oh Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in You.

"I just wanted some change, so I wouldn't have to sell this" she says near tears, motioning to her crotch and before I can speak up she's whirled away. I had to stop and breathe for a moment because "Molly" breaks my heart. She's an artist, and mentally-ill, and childlike, and sometimes uses and is very broken by the traumas that have occurred in her life. Last week while I was trying to coax her along, she was telling herself a personal narrative in third person (interrupting herself with the waving of an American flag- she was a "military brat"), "Why didn't "Molly" get to go on vacation? My sisters did. I know they had to send me away because they didn't know how to deal with me... one day she's gonna be the first person from Chinatown whose dual-diagnosed and not on medications... red, white, and blue, red white, and blue...  and a user... to graduate from college with an art degree..." she went on for awhile and then her voice breaking she said in a summary that revealed so much, "and then her family will be proud of her."

"Molly"... ugh. Somedays I do not want to open my heart fully to life where grief and beauty lay entwined in each others arms. It is too much. I often feel so raw here, agitated, sorrowful, angry, ecstatic, calm-- all my emotions nearer the surface. It isn't easy to be here, the other day after a frustrating meeting I went to Rick's office and I could feel the emotion in my quavering voice and I realized how I needed to stop and breathe. Serving others can be an illness, a monster of ego and need to do becoming more important than the individual-- then the unsexy, gross, painful agony of loving broken-selves (my self included.) There is also rage... the ghettoizing of the poor, the way Chinatown was created to distance the un-desirableness of people experiencing homelessness from downtown, the way our society can discard the elderly... it is awful. 

Greg asked me the other day, "how do you pray?" and I find that lately they are mostly quietness (like meditation)- a sense of God being present with me, "dialogues with silence" I am beginning to understand that.  In response to Mark recently I wrote, "I am anchored by the desire to live through my own eyes, to be witness to my own experience of the world and what it means for me to encounter God and others in this life. I think of the symbol in the womb of my woman ring-- it represents both Spirit and Encounter. I am me... its hard to articulate this but that anchors me-- to respond to my own nature and to communicate with God so that I can be my self without the distortions of my limited perspective, my sins, my insecurities, etc.) I feel held. I do not know how to say it... but I get this sense sometimes of concentrated being, of a solidity... I feel held, held by a Love that is expanding, that is leading me from the deceptions and distortions that destroy me, and it is slow, painful, devastating. This is still true, "God will break your heart." God will break your heart. And yet, there is always and yet...I think this is the feeling of salvation, of redemption, of earth's own desiring pulling inside me like a tide. The conviction that "all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Trust. Slowly it emerges, tender and yet the roots dig, dig... it is not love that rescues us but Love, maybe loving... learning how to die, learning over and over how to undress our death-styles. I have faith in this: that we survive by our small deaths; being reborn.


Fromm wrote, "The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.... all of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action... the religious task of man... is not to think right, but to act right, and to become one with the One" ... "the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of loving." 

Meister Eckhart: "If therefore I am changed into God and He makes me one with Himself, then, by the living god, there is no distinction between us... Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here- but it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him."