If they were doling out awards for: Most Productive During Quarantine, or Holy Roller of the Year or Most Faith Person of Pandemic 2020, undoubtedly, my name would not be one of the reckoning.
However…
If there were awards for: Fell into Past Sins, Binged out of Her Mind and Comfort Eating Marathons, Longest Wallow in Self Pity and Doubt this side of 2020 – I probably would reap them all.
But I digress.
I have been lamenting and bemoaning my lack of Words since The Events of 2017 (they shall not be named), but I found some words to throw at you, with a surprising urgency (for whoever you are) that I turned on my laptop and decided to get them out.
I’ve been waiting for the heavens to break open and a choir of angels to descend with trumpet blasts, when someone talks about uncertainty this year – because I get to say a very very satisfying ‘I told you so’ and congratulate myself on this non-achievement that brings me exactly 3 seconds of joy.
It’s satisfying because I have had the perverse pleasure of predicting or sensing that this year would be filled a lot of goddamnery (pardon ze french).
It’s satisfying for only 3 seconds because that foreknowledge I once had – those forewarnings, premonitions, senses, whatever you want to call it – are no longer there. They’re gone. There’s nothing for me to cling on to. Utter darkness, no road signs -that’s what I am working with. And I’m not working at all. In fact, I have been utterly terrified that I cannot predict bad things. For the first time in the recent past, I have NO CLUE about what is happening, and what my future looks like. My back-up plans are shrouded in darkness, my mind is unable and unwilling to construct a life raft (or as I call it a List) to help me make sense of the darkness. So here I am, alone, adrift, God knows where.
Now I hear you ask me – But R, isn’t life always uncertain? Didn’t you live in a time where you didn’t really know all things and they turned out OK?
And you are right! Whoever you are, reading this. They did, and I did.
But you know, this time it’s different. This time, there’s a lot more at stake – my big ole, battered, bleeding heart (see what I did there?)
Did you jump to conclusions? Done?
Ok, now let me remind you, that my word of the year is Trust – and what the Lord is asking me to do, is to give up my last (I think) bastion of control – the need to know things/ the need to be prepared – especially for the bad stuff, but also for the good stuff. I HATE, LOATHE, DETEST, ABHOR Surprises (even more than I dislike Enrique’s music). I like to know what’s coming up – I read blurbs of suspiciously sad books, I read spoilers of suspiciously sad movies… I like to know about surprise parties for myself beforehand (although it makes little difference because I can’t process those emotions well in either case) and so far, the Lord has been pretty obliging. In the last 3 years, I’ve seen all the bad things coming and I’ve been prepared for them.
This year, the YEAR OF UNCERTAINTY – the Lord decides to take even this foreknowledge away from me – and ‘Trust’ Him.
I will not lie. It’s not easy. It’s like you’re falling of a cliff and trying to grasp at straw and you don’t know how long it will take before you reach rock bottom.
What does this mean for us, though – you and me?
So Father Mike in his homily at this Sunday’s mass, said some pretty unsettling things – to dethrone the false gods I’ve been accumulating… some things I knew about:
- Our normal state is not certainty – it’s uncertainty. We will never know everything and in some cases anything.
Some things that rang true and I hated:
Hope is not outcome based, because Hope is not a what, it’s a who. (That who is Jesus). The source of our Hope.
Dadgummit!
All the happy endings I was writing for myself, trying to be the architect of my own happiness, trying to control my own narrative, all the things I was filling my happy endings with, I could hear them coming down with a crash.
You grow protective of your castles in the air. They’re like imaginary friends for adults. I was reluctant to let them go. I’ll admit.
It’s going to be a long, tough spring cleaning – removing the ‘whats’ in my life and replacing them with ‘who’.
It’s going to be an terrifying and exhilarating ride, I guess. I am not going to like it one bit. And you dear friend are also in the same terrifying little boat.
I will say this though, the Lord’s teaching methods go from practical to theory. This lesson, He’s tried to teach me in all shapes and forms. The whole episode of my dad being massively and seriously ill with ‘Ischemic Stroke caused by Atrial Fibrillation’ and me not sensing the bad things beforehand but me handling it ok (of course all the emotions will come out now, now that things are stable).
Ok I lied.
It was so stress-free in between, I felt like I was on a holiday :P. Point is, I didn’t see the bad things coming, but handled it okay. That was the Practicals bit of the lesson.
Then the theory – the aforementioned homily by Fr. Mike – cementing the great truths that ‘We don’t need to know what the future holds, because we know him who is holding our future’ and ‘He who has been faithful in the past, will be faithful in the present and future’. and ‘His faithfulness is not in the fact that you will never have problems or suffering – it’s in the fact that in the suffering and problems, he will always be there with you.’ not as comforting as Joel Osteen – but I’m warming up to it.
The cement as it is, is still wet. It will take some time for these truths to root themselves in my heart.
What does the rest of 2020 then mean, if there is all this exhortation to Trust God? Does it mean more bad things will follow?
Well, that’s on a need to know basis, and right now apparently, I don’t need to know.
The Jabberroxy 