Barefoot & Preaching is a syndicated monthly column in The Catholic Register.
Suicide: On Crushing Weight and Never-Ending Love
I was trying to decide if I wanted ice cream when I got a text from my sister: “Call mom or I when you can.” It was one of those moments where time stops. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach knows that my world will never be the same. Someone I love lost their life to suicide. I had the honour of presiding at the Celebration of Life. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. And we need to talk more about this crushing weight – and a never-ending love.
In 2012, I found myself lying on the floor of my office, underneath my desk. I called my husband first to tell him that I was not okay and that my next call would be to the mental health crisis line. I spent two hours on the phone, telling the beautiful soul on the other end of the line how I had this amazing life that I could not live because the weight of the depression was crushing me.
It was as though a massive storm cloud had moved into my head and heart. The sun would be shining on a beautiful day, and the world looked black and white. My beautiful kids would be laughing and it sounded like I was hearing it muffled from three rooms away. People loved me and it felt like there was a brick wall between my heart and theirs. I could make myself get up and go to work and do the ordinary things my life required, but it took a hundred times the effort that it should. And I was lucky – because somehow, I managed to recognize that something was very wrong. Mental illness often robs us of the ability to even see how dark the world has become.
A tumor gradually impacts the organs around it, causing pain or other symptoms. Diabetes disrupts our energy levels and washroom trips. Colds and flus give us fevers and coughs. We learn to recognize all these symptoms and to seek medical help when it is needed. Some of us resist going to the doctor more than others. But as a society, we do not blame people for these kinds of illnesses.
Mental illness is harder to recognize, diagnose, and treat. But it is no less challenging that physical illness to live with and fight. And just like life-threatening physical diseases, suicidal ideation is a life -threatening illness that no one wants. Many fight silently for years. Treatments are available, and they are not always effective. The crushing weight, day after day and year after year, sometimes does too much damage; in too many heart-shattering endings, this external threat overpowers the human longing to live.
There is so much to say about this, and these are the two aching out of my chest today.
First, the God of my understanding was holding me up when I called mental health from underneath my office desk and again when I called my sister to get the terrible news. That God is a Love bigger than human pain or suffering.
More deeply than I have ever known anything in my life, that God has poured never-ending unconditional love over me and the whole world for every moment of my existence. That God cried with me for the one I love. I am certain that the Creator and Author of Never-Ending Love is bigger than suicide. All who are weary and burdened have been promised rest, and I will pour out love and rest and compassion on the suffering because it has been poured out on me.
Second, in the daily living with mental illness and in the shocking and bleary days following these tragic deaths by suicide, we need all the same compassion and care that we so generously offer in other kinds of suffering and loss. Love and connection can and will save many lives – but sadly not all of them. Asking for and receiving help is one of the hardest things we have to learn to do in this life. Trust in eternal Never-Ending Love is the only hope we have to heal when suicide takes someone we love far too early.
A God who sets us free…
Both in communities of faith and in twelve step groups, I have found glimpses of this God who sets us free. I love to get to a place with people where it is possible to ask the question: “Tell me about the God of your understanding.” The God of my understanding is not afraid of our freedom but delights in it.
Finding Tenderness in the Fog
This is the thing about profound human pain, simultaneously physical and emotional and spiritual: I begin to identify with and feel attached to the fog, frozen by the fear that what comes next will be even worse than what is now. Twelve step spirituality and mentors have whispered to me in the fog, as many times as I needed to hear it: you will not move until the pain of staying here exceeds the pain of changing. It is a whisper of tenderness and compassion through my tears.
Receiving the Gift may be the hardest work of all…
Especially when the gift we long for is a person, receiving the gift changes everything.
Allowing time to be ready to move
I have made slow and real progress at breaking down addiction to perfection. It is so hard to allow myself the time it takes to become ready.
Presence: the art of being where I am
On the other side of grief, of leaving the broken, of destruction is recovering, healing, and growing something new. And one of the practices that carries through both seasons is presence. Just plain showing up for what is and who I am today is both difficult and courageous.
Less – and the Mess in my Heart
Owning less has been a necessity and a goal as we downsized our home with our last move. And last fall, I took up the Wool& Challenge to wear the same dress for 100 days in a row. I was intrigued (as a knitter) by the prospect of wearing wool, exhausted by the choices in my closet every morning, and challenged by the impact fashion has on the environment.
Living in the joy of the beautiful mess
A beautiful mess is a privilege. The resources you need to love in it are right in the mess itself. Its imperfection is an invitation rather than a threat.
Writing the story of a life
In writing the story of my life, however, I live through a lot of moments that won’t make the cut in the highlights or the bloopers. Our world is currently obsessed with capturing the moments and sharing them, but there is so much (and maybe more) value in the things that happen between photographs and bonfires.
Seeing grace and sifting through clutter
In all the sifting, I am seeing the moments that make up my life.
Trusting what is to take us where we need to go
The forest floor is a mess. Dropped pine needles, interrupted with deer droppings. Broken branches and fallen trees from the windstorm days before, layered on the trunks from seasons past. Grass and leaves and tiny flowers breaking though wherever enough light and water allows.
On Being Barefoot…
Before the burning bush, God asks Moses to take off his sandals, to notice and reverence that he walks on holy land. This holy land continues to burn before me, before us, signaling God’s presence before we arrived rather than because we did. This life we are living was holy before we existed in it. This land and creation we call home is the first book of revelation, God’s love letter to us, bearing witness to the Creator of it all.Our lives and the moments that make them up are the stuff of sainthood, our invitations to participate in Divine life to be swallowed up and fulfilled by God. At the grocery store, in the false solitude of our cars and commutes, in our laundry rooms, and over text messages. My shoes run the risk of “protecting” me from the sacredness of this naked moment. And how I love shoes, and how my sensitive toes resist the prickles of grass and the mess of sand. But barefoot is how my spirituality works, daring to live an embodied and earthy love of Jesus who took on flesh. I’m wandering through this life, yearning to let go of my shoes, to walk reverently and with deep attention to what passes under my feet and to what isn’t yet my path. Barefoot is how I write, how I speak, how I work. Experience shored up against an insatiable thirst for knowledge; direct honesty honed by sensitivity; and vulnerability chained to a commitment to competency. And an unapologetically barefoot tendency to speak it as I feel it, which leads me to…
…and Preaching
I’m a preacher without a pulpit, with words that burn until they are spoken ~ aloud or on a page.
My ministry is one of colliding words and ideas, reaching out to find a connection with God’s amazing people.
The world seems to me to be spilling over with grace and we seem to be people who, all too quickly forget that all of this is pure gift.
When I’m driving, eating, visiting, resting, cleaning, working, playing, and almost everything else, I’m frequently stunned by the pure miracle of what simply is.
It’s not all promised joy and ease, but it is all presenced and remembered by the One who gives it. And I can’t stop talking about it, proclaiming it, preaching this good news that we have not been forgotten or forsaken in any moment of this life.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, my words seem to be given to encourage and inspire. In a world where women and girls are still too-often silenced or secondary, I’m barefoot and preaching because my soul won’t rest any other way. If my words can be a gift to you, then that is a gift for me.