must not fear, hold back, count, or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave, which then carries you, sweeps you into experience, and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, and instabilities, and it always balances them.” The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4

Here’s to reading. Here’s to travel. Here’s to curiosity. Here’s to creating. I’m hoping for it all.

I’m just scratching the surface of being alive.

How do I make life less bitter?

Why does life crush my bones, and
leave dust in my eyes, bereft of tears?
I blink painfully. Chronic headaches, and yet

I try to be normal.
I wake, breathing in <<live a normal life>>

But always

shards of glass in my lungs

shred me.

Some days,

I am glad for the constant pain.
Let go, I think. Be destroyed.
My spirit suggests sweetly in what would be a relief

to release the mental suffering.

But living is a requirement of life.
Living for others is enough, isn’t it?

Then, there are days

like today when my confusion is paramount.

What would it feel like to be happy?

What do I do if I have to be alive for a long time?

How do I make it less bitter?

Make each breath less painful, the shards less sharp?

How do I live with a head that hurts too frequently?

What is bearable?

How many people can one lose and still believe in this life?

I hate my brain.
I hate my head.
I hate my heart.
I hate each breath,
Some days. Not always.
But today.

The Monster was Caged & Resting

I asked my son to write about his depression. I am trying to save him.

I want to know what it is like to be inside him. Him specifically because every person’s suffering is different. I know the exercise of putting words down on paper heals.

But I know depression only too well. It chases me. It’s never far. Though it’s been a good long while. The monster has been resting.

It’s been glorious to wake without it heavy on my bones.

If I’m lucky enough to live a while in peace, I fill my mind with other things, books, music poetry, and people who tell a different story one of liberation from the destruction, heavy, crushing demolition.

When I slow down now to remember – for I told him I would write, too and put down the words of depression – it feels like letting a monster out of its cage to play a while. A dangerous game. The monster only wants to kill. But if I visit, like in the zoo, perhaps I can view it from a safe distance.

Depression is dogged, relentless. It won’t let me sleep well, and the more fitful the sleep, the longer the dark days awake. Depression hurts me in my bones. It’s a deep ache, heavy, as if I’m full of sand. Each step, each breath, each thought more difficult than the last.

Yesterday, I heard it knocking, I learned I’ll be seeing someone, a family member, who has declared me unfit, unworthy of their love (and time), and the monster came to sit on my chest. Instantly, I was immobilized by anxiety. Meanwhile, it laughed deeply and ironically and climbed on top of me.

As I drove through the Wisconsin countryside, fighting to stay awake from a long day, a great big, emorphous tonnage of a monster crept up and pounced. I feel it now, the next day. On my ribcage. I can’t see it, only I feel it make itself at home on my ribcage. I can’t fling it off, too heavy, but also like water between my fingers, shape-shifting, magical but hideous.

So I am in danger right now. I’m at risk if i keep it to myself. I’ve never achieved anything important by myself when it comes to this monster.

I can distract myself, but that’s a dangerous addiction for me. I can retell my worthiness to myself, but the monster on my chest is about my value, and I’m no match on my own.

But pride always keeps me from speaking. I’m mute against the danger, the suffering which I know will come in the days ahead if I don’t speak aloud. “I am in danger.”

As I chase something truer than her lies, I’m already tired.

I’m already afraid.

I’m already beaten.

I know one of these times the monster will win.

Do I fight?

For now, she settles in. Ignores me. That is her superpower satisfied with scaring me close to death then slowly crushing the air from my lungs. I know if I don’t fight, she’ll more than ravage. Or maim. More than lay waste.

She will consume and kill me slowly, as asphyxiation finishes the job.

Right here, in this moment, being tired already, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go sit in the sunshine. That’s a microchoice toward life.

gray hair, bare feet and salty tears

When I am old I will take long walks on a beach. I will stop dying my hair even if it ages me, as my sister says. I will be aged, I will stop trying to hide it. To be near a beach is a lifelong dream. But it may not happen. I am okay with that.

When I am old I’ll need sunshine. I will take up a camera. I’ll play more, especially with words. And in general I think I will try to have more fun.

When I am old, I will want my family around, daughters and sons and others, grandchildren. And if they aren’t near, I will travel to them frequently. All of this is obvious, I would think, when I retire.

There will be a convertible, because — it is a life long dream.

I have always thought Holly and I would end up living together when we are old women; both of our husbands being older than us.

What a hurtful thought now. It drags me down. I feel the familiar ache and dread. When I am old, there will be gray hair, bare feet, and salty tears.

some day

I promise you sis one day I will be okay. I know how much you loved your life, and I don’t want to be ungrateful. We have had many blessings, so much love. But you’re gone. Mom’s gone. I sit with that loss and emptiness frequently.

