It’s been a few months since I’ve written a word other than for professional reasons. Bear with me then, as I feel a little rusty. I honestly opened my blog up because I’m not sure how or where else to pour this out and calm my mind enough to sleep tonight.

Even as I write this, I am still shaking. Even as I write this my hands ache right through the middle… my left more than my right, a kind of pain that I get when I hold something holy – it doesn’t hurt, but yet, I feel this intense aching pressure – as if I feel the memory of a pain.

Tonight we had Encounter at our parish. I adore those nights, the dimmed lights of the church, the soaring voices of our talented choir who lift our hearts and minds in prayer and thanksgiving the Lord, the lighting of candles and the offering up of burdens and weights and worries and woes. Tonight was also offered special prayers from our talented prayer team and confessions by our ever patient pastor.

Yet, leaving home… I was preoccupied. My boys were too tired to come with. I was still feeling buoyed up from how good today was. Beginning to end the day was just. good. I’ve just come off a long stretch of illness and finally had a day where I didn’t feel sick or tired…just energized and suffused with light from the moment I woke. I wanted to dance and skip all day long – and so I did – silly as it must be to see a middle aged woman skipping and spinning down a forested snow laden trail in the middle of the day; I felt the iridescent pleasure of the soft, cold kiss of powdery snow drifting down from the tops of the tallest trees around, glimmering like so many sparkles in the brilliance of the day. I giggled like a child at my happy, fluffy dogs as they enjoyed the marvellous sunshine, the crisp cold air, the scent of the wooded hills.

And so.

My mind was in a million places as I raced to Encounter this evening; on my boys, on my joys, on my slight twinge of ache in my stomach which is still not back to eating full and proper meals. I wasn’t focused on the Lord.

I entered and saw my parish family and felt the peace of the place. I found my way to a row on the side, feeling suddenly sombre and in the mood to be tucked away a bit out of sight and mind.

I said a simple ‘Hello Lord’ type of prayer; I pray best in a conversational style – just, a kind of “Here I am, How are you? Today was wonderful.” Our pastor called on us to reflect on our burdens and let them go; to be healed. I nodded dutifully along, my mind an earnest blank as to what was burdening me this evening. I asked for my stomach to feel better (and it did, pretty much immediately).

And so, I sat and listened. Usually at Encounter I can’t help but weep at the beauty of the music, at the pull on my heart from the Lord. I sat back tonight and rested in peace. As I reflected on previous evenings, I realized that much of my pain was healed; or I was at peace with some of the more hurtful things in my memory. They’re now so many memories, but no longer ones that make me want to rip my skin from my bones in the agony of them, they now are simply things that happened and I can let them go… as if with the puff of breath on a dandelion gone to seed.

Gradually my mind sharpened on the things that matter most to me in this world; the people whom I care deeply for, and more specifically on my children. I eventually resolved my mind around what I wished to pray for and stood and lit my candle. And here is where my evening began to change and morph.

I lit my candle and I felt all is silent. I heard the click of the lighter, and felt the warmth of the candle I had chosen carefully for its fullness of wax. I cupped my hands around it and breathed slowly inward… I recall turning and walking to the altar I knelt briefly before the Lord and turned to set my candle down on the communion rail… There I knelt with my head bowed, letting my mind skip and shimmer over my concerns for my children, landing lightly on my worries… but what I was really wishing for was a different kind of healing. I prayed to heal my family lineage, back for generations. I sat and thought of those who came before me, and prayed for them, that they might be healed so that I may be healed, so that our family histories may not pass further to my children. I prayed for my brothers’; that my oldest continue his work to lead and guide us in the hard work of uncovering our past, and my youngest accept that he needs healing and to come to the Lord.

