Claiming God

Rainer Maria Rilke’s words come to me these days as I find more truth behind this broken relationship that as long made it’s stay on my heart this year.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is the live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I feel like I am finally starting to live my way into an answer. An answer for why I could not stay with Fady. I have spent the last six months still bearing the painful “why,” unable to really understand. The break-up was on his terms and his terms only. But it is finally becoming my terms and that feels so good and the heaviness lightens significantly.
“God,” he, an atheist, said. “It is about God.” As a Unitarian Universalist and as someone who believes in the reason-defying qualities of love, I believed with all of my heart that we would work through this- Our love was stronger than this label- related divide.
And now, I realize, he was right. Ok, so God did divide us. But it’s not a God held by clouds holding a wand and interacting from afar. It’s not even a God such as that I believe in- a higher power that moves in and among all sentient beings, opening us up, calling us closer to life. It’s the God that is community. God as our pull out of our isolated existence towards a greater cause of societal transformation. God is not a cerebral choice to “maybe” participate in community… mmm… tomorrow? It is a deep human need for community. For in order to know ourselves, we must seek the Other. It is a deep feeling that we need each other in order to grow. This is the center of the God I believe in.
It doesn’t concern me whether one finds their power in something beyond or within humanity. Theist or humanist can worship together when there is mutual desire to grow and deepen as spiritual and response-able beings in this hurting world. It concerns me that one opens oneself to change, to transformation, through relationship and commitment.

By opening ourselves to change, we create change. There is no other way. At last, this loss is on my terms. And with it, I find a renewed sense of self, calling, and devotion to the transformational power of God/community.

My Sacred Sad

My heart is full. Full of sorrow and anger and longing and even peace. I long to connect with my longing. And lately it is sorrow that has brought me closer to the earth, closer to my heart. It is sorrow that most resonates with me and I kneel down with my hands on my face, tears washing away these barriers I have made. Barriers to feeling. To life. To love. My sorrow is not a barrier to love. It is a way to love. Many times I judge my seamlessly endless grief over a lost relationship. “Still?” I ask. “Your still not over him?”
Yet, what does this judgmental question do that is good? Nothing! It only makes me more foreign to myself. Something not right, unacceptable, wrong. Broken hearts take their own sweet time to heal. As a friend recently told me, “You never stop loving someone.”
No matter how badly they might have hurt you, and no matter how resentful in the day, when the night comes, it is that unmet love that lingers.
I thank God for my sadness. Tears pull me closer to the earth, the home of my soul, the Ground of all Being. And I find peace.

Deep Peace

Last night I felt a tiny change. Something like thorough joy nestled inside my body. Not the temporary level of fleeting emotions- the surge of happiness or the crush of inadequacy. But this feeling was more thorough, like grainy mud instead of feathers. What happened? Well, breath. There is a wonderful little yoga studio really close to my house run by one woman. It is very community-oriented, much like I experienced at the aikido dojo in Oakland. If you attend regularly, you begin to get to know other regularly attending folks and conversation in the front room lingers up to a half hour or longer after class ends. Last night I was able to breathe deeply with three other women, for a couple hours! It filled me with life, a reminder of who I am, in relationship with all beings. This morning it was like I woke up with someone else by my side. Of course, it was just my cat, who is always there. But there was an extra company, one that I brought, in my room. In my bed. In my daily tasks and pages upon pages of reading. It is good to have a friend... I am cherishing these days of returning to who I am/ to God.

Ntosake Shange's words from "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" come to mind:
"I found God in myself and i loved her, i loved her fiercely."