Grief says your loss is as great as your love. If that’s the case, sis, maybe I’ll never be okay. I’ve had my ups and downs in the last three years. The highs of football games, and honors classes, Spanish classes, all the things that were important to you for your kids, they are doing. Going to college, engaging in life. I hope you’re proud of them. I know I am. I’m not an instigator sis, so I’m afraid in this way I’ve let you down. Okay, Covid-19 made us hunker down for more than a year as a family, so that’s not on me. But I am just not there yet, where I can get so excited about a thing that I want to drag the family out to do it. Sure we’ve gone to the Dells for a week of fun in the sun. That really was a nice time. Lots of laughter, snacks, bad eating, water parks, staying up late. But you would have made it better. I just don’t measure up to you. I never will. I still feel sadness. I still can’t believe it. I am still outraged. And I know you always wanted us sisters to be closer. Well, you know our family. Dysfunctional was a word created for us. Don’t get your hopes up. Where is this going sis? The anniversary of your death is tomorrow. I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t stop the rage. I’m devastated by all our losses. Perhaps on this earth we will never be whole. My broken heart feels utterly worthless. I carry on, but I am crushed by the weight of losing you.

This is the week my sister was killed. It has been on my mind on and off. It is filtering into morning coffee making. As I water my plants in the morning’s first light it pushes through my brain fog. It has a loudmouthed agenda as I drive to work. My sister is dead, dead, and dead with the rhythm of my tires on the road. I play music even louder and open the windows to out scream that chant.
But my mind wants to remember three years ago and so I carry that like an albatross through my days this week. It is heavy, its claws bite into my skin, and it weakens my legs with the weight of it, my stomach lurches in remembrance of that life shattering pain.
“Paul killed Holly” the phone said. It felt like Déjà vu or I was still asleep, as if it couldn’t be true. The words floated around me but I was incapable of acknowledging that statement. Then, “Can you talk to the kids?” As one can imagine those next minutes are a blur in my mind, the most important piece being “I’m coming. It’s Auntie Melody and I’m coming.” There were tears mostly on the other end, tiny voices, and shattered souls, blown clear from their quiet safe lives. It was a strange moment of intense pain unlike any other in my life. All I could think is they are alone. I have to get there.
A lot of things broke when my sister was killed. Inside me most of all, I cannot speak for others, but also other relationships that I thought were something, became nothing. Did we really think we could survive that much pain? Grief is selfish in a way, in our anger we say horrible things; things that somehow can’t be undone, can’t be unwound, the ferocious language of rage and the bitterness of murder.
I am to blame but we couldn’t survive it. We are crushed, disabled, ruined.

Hey, How are You? My Sister is Dead.

My sister’s murder shut me down, I have had to close off the pain. It is the only way to keep going. And go we must. It is not like I don’t want to go on. Life holds plenty of goodness. But living in a world where a husband can kill a wife with a gun, well, that is unimaginable to me. I have spend many, many hours thinking about how to go on.

We must not only imagine it, we must live it.

With all the killings this week, I have to admit, I’m shook up. There are so many hard memories that I have put away in a safe box and the news takes that box and shakes it hard. Pain comes flying out at the most unexpected and inconvenient moments.

And then things that shouldn’t be hard, become hard. “I chose the number 73 on my football jersey because it is the year mom was born.”

“What a wonderful way to remember her,” I say with my heart crackling like it is on fire and my head spinning.

We are coming up on three years, in June. Three years later it is still a hard lump in my throat and I find myself avoiding conversation with everyone today because I don’t want to answer “How are you?” People just mean “hey” or “how was your night?” and I want to say “My face is burning hot right now, to be honest, because I just remembered my sister is dead and I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

But I won’t be rude. “Hey back,” I’ll reply, “Great Bucks game last night.”

A Creative Soul.

My first words are lethargic, yet I know it is time. They have slowly birthed themselves, then are bursting out of me like an explosion.

Life is so loud that I can see the thickness and mass of the noise that surrounds me. I feel the sensation of the words. My soul is tired. An atrophied muscle. Sensation and muse have been absent. My ten fingers, slowly tapping out original thoughts are creaky and rusty like a derelict bicycle dragged out in the spring after several winters of inattention and lack of use. Distraction stretches and unfurls squeezing out my imagination.

We should teach children to prepare for an adulthood jammed full of clamoring urgency. Middle age will have paraphernalia that collects in the basement, garage, closets and corners of our consciousness until there are no decent ideas or inspiration, only excuses. Interruptions and noise.

When I was young I would not have believed that I would need to learn to be disciplined in order to challenge the “to-do” of family, work, and possessions. That I would need to carefully clear a room for quiet. As I do I am hopeful that the sparks of creativity will ignite.

