It's been a year of tremendous healing, and a general restoration of my self. It was a tough time when I was last writing here regularly, and it was a tough time when I wasn't. I'm in a much better place, now, and it's only now that I've been able to begin to revisit the part of myself which used to move me to write here.
I visited Frederick Street meeting in Belfast today, and it was good. I've been to less than five meetings on either side of the ocean in the last five years. I actually attempted to go last week, but got lost, and ended up finding myself in Saint Anne's cathedral, lifting up my soul on the sung service of the Church of Ireland, where the police posted by the door stood in dark contrast to the light and joy of the young choir's voices singing Mozart. I was moved by the music, and moved by the priest's generous sermon on mean little Zacchaeus in the tree and his change of heart. I still felt more outside of the experience than inside of it, but bid my fretful (a)theology be quiet and just sat with the experience. I escaped before tea, but felt the warmth and love of that little congregation in the huge church, and was glad my misadventures had brought me there.
This week, armed with better information, I arrived at Meeting just in time. I sat down in the very warm room, made a series of decisions about the several sweaters I was wearing, and tried to settle.
There were a lot of reasons why I had avoided meeting for the last five years. The most pressing was the continuing disintegration of my "notions" of God. I kept erasing and re-drawing the line for years, desperate to find some firm sense of who or what I was speaking of or to, some line of experience I could hold fast to, but I could never lay my hands on something solid and sure. I felt "cut to the heart" again, and again, like Margaret Fell.
"Then what had any to do with the scriptures but as thy came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a Child of Light, and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is inwardly from God, etc?"
This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart, and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat me down in my pew again and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, "We are all thieves, we are all thieves..."
but it didn't stop there. I couldn't trust my experience. I could not say at all that anything came inwardly from God, because it seemed to me that I couldn't truthfully say I was ever sure that what I experienced was not "simply" the agitation of my own emotions, the ignition of inherited ideas and forms, and again and again I found myself thrown against a possibility I didn't want to consider. It was desperately painful, another wound in a very wounded time of my life.
So I withdrew entirely. I avoided the question, I diverted what little "spiritual" attention I still possessed into a nominal humanism and tried to live my life by the "light" of what seemed the most loving and right thing to do at the time. I was still struggling with the aftershocks of a personally devastating breakdown, but I threw myself into a new country, a new relationship, and new pursuits.
And there was a lot of good there. I recovered some of my creative power, I made wonderful friendships, and I grew up in many ways. I entered therapy and did a lot of deep work.
But my world was bound by the simple existence of the day to day. My eyes and heart were focused on the business of keeping my mind together and keeping my relationship together. I avoided conversations or even thoughts about "spiritual" things. I resigned my role in any greater "plan" and even my ability to make any real difference in the world beyond my small immediate sphere. Many times, I even sincerely doubted my power there.
I'll skip over the gulf of pain and despair and hope and betrayal and my own many, many, many mistakes and say I finally washed ashore and found my mind and heart free for the first time in a long time, and I began to carefully feel my way back, and like I said, I began looking for some precious things I left behind. Most of them were questions. I've spent the last ten months examining them gently.
I still don't have any answers, and there's still no line I can draw, or hold. To put it plainly, I still don't have a God I can define, let alone address, or trust, or expect to speak in, or to, or through me.
What I do have, though, is some peace with that. And a strong conviction that I do need a community, and a space where I can raise my mind and heart to things beyond myself.
So I sat in meeting and waited. Listened to the messages. Sweated in my thermal shirt. Tried to clear my mind. Someone spoke of forgiveness, and I thought of repentance, of turning back. I thought of lifting up my heart, of how there is almost a physical (metaphysical?) sensation to that. So I did, I lifted up my heart, even without a God to lift it to. I lifted it out into the meeting, and out into the nothing, and everything. And I felt it, there, again, for the first time in a long time. That electric thump, half painful, in the centre of my chest, and the sting of tears at the back of my eyes. That sense of connection, that sense of height, of clarity and warmth, of light, of love. It is unmistakable and good and knowable, and it informs and changes your life. Wherever it comes from, a "divine" source, a mess of associations and expectations in my mind, or mere neurology, I don't care any more. It is good, it is a source of power, I have missed it dreadfully, and it is necessary to my life. I'm just going to follow it, and I am not going to worry about its origin anymore.
I am laying down that concern, and I am simply going to continue to lift up my heart, moment by moment. Lift it up, with courage, a dozen times in a day of depression. Lift it up in the face of the world's pain and my own confusion. Lift it up, consciously, continuously, with conviction and with discipline. I'm going to read more Whitman.
And I'm going to go to meeting.
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