Images and music adorn my mind and what flourishes in the heart is a sense and
connection for the Presence of God, all in the matter of a beautifully sacred and
interminable sadness.
This is a gift. A
gift like no other.
Only such gifts are
given of God.
And, how can sadness
be a gift? Should sadness not be lamentable and, hence, to be avoided at all
costs?
Never. And this is
why: sadness connects us with the fuller experience of being human. The
emotions engaged, the mind suddenly able to experience what thoughts those
feelings generate, there is a deep catharsis that only the Presence of God in
us can procure and explain.
A series of images
are looked at: the birth of my stillborn son. Playing a favourite gospel song, It Is Well, which envelopes my mind in a
haunting paradox, I am caught up in high heaven.
Tears are able to pool
for the unrequited sadness that will now last incessantly – a connection to
loss all too effective in getting me into the heart of my healing Lord. The
banks of a lower eye lid are breached and a single large, warming tear rolls
down the cheek centimetres south.
God is with me in
the very event. I’m soothed yet touched, saddened yet satisfied, aching yet at
peace.
The experience of
bathing in the Presence of God is second to none, merely for the fact that a soul-scolding
experience is made never more meaningful. God was there. God is there. And, as
the experience is replicated by the willingness of revisiting our associations
of pain, we are healed each time, afresh.
God must want us to
connect with such a way of contemplative prayer; every thought and emotion given
to and countersigned by the Divine.
He must want us to
know his holy Presence – that Presence that is so other-than everything of the
world.
***
Let me attempt once more to write of
pure experience.
Connecting with recent historical
images, those most personal and private, with music that can only have its own
personal and private meaning, there is a unique interaction swaged in the
divine heart.
Entwined in some measure of divinely
visceral intercourse, God makes one moment turn all our perceptions around.
Feelings of connection are fused into my being.
In these moments of intentional melancholy...
The sadder I am in memorialising my
loss, the fuller God makes me feel.
***
The purer the connection we make with
our loss, the more profoundly we are met by our Lord.
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
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