As I prayed, I closed my eyes and through my eyelids could feel the flicker of the candle… as though it was instead a conflagration of flames just beyond me. I became aware of a presence just out of reach. There, but not there. I opened my eyes, and it was as though there were another person there, only there was not. I was so intensely aware of His presence that I stayed in my kneeling position perhaps longer than I should have…

Eventually I made my way back to my seat and resumed my reflections on my family. The tears came, but slowly this evening, nothing like the huge waterworks of previous evenings. I pictured in my minds’ eye things I rarely allow myself, which is the detailed memories of happy moments with my boys. Their sweet voices echoing through my mind; I wondered at myself for choosing to park all memories that I cherish so very much simply because they occurred alongside memories of my ex husband. I wondered to myself why it is we single women are made to feel almost guilty for still having good memories of a person we leave because of the hurt that relationship caused. Can we not still have some of the good live alongside the awful? Can we not hold that duality of mind and be resolved and eventually okay with our choices to leave, to protect ourselves, to protect our children, to move forward into a life that we pray is full of lightness and goodness?

And so I sat and reflected in the darkness tonight.

And then, unbidden, I seemed to disappear inside my own mind. I was no longer me; I was, and still aware of being present in the church, but I was also There. I was elsewhere.

I became aware of water at first, the sound of cool water being wrung from white linen cloths into an urn at my knees. I was bending over, in a darkened stone room. The sound of water being wrung out, rags being washed, over and over and over again. I saw and felt in my hands white squares of damp linen, and before me His body laid out. I was beside his shoulder, neck and ear; and it was in both slow motion but very real time, the sensation of washing His body. Over and over we, myself and three other women, bent and rinsed our rags, water spilling over the edges to the dark stone floor. I had a candle off to my right side and there was a bit of daylight reaching back into the room where we were, gently illuminating His body. I felt frustrated momentarily and so sad and so weary as I tried to wash the blood from his fragile skin and feeling the shock and horror of just how wounded he was, the skin so fragile and pale and torn. I saw Her hands, older than mine, pale with age and the fragile crepe y skin that worn hands become threaded with fine blue veins, as she also washed with infinite patience and tenderness, and I bent again and rinsed my cloth and started again. We were guided to place our soiled linen into an urn so it would not be discarded casually. I recall the the shock of trying to wash his beard near where his jaw met his ear and finding so much torn and ruined flesh there, and weeping for the sadness of His ruined self. My heart still aches with the pain. The women used oils on his body, which I could smell and feel permeating the air with a kind of heaviness. Perhaps that was just my heart feeling so hurt and wounded and lost.

And yet, through this deep disappearance into someone’s memory, I was also aware of kneeling of rising of singing the prayers in church. My present self intertwined deeply and confusingly with the self of another. Was she hearing my voice singing the prayers as I was hearing her rinsing her linens in the water and feeling her pain as she washed His most precious self?

Afterwards, I truly can’t say I remember much of the end of Adoration and Benediction, I just felt in shock. Shaken and frightened and dislocated… as though my very soul had been somehow disconnected from my person and was now trying to rejoin me in the present. I spoke with one of our parish mothers who is a guide to me, who is wise and knows our Church and Her history and the experiences of people and she has told me this is a gift. ‘What to do with a gift?’ I asked her, and she told me to write about it.

And so I have.

My hands are aching now. A kind of tingling ache. As though a much bigger hand held mine and squeezed hard right through the palm, index finger on one side and thumb pressing hard up on the other, and then let go when I cried out… and now I have this tingly ache.

I’m not worthy of gifts. I’m just me. A simple woman who loves. Who believes. Who trusts. I don’t know what to do with any of this.

I cried in my car. I was very cold the whole way home, and yet was sweating through my clothes. I came home to the very real moment of two teenage boys listening to loud bumping music, laughing as they tried to out tease the other, doing the dishes and making a mess everywhere. I gave them each the biggest hug I could, and breathed in their very boyish scent. I took a shamefully long and hot hot shower to try to warm back up; feeling coldness through my bones. I was still shaking and quaking after my shower… but here we are. Here is the story of today.

Pray for me, whoever you are that reads this. I will pray for you.

God bless you.