This past weekend I spent 12 hours on retreat with the faculty at ISF. This was my written response for the prayer project that followed...
On retreat my soul began to open to love in a way it has not since I hit a wall several years ago. In response, I find myself retreating from these feelings in fear and uncertainty-
I highly doubt my motives for such an opening to love. I believe that for the most part when my soul begins this opening up it will take into itself the wrong thing.
What is this blooming that defies the dark
and rides the wind?
and rides the wind?
In my experience this is true: the bottomless hunger that awakens within me will absorb the easiest thing within reach that appears to be safe and fulfilling, regardless of whether my judgement is actually correct. Based upon past experience, that which my soul draws in will be detrimental to my needs and desires. It is a self-destructive process with momentum; this hunger, when it does surface, is painful and full of endless longing, and it is compelling with a force that quickly becomes all its’ own. It hurts others, and it hurts me.
One dysfunctional aspect of this opening up is a desperate belief that I can rescue another person with my goodness-
this desire to rescue another human is usually the catalyst which prompts this hunger to surface.
What is this growing in the barren places?
In the past I believed that I could rescue another, and that they in turn would love me through a realization of my special gifts and unique spiritual powers. Now, beginning on this retreat, I felt, quite against my will, this gaping blooming which began to rise up in my soul once more. It has a voice of its’ own that suggests Love might be calling me again. I had the realization during retreat that it is a hungry reaching which has driven the story I tell- always a desire to rescue is motivated by a need for love, which leads to my unhealthy attachment to the other.
And always, this attempt to rescue and attach to another has ended so poorly that the relationship was destroyed, my needs rejected, and I was left floating in the sea of unmet longing.
This time, however, this floating has met with a slowly dawning awareness based on experience that I still do need to be attached to someone. This is a spirit attachment, the kind that moves beyond the physical realm. And on retreat it struck me against my will- awareness that the reality of this need has not gone away. A general depression met with a remembrance-
my soul is still capable of deep opening to another in love if given the right circumstances.
I felt myself drawn to the people around me on this retreat who were sharing their heart and then listening to mine. I felt myself safe in the presence of authority figures who appeared to be spiritually stable and emotionally healthy. The hole in my soul which longs to share in intensive emotional bonding with another was stirred deeply. I spent the 12 hours of this retreat experiencing others share and also listen to me in ways that awoke the gnawing, gaping hunger for emotional and spiritual attachment that far exceeds the limited capacity of any human person.
In spiritual direction the following week, my director and I spoke of the progress and gift of this new awareness, but also the pain. To acknowledge these unmet needs inside of me is haunting and disturbing- to experience them hurts.
I believe that I am called to attach to God, and that no other being on earth can offer me what I truly need in this area. It is not a need of my flesh, although it manifests itself in that manner because the spiritual will always spill over into the physical.
Where is God in this place?
He dwells in the open places without filling them.
Oh how I long for my Lord to fill these empty spaces.
This blooming reveals a barrenness within.
Here my Lord abides.
Here I experience the frustration of realizing that He will not rush in to fill the gap. Rather, He seems to be sitting with me in it, experiencing it with me rather than fixing it.
I have felt Him draw near to me in my unhealthy responses without doing a single thing to alter them.
I find this confusing and uncomfortable. My Lord seems to desire a dwelling within me in the broken and empty recesses of my unhealthy soul, but He seems to have no intention to begin repairing them at this time. I want Him to rush in and fill the hungry place that has awoken, or I want it to go dormant again. But I realize that I cannot force the hand of my Lord to act, and neither can I be fully human if I suppress my unmet needs. On retreat my soul opened up and howled like a lone wolf in a barren wilderness, panting beneath the moon in hurried search of a drink to slake her deep and desperate thirst.
This blooming has created a vaccume, a space between, full of need.
My God, my spirit is hungry and my soul is weak.
My desires are decrepit, weighed down by the pride of the flesh.
Sin concatenates around my human needs.
This is the opening of my soul upon retreat.
May the will of my Lord be done in me.
Amen.
