Speed-Writing to God

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.

Picking Up Stitches

Marie Louise

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray.

~Rumi~

In the last five days I have completed five rows of knitting, except for the second row, which my friend Joani finished off when my hand cramped up.

This is a great and unexpected event. Ever since I tried to get my grandma to teach me and she laughed my awkward fingers off the wool—Maybe you should try crochet, she said. It’s easier—I have cast not a single stitch, nor considered that I ever could. I have recently been gearing up to learn to sew a bit, since the simple clothes I like are not accessible easily, but knit? It never crossed my mind.

However, you will see the pleasure that I take in knitted wristlets, of which I have a dozen pairs or more. Wood, wool, leaf and feather, branchlet, sundog, fire. I love the taste and texture of the living world and every time I pass the wool shop—always closed—I stop and linger at the glass, taking in the skeins and skeins of every coloured yarn, the toques and neckpieces, the birchwood needles, the baskets... A feast for eyes and heart.

A friend asked if anyone knew how to make the cables stand out more clearly in his sweaters. I stopped by the store—open for a change—and asked.

And chatted and sat. Was challenged, So are you going to learn to knit now?

This is how I see it.

No. I am not going to learn to knit. I don’t want another craft to labour over, study, perfect. I want a restful pastime. Something to do with my hands besides making something else to eat.

The young saleswoman swore she found knitting more relaxing than yoga, which she teaches. Well, I doubt I would. And with hands full of cramps I can’t expect to do a lot. But a single line? That’s kind of pleasant. Touching the wool, the smooth wood of the needles, admiring the colours of each. Making that simple stitch I saw made so many times so many years ago.

Maybe, after a few more weeks or months, I’ll have enough of my weird uneven rows to stitch the ends together and slide it on my wrist.

Oh, no! I just realized I’d have one wrist left to go. Oh, well. There’s always next year.

“...drawn silently by the strange pull of what you really love...” I love you, Gramma. And I do understand.

My grandma was named Marie Louise. Her mother was from France, her father was from Belgium, and she grew up in southern Saskatchewan. In Forget, in Saint Hubert. At four she went to live with the sisters, she and her sister Julienne. She stayed with them for more than twenty years, visiting her family on some vacations as they moved about trying to strike a living from the land.

She became a mother one day, marrying a man who came in on a threshing team. But how do you mother when you have never seen it done?

So laugh at my unschooled ways. My hurt is your hurt, too. But I love you still and like you eventually did, in the glamour of senility, I have let go of my anger at such acts of insensitivity.

Remember when you looked up at the flowers on the wallpaper and said how beautiful they were? When you heard children play outside and watched with vague curiosity? Remember me sitting next to you? Those were lovely days. Sweet moments and sad ones as you gradually went away. I had those. Who cares if I never learned to knit?

Theresia & Marie Louise, Priest's House, Forget, Saskatchewan