Right now I cannot find

spare words.

Clatter invades even with my eyes closed. When I open them again life shrieks to be cleaned up, cared for, carefully ordered from disorder.

This noise competes for our creative soul. Clarity is somewhere the echoes of a silent room.

The empty pages have waited for me to trust myself with words again.

First words spill like heart ache.

I stare hard; curious and hungry, finally ignoring the noise. And for a moment I am filled with wonder.

I squeeze my eyes shut, salty with the sadness that has been pushing and pulsing to come bursting. Fury swells. I remember that I AM MADE FOR THIS! The anger comes because I have walked on for what seems an age. Walked without words.

At some point I left the path of imagination and curiosity which lost my interest. It is a path that requires trust and a willingness to face down the noise.

The energy of rage and the sadness is important in order to walk with words.

As if jumping on the dilapidated bicycle, I press my feet down on the two pedals slowly, beleaguered in the beginning, then faster and faster as the blood in my legs begins to pulse and flow. In my mind’s eye I feel the wind, my salty stinging tears flowing down the worn grooves of my face.

And I soar.

April 8, 2017

{Ten Thousand Tears}

Ten Thousand Tears.
….When I was a child I pinched my eyes closed to reject my weakness, my torment as I was hollered at by a daddy that didn’t know better. I closed down my heart; it hurt too much to feel bad all the time. So I told my tears, you aren’t welcome here. And my heart and soul slowly turned hard as stone.”

I know there are fellow sufferers of depression, others who have family or friends who descend into this murky, sinkhole of depression’s hell and you cannot imagine how to help. I hope that whatever is redemptive in my story will one day help others find help themselves.

Excerpted from a post on LogicandImangination.com.

Logic & Imagination

My tears are welcome.

I see them splattered, dried on my glasses as I peer out the window into the wintry, cold, gray, foggy morning;

tiny specks on the panes of my eyeglasses.

I wipe hard at these dried salty witnesses.

They are a record of my sodden heart.

Ten thousand tears come raining down.

The soil of my soul is softened.
Broken apart by tears, which took forever to reappear. Though I fear

that I cannot stop them, deep down I know that they are what keeps my heart growing.

Soil ready for love, open

to the community of believers,
to grace,
to healing, forgiveness and new life,
to hope.

My tears, such an old and forgotten notion

for me.

When I was a child I pinched my eyes closed to reject my weakness, my torment as I was hollered at by a daddy that

didn’t know

better.

I closed down my heart;

it…

View original post 689 more words

My Very Little Faith

As it turns out I have A Very Little Faith. Perhaps I am a product of my human father who believed personal greatness was achieved through his tenacious hard work. Having a false humility, showing off A Very Big Faith, I saw that it was one that didn’t fundamentally change his character. Not really. This was my experience.

Still doubting his own goodness at the end of his life, my father died longing to hear “Well done.”

All of my life I have feared the thought of not really knowing. What do I believe? Feared this very thing: A Very Little Faith. Consequently my prayer life has been frantic and hapless. There’s a weariness in faith achieved by your effort. And yet, this is faith. Not knowing, striving. the balance needs to be in how much is human effort and how much is laying down, in relief, our human need.

When strife hit us it struck like a cold winter’s storm. Those of us who live where the seasons always come know that winter is expected.When adversity came and set up camp in our lives, at first I thought, “Of course.” And “I deserve this, somehow.”

Then, as time went on, I came to understand something entirely different. A realization about myself that only adversity has brought. I’ve done a lot of my spiritual life in my strength. The work of living with clinical depression and occasionally overcoming at least for seasons. The strength of mothering with depression. The control required to get sober. And stay sober for seven years. And live sober daily. All me.

Our child three years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. A great effort required me to find and work with all kinds of doctors, psychiatrists and therapists. To wrangle with the school system. All to advocate for my child’s current and future health. To hold on to hope in the middle of destruction and pain, singular sorrow, a mother’s grief, all took my personal strength and wits. There is the constant not knowing how to receive help and not allowing others in, to protect my child’s privacy, How does one receive encouragement and take help for a while to share the load? Almost impossible. Layered atop it, helping my mother in the last two years of her rapid decline, physically and mentally. All required doggedness and charity and choosing to do the right thing. Too much of me. And over time this has weakened me, isolated in unhelpful ways, the searing fear and solitude.

Prayer then is what? I have struggled to understand. My Little Faith drove me to my knees, humbled. Hurt and pressed in by all this pain. Call it suffering if you like, most people would but I’ve become uncomfortable with the comparison.

As if life isn’t just hard. For good people and bad alike, life brings good and bad things. Calling it suffering presupposes that somehow I don’t deserve hardship. And that’s not the point. It simply is what it is.

