The prompt I was
writing to here was to write a letter to someone I trusted as a child. Though I
no longer qualify as a Believer, God came to mind. It is a
stream-of-consciousness thing which doesn’t attempt huge leaps of logic, so let
it simply waft past you rather than trying too hard to comprehend. That is how
I wrote it.
 |
| Jesus Praying on the Mount of Olives (Artist Uncredited) |
Dear God,
I am writing to you, shade of a being I once imagined,
shaped by family, friends, and neighbours, details filled in, sometimes false,
sometimes fearsome, sometimes heartbreakiingly dear, by the representatives of
your faith, female and male, yet still somehow personal to me, unlike any other
person’s God, unlike any other caricature of divinity.
I write as a shade myself. I knew, and was, and am formed by
that little girl and her haphazardly peopled world, but I no longer have a
straight line to her. Her memories are tissue thin and blurry where they still
exist. Her decisions are sometimes clear, sometimes lost. Her anger,
represented now in dreams as mentally disturbed gunmen and inexorably
approaching zombies, is the last strong vestige of whatever blossomed in her
breast, along with its near companion, dear companion: conscience, compassion,
love.
Ow. My arm hurts as much as my head after writing that so
quickly. I’m tired, sore, tempted to go to sleep. What did I even want to say
to you?
I remember when we talked a lot. Sundays on the kneeler,
certainly, after confession and during penitential prayers, and before
confessing, wondering with you what I might have done that I should list, or
lying angry in my room when parental punishment struck me as too unfair.
I hear adults laugh at things they felt or wrote when they
were young, but I can’t mock our childish agonies, or the indecipherable world
that gave rise to them.
I was told that you, God, could do something with my pain,
or maybe I only thought that was what grownups had said. Maybe they only meant
that God brings and God takes away and I should pray to him and come to terms
with that. An explanation might have helped. Or maybe I got one and rejected
it. It always seemed there was much less giving than taking away.
I do see things differently now. I have dabbled with the
disciplines of gratitude and forgiveness, self-expression and self-care, and
self-restraint. I am a calm and happy person most of the time.
But the gunman is still in the church, the zombie in the
library, and the child who wished that she would die, if not be loved, if not
protected, if not helped up to a higher stair, she huddles in there still,
heart pounding, strategizing with her dream companions how best to struggle
through the challenge of the night.
And the young adult who pushed through the prairie blizzard
shouting into your naked, uninterested ear—she remains, better trained, with
more understanding, no longer misled into thinking there will be some sweet and
final rescue.
They are there and they are my charges now, and I think I’ve
done a better job with them than you did.
That does sound harsh, and my tenderness for you is now
revealed. I know you didn’t stand a chance. Though there were genuine , kind,
and honest folk, even gods need steadfast, clear-thinking allies in their work,
and little succeeds against a whirlwind of misunderstanding and despair.
Care for them, my people. Let the dew of compassion, the sun-drops
of faith in themselves and their safety permeate the armour, the veils, the
corroded flesh, whatever mars their moments on this earth. And help me to
continue letting go, freeing the leash I have tied around myself, freeing my love
for every one I see.
Sweet blessings on your work.
Love,
Casey
Thanks as always to the wonderful women at the Callanish Society for our healing writing sessions.
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