Good morning…
Author Paula D’Arcy knows the upending sensation of sudden loss. Before diving into Paula’s book Sacred Threshold: Crossing the Inner Barrier to Deeper Love, I read aloud to our class a few pages from her first book, Gift of the Red Bird, written in 1996. Listen to the healing heart of the wise woman who guides us towards God’s light amid life’s deepest darkness.
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Chapter Two, page 29-30
In January of 1973 I married Roy D’Arcy. Ten months later we celebrated the birth of our daughter, Sarah. My life had never seemed so rich, fairly bursting with promise. Sarah filled every waking (and several nonwaking) hours, but the task of mothering was one I’d chosen and relished. When Roy wasn’t at home spending time with Sarah and/or me, he was teaching English classes at a nearby community college or busy digging up our backyard in order to create a vegetable garden productive enough to feed the Western hemisphere. The garden was his place of contemplation and joy.
Our budget was limited and our life simple. But even so, friends made our lives full, and Roy’s unquenchable thirst for books and knowledge occupied many hours. When nights were long or our hearts troubled, he read poetry out loud. We often fell asleep with the words of great masters ringing in our rooms and comforting our spirits. In June 1975 we learned that I was again pregnant. I felt proudly on the brink of every dream. In August of that year we traveled from our Connecticut home to Massachusetts to share the excitement in person with my parents. I was looking ahead with assurance, never guessing that this trip could end with senseless tragedy.
But as we returned home to Connecticut on August 18, our car was struck by a drunken motorist who careened across a divided interstate highway where the required metal safety barrier had been “overlooked” and never installed. The driver’s speed was ninety-seven miles per hour. Sarah died of head injuries on August 20, and Roy died three days later from a ruptured spleen. I was twenty-seven years old, three months pregnant, miraculously alive, and shattered beyond any sense. I wished I too had died, and couldn’t imagine ever feeling differently. The long journey of grief would consume the agonizing years which followed. I gave birth to my second daughter, Beth, on March 20, 1976. For her sake I fought my way back to sanity, filled with questions, fears, and disillusionment about life. The greatest question: How could a loving God let this happen?
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December 1975, page 33 (four months into her process of grief)
In this abyss I am learning what it means to really pray. To pray as if your very life depends upon it. Mine does. I guess my life has always depended on something outside myself. But in this abyss, I know it. I pray as if finding the truth about life is the difference between sanity and senselessness. For me, it is. My anger is spent now, my eyes and throat changed by tears. I have kicked and screamed at my enormous sense of betrayal by everything I believed in. Marriage. Family. Love. Plans. Goodness. Being a good person doesn’t mean life won’t wound you. None of the protections I believed in were real. And now I am left either resenting my life because I didn’t get the things I wanted, or learning to love life on its own terms. Really, learning to accept God on his own terms. It is very, very quiet inside of me. My first honest prayer is a whisper. “God, if you are really out there, help me. Let me find you.”
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January 1976, page 34 (five months into her process of grief)
I scream, Why? For months I have screamed, Why? Why did this happen to me? Wasn’t I good enough? Am I being punished? Could you have controlled this, God, but didn’t? Why? Do you hate me? I only stop asking why when I sleep.
Then I feel a Presence next to me, down here in the abyss. I don’t know how I know that. I just know. Something is different. I am not alone. It’s as if someone is saying to me, LOOK. USE YOUR EYES. SEE. And out of my depths I begin to look into people’s eyes for the first time in my life, and I’m startled by what I see. So many people are unhappy. Many are bitter. Most people look without seeing. That has been me. I am looking in a mirror. But some eyes are different. They are filled with a certain light, and it draws me like a laser. I want it. Sliced open, unable to be fooled, I see that the light is good. How did they get it? I need to know.
I begin to see something else. The people with the bitter, unseeing eyes avoid my pain. They are uncomfortable with it…with me. They want me to be myself again and to stop reminding them that life is treacherous. But people with the light-filled eyes are not frightened by my grief. Some admit that they don’t understand it. But none of them can be dissuaded from their belief that God is with me in it. They say he has never left me. Would not. In fact, he is in the abyss with me, waiting. And he will stay with me, as long as it takes. Love and unconditional acceptance surround my pit. They are real. There is something deeper than the abyss.
I eat those words like my first meal after a long fast. They would be merely words, except for the light. I think about it. A God who stays with me. Not one far away. Not someone only the clergy can reach. Not someone confided to Bibles and prayerbooks and sanctuaries. A God so personal and loving that he is in this pit with me. A God who is close and real. Yet he asks so much. He asks me to look at wrecked cars and stolen lives…to stare straight ahead at only darkness and believe in light. He asks me to change and to see things differently. But maybe it’s not so difficult in my circumstances. I have tried everything else. Nothing else I know can pierce the darkness and turn it back. Not perfection. Or hard work. Not control. Not even the best values. If any of those things had the power to endure, I would have seen it. I would know. But they were all moveable. So here I am in the dark, in the face of being refused the people and the life I wanted the most. My future is utterly unknown. There is nothing to guide me but a light. There is nothing to assure me but faith. And yet, I am about to take the first step. I am suspending all I have been taught in order to follow my own path. Perhaps I will reach some of the same conclusions with which I was raised. But this will be different. They will no longer be premises. I will own them. They are right to call it a leap. It is.
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February 1976, page 36 (six months into her process of grief)
I slowly begin to understand that it is up to me to choose how I will respond to this pain. I can let it eat me, and grow my own bitter eyes. Or I can let go of my assumptions about how life should be, and search for the beauty in what life is. It’s like bread loaves from crumbs. The pieces of my life transformed into something beautiful. Tears into joy. Mourning into dancing. It is a choice. I can barely believe that God is with me in this pit for as long as it takes. Why? Why me? Days ago I was demanding to know Why me, why am I so cursed? Now I am asking, Why am I so blessed? I also have this growing conviction that when God first came to me in response to my prayer he dimmed himself. I know he is blinding white light. But I could never have withstood the brightness. Somehow that gesture moves me more than a thousand miracles.
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Today, January 25th, 2022, Paula is forty-six years and five months into her process of grief. This morning I mysteriously happen upon a one minute video Paula created last April with her friend Khris Ford, another seasoned woman of faith. What a vivid description of the upending experience of grief. Please LOOK. USE YOUR EYES. SEE God’s unmovable presence.
You keep a record of my tossing and turning. Keep my tears in your bottle. Aren’t they all listed in your book? (Psalm 56:8, EHV).
…Sue…