I don’t want to know how will it all turn out? That question remains unspoken, becomes the greatest test of My Very Little Faith. Erroneously, for as I said, life is hard. For good people and bad.

Will we be okay? Will she grow out of her mental illness? Will he or she ever grow up to work and live on their own? Will the business survive? Will I stay sober? Will I ever be free of depression? How will my mother’s last years disappear into the fog of her memories?

I don’t ask God to explain.

I think it, I wonder about it. But these are not prayers.

I’m afraid to pound on God’s chest which assumes an intimacy I wonder if we have ever shared.

Turns out I have A Very Little Faith.

I do have Hope. An unreasonable belief that we will get through this. Life may yet give us a reprieve. Life may not.

This is the tension of being human. Hope, I suppose, is a freedom to not be dejected by it all. To not be destroyed. Ultimately, to be content in this, too. To grow comfortable with life enough to pray something altogether different. I accept this.

Hope is believing God is good and longs to share goodness with us all. Do I know what this means, not really. Is it enough to believe that God is faithful to us? To let go of the how, the why and the when, all existential? Hope is based on the premise that God only gives what is good, which is not the same as gives all the good things that I can imagine to ask for. Peace is found in the release of open hands, willing for anything to come–the unimaginable. Even something better than my limited imagination and Very Little Faith allows.

The unseen is ahead, the future is unclear, the mist heavy and yet the person of hope finds peace which is beyond intellectual understanding.

The prayers of a Very Little Faith faith weakens my soul. Corrupts the possibility of a good future. All my attention on the present moment and not on the One who is good beyond my comprehension.

Whether we ask and we question, or we rail against God and we ask again. Or we thank or praise. It comes to this. Is it a prayer made in hope or A Very Little Faith?

For months now, even years, my spiritual life is stagnated by fear of more pain than I can handle. My Very Little Faith holding to a pattern of foggy, doubting emptiness.

Henri Nouwen says, in this moment “Spiritually you are dead. There can be life and movement only when you no longer accept things as they are now, and you look ahead toward that which is not yet.”

How much of the spiritual life is wrongly asking but not hoping for what is not yet? What we want will surely never come. For we long for peace, for comfort, for good health, for success and happiness for our children, for all the good things we feel promised somehow. Not promised by God, surely but by a fractured, ill, witless weak culture. We subconsciously buy in and are subsequently dismayed with our lives. Or are we thinking wrongly again. Yes, with certainty.

And in the end people of A Very Little Faith are compelled to open our hands to God in hope.

Simple hope. This, then, is A Very Big Faith grown in us without our doing anything at all.

Amen

P.S. I’ve been reading With Open Hands (Ava Maria Press, 1972) by Henri J. M. Nouwen which has heavily influenced the laudable parts of what I’ve thought here. The foolishness is all my own.

I’ve been honored to be a part of a collaborative book titled Disquiet Time: Rants and Reflections on the Good Book by the Skeptical, the Faithful, and a Few Scoundrels. I wrote on my ideas of prayer based on my understanding of 1 Thessalonians 5 that we are to pray without ceasing.

Award-winning religion columnist Cathleen Falsani (Chicago Sun-Times, Religion News Service, Orange County Register) and Jennifer Grant edited this labor of love, the new anthology Disquiet Time.

In their words:

At its conception, we wondered,

“What if we asked a subset of our most intelligent, inventive, and faithful (and/or scoundrelly) friends to reflect in a deep way about how the Good Book has affected them?”

We decided that we needed to give them room to be snarky, to dig deeply, and to stray away from a PG rating if needed.

And so, almost two years after our first, funny email exchange about the idea, we present a book comprised of more than forty contributors including Dale Hanson Bourke, Eugene Peterson, Margot Starbuck, Jay Emerson Johnson, Debbie Blue, Brian McLaren, Amy Julia Becker, Karen Swallow Prior, Christian Piatt, Carla Barnhill, and many other talented writers and Island of the Misfit Toys-souls who describe themselves as Christian, post-Christian, Jewish, Zen Buddhist, Anglobaptist, or “none of the above.”

That’s kind of the point of Disquiet Time.

I do hope you will look for it.

It’s not about theological or ideological labels or conformity, but, instead, about hearing stories you might not otherwise have been in the room to hear.

It’s about giving thoughtful people the opportunity to tell their faith stories, as rough or incomplete or irreverant or sincere as these stories might be.

Read, enjoy, and be a little braver when you tell your own story of faith and/or doubt.

The book launched last week and (although our publisher Hachette and Amazon are currently arm-wrestling, and Amazon isn’t making it easy to order Disquiet Time), our friends at independent booksellers, and Barnes and Noble and iTunes (among other generous and author-loving places) will cheerfully honor your order of our book.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.

Ya'll, thanks for sharing.