The Invisible Man

As I prayed this morning, I asked the question, “What are we working on, Father?  Where are You trying to lead me.?”  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ego and my attachments and the need to let both of them go.  But then I heard a whisper.  

“Enter into the pain.”  

It may have been God or maybe it was just my subconscious.  Either way it was a reminder of what Richard Rohr has said and written: “That which you do not transform you will transmit.”  It is still raw to think of Griffin’s passing, to imagine him struggling for breath alone amidst a dozen or more people.  He died in some fashion the way he lived when he was outside the environs of his family: invisible and alone.

How does one transform that reality into something good?  Where is the relief from that painful memory?  Where was God in that moment in time?

“I AM WHO I AM,” Yahweh told Moses.  Is it mine to ask where God was when Griffin struggled to draw his last breath?  Was I there when God breathed into Adam his first breath?  These questions are in so many ways just a way out of dealing with the pain of this loss.  Grief is so much more manageable in the head than in the heart.

The purpose of grief isn’t to manage it.  It is to walk with it, into it and maybe finally through it.  It is primarily a journey of the heart.  To willingly allow one’s heart to be broken a thousand times over only to be healed a thousand times more.  Grief is the place where we reconcile the unholiness of our loss with the holiness of Griffin’s gain.  Reconcile all the ways we failed him with all the ways we were uniquely equipped to be his parents.  Reconcile the bright, shining light Griffin could be with the dark, stormy interior life that was his prison.  Reconcile a world that was at once full of the most generous human beings that surrounded and celebrated Griffin with the cold world he entered when he left our home, a world where he was invisible enough to die choking in the corner of a room full of people.

This is my pain that needs transforming, lest I continue to transmit it.  

Pray for me.