Friday, February 6, 2015

The Gift of Enjoying a Serenely Intentional Sadness


Images and music adorn my mind and what flourishes in the heart is a sense and connection for the Presence of God, all in the matter of a beautifully sacred and interminable sadness.
This is a gift. A gift like no other.
Only such gifts are given of God.
And, how can sadness be a gift? Should sadness not be lamentable and, hence, to be avoided at all costs?
Never. And this is why: sadness connects us with the fuller experience of being human. The emotions engaged, the mind suddenly able to experience what thoughts those feelings generate, there is a deep catharsis that only the Presence of God in us can procure and explain.
A series of images are looked at: the birth of my stillborn son. Playing a favourite gospel song, It Is Well, which envelopes my mind in a haunting paradox, I am caught up in high heaven.
Tears are able to pool for the unrequited sadness that will now last incessantly – a connection to loss all too effective in getting me into the heart of my healing Lord. The banks of a lower eye lid are breached and a single large, warming tear rolls down the cheek centimetres south.
God is with me in the very event. I’m soothed yet touched, saddened yet satisfied, aching yet at peace.
The experience of bathing in the Presence of God is second to none, merely for the fact that a soul-scolding experience is made never more meaningful. God was there. God is there. And, as the experience is replicated by the willingness of revisiting our associations of pain, we are healed each time, afresh.
God must want us to connect with such a way of contemplative prayer; every thought and emotion given to and countersigned by the Divine.
He must want us to know his holy Presence – that Presence that is so other-than everything of the world.
***
Let me attempt once more to write of pure experience.
Connecting with recent historical images, those most personal and private, with music that can only have its own personal and private meaning, there is a unique interaction swaged in the divine heart.
Entwined in some measure of divinely visceral intercourse, God makes one moment turn all our perceptions around. Feelings of connection are fused into my being.
In these moments of intentional melancholy...
The sadder I am in memorialising my loss, the fuller God makes me feel.
***
The purer the connection we make with our loss, the more profoundly we are met by our Lord.
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.

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