Status Updates From The Healing Path: A Memoir ...

May each of us, at our own pace and in our own unique way continue to deepen our heartfelt trust in knowing that God, who is the origin, sustaining ground, and fulfillment of our healing journey, will and already is bringing the healing journey of our lives to completion.

Insofar as these wounded and wounding aspects of ourselves recognize that they are seen, loved, and respected in such a merciful way, they can feel safe enough to release the pain they carry into the more healed and whole aspects of ourselves.

…the healing path is not a linear process in which we can force our way beyond our wounded and wounding ways. Rather, it is a path along which we learned to circle back again and again to cultivate within ourselves a more merciful understanding of ourselves as we learn to see, love, and respect the still-confused and wounded aspects of ourselves.

May each of us learn to cherish the gifts of divinizing liberation that flow so unexpectedly into our lives in events so blissful or so terrible that they lay us bare to the presence of God that is always there.

… the gift is God‘s merciful presence, cascading down into the lowest and most broken places within ourselves and others, waiting to be seen and trusted so that it might lead us out of the darkness and into the light.

I began to realize how true it is that when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. And I was learning to become a merciful person by learning to be merciful toward the traumatized, fragmented aspects of myself.

… The spiritual depth dimensions of healing that I was seeking in my own therapy were waiting to be realized in my graced ability to see and accept the gift of my traumatized self, by which I had felt so ashamed and so burdened because of the suffering it had brought into my life.

… I started crying, telling her that I did not know how to do life. That from the time I was very young, life had always seemed to me to be too overwhelming for me to figure out or know how to do it correctly.

What gradually became clear to me was that my mother‘s motto of peace at any price was not worth the price. At the same time, I realized how delicate and challenging it is to step forward in honoring the truth of yourself and others when you have been and perhaps still are traumatized and living in a precarious and potentially life-threatening situation.

May each of us at our own pace and in our own way continue to find our way along this path, this way of life, in which we are learning from Love how to be healed from habits of our minds and hearts that compromise and do violence to Love.

As we learn to settle into an underlying, habitual understanding of this graced alchemy, a kind of quiet confidence can begin to grow within us in knowing that God, who has begun this work in us, will bring it to completion up to and including the moment of our death and beyond.

…this man’s moment of deliverance was not the end of a journey but the beginning of a much longer one. For the habits of mind and heart formed in trauma, abandonment, and addiction are very strong.

For in this moment the alcoholic in him that, for so many years claimed to have the final say in who he was, was dying. And in this death he was being born before our very eyes as someone newly emerging out of the darkness into the light. The room in which his awakening occurred seemed to me to be at once a hospice and a maternity ward. For the room embodied the intimately realized mystery of life out of death.

You will never find true and abiding intimacy running from that solitary aloneness, but only by entering into that solitude in which God‘s abyss-like intimacy with you, with all of us, and with all things, lies hidden.

… as the psychologist D. Winnicott expressed it, we are all alone together.

No matter how badly we may have trashed ourselves in patterns of self-destructive behavior that ritualistically reenact the traumatizing ways we were treated, this innermost hidden center of ourselves remains invincibly whole and undiminished because it is that part of us that belongs entirely to God.

Finding our way along the healing path does not consist of mastering some method of meditation but rather consists of learning not to do violence to the fragility of our waiting.

Finding our way along the healing path does not consist of figuring out some obscure teaching but rather consists of learning to see God hidden and revealed in all that we see.

Finding our way along the healing path does not consist of striving for some far-off goal that we may or may not attain, but is rather a way of a discovering a secret hidden deep within our hearts.

It was in the midst of these interior upheavals and loss of spiritual rootedness that I found solace and a sense of security in falling back into the deeply dissociative states that allowed me as a child to survive the ongoing trauma that seemed to threaten my very existence.

The whole Catholic thing seemed to me at the time to be so hypocritical, so driven by an all-male clergy invested with spiritual authority, regardless of the extent to which they may really have been grounded in humility and true to the imperatives of Christlike love for those they served.

It seemed then that in returning home, my life had come full circle. Only now my situation was much worse than it was when I was in high school. For now, there was no holy place I could flee to find refuge in God beyond the sadness and uncertainties that now stirred anew in the broken places in my mind and heart.

May each of us learn in moments when everything seems lost that our unknown tomorrows will bring yet more perils from which will arise yet more unforeseeable blessings.

I took off my monastic habit and put on the secular clothes that felt strangely familiar to me. I walked alone through the empty hallways…and out through the gates…to…where a driver was waiting to drive me to the…airport. As I flew home, it seemed that I was flying into a void without any meaningful or foreseeable future. 😭

Now for me, there was only a future that seemed to be no future at all with nowhere to go except back to my life in the world I had left behind when I came to the monastery. And kneeling there in that sense of utter loss, I started to cry.

I had so wanted and never questioned that I would be spending my life here, giving my life to God… I had so wanted and never questioned that I would die here and be buried with the monks who had died and crossed over before me into God, just as monks have died and crossed over into God down through the centuries. But now none of that was going to happen. 😭

I sensed that the thin ice was beginning to break apart, causing me to fall into the icy depths of a psychotic break from which, given my history of trauma and fragility, I might never return.