Heavy Laden Refreshed

Another round of recovery and refreshment took place.

In a move that I knew was right, and yet thought, "Am I really gonna do this??", I called Mtr. Phoebe McFarlin and asked her to hear my confession. I needed to clear out whatever it was that was standing between me and Charlotte.

Understand that I have been praying and feeling for Charlotte as she approaches her surgery on Friday. But, as I've noted in previous entries, this news of her cancer came coupled with news of her lesbian relationship. As I described it to Mtr. Phoebe, I've felt that I am most like the character Jonah in the Bible. And just like Jonah, instead of rejoicing at the news that my friend has a partner, I wanted to stamp my feet and pout and sit under a bush and grumble that "I knew it all along! Why didn't you come out sooner?!" Of course, in the Jonah story, God let's Jonah have his temper tantrum and then takes away his shade bush, which only makes Jonah angrier. And God lectures him on "Who's bush was that any way? Did you grow it? Then is Nineveh not mine to do with them what is just in my mind... which isn't your mind?"

In many respects, I feel that God was doing much the same with me. Because there was a part of me that was longing for justice on MY terms. But that longing had become a burden.

As I mentioned, when I read in Charlotte's entry about her coming to realize that she was now sharing more with people than she had ever done before... it was the "just" answer I had wanted. At sixteen, I had revealed a deeply-personal and extremely vulnerable part of who I was. I'd shown her the seedling of my sexuality via a coming out statement in a paper, and it was rejected as a weed that needed to be uprooted.

Back to confession. I'm quite used to the corporate confession in church on Sunday. For a time in my dark teenage years, it was the only prayer I would say during the service. This concept, then, of meeting one-on-one with a priest was something I was aware of, but failed to see a need for it. Until now.

Thank God there were no closets with sliding doors! Instead, we sat in the chapel, Corpus Christi looming. And I should've known I was in for it when Mtr. Phoebe started: Hear the Word of God to all who truly turn to him.... "Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you."

I'm surprised I didn't fall to the ground. All this week, I have been getting smacked about, figuratively, by words that I associate so closely to the years when Charlotte (who went by her middle name Dudley at the time) was my advisor. That passage from Matthew has been written in permanent magic marker and is forever in my brain from my youth. In my EfM class, our Year Four student had just read a chapter on Paul Tillich, a theologian I had read in Charlotte's Religion E course that I was taking during that sophomore year. I remember that she had remarked on my quarterly report card that I had written the best paper in my class, a critical analysis of the play "Equus" through the lens of Tillich and one other theologian. So, a lot of things have been popping up to coincide with this moment of letting my teenager have a tantrum.

OK, controlled tantrum. This is confession in a chapel, and not Gestalt in a therapist's office.

There comes a moment in the confessional time when it goes "free-form". In other words, I say, "Especially, I confess to you and to the Church.... " and then start confessing. This being me, I was searching to find what words would accurately describe what I was confessing. And so I got questions, including the important one about how was my teenage-self feeling after having read Charlotte's self-realization that she had been extremely reserved and was now opening up in ways she had never done before. To get a clear read on that feeling, I closed my eyes. And I had a visualization of the moment when I was on the steps of Mosley Chapel in Byfield, and read the words at the end of my paper. I remembered the purple ink, the bend of her scripted handwriting, the words themselves. And as I saw this scene again, an amazing thing happened. The handwriting on the page began to disappear, to fade away. Those words that had burned my soul like acid at sixteen were gone. The bottom of the paper was blank with the new knowledge, or reminder, that she had repented those words... and now was repenting of them more by acknowledging how locked in a box she'd been to expressing her feelings. Without those words on the paper, my sixteen year old was not hurting.

This moment was incredible. The power of God to reach back in time and erase the very thing that had been the burden was so real to me, and freeing. I am in awe of this. With this burden released came the sorrow and ache for Charlotte. Not just for the cancer, but for what she must have feared in herself and an institution that, until recently, encouraged her to remain apart from her true self.

Some may argue that what happened here had nothing to do with God. That what I did was within me, and was akin to the Gestalt work I've done and even a little like the sensorimotor education I do with clients some times. But God was a part of it because I believe that God exists in the spaces in-between the tangible and intangible. God is not absent in a Gestalt session or during bodywork because God is infused in the body!

How can I not praise God from whom all blessings flow?
How can I not acknowledge that God did something miraculous and unexpected to free my soul?
How can I not say, "Thanks be to God!"?
God is not only good. God is great!