It caught me completely by surprise. I felt the hugeness of it 'everywhere'. Head, heart, blood flow, gut, everywhere. And I had to 'do' church later that morning. Either that or get somebody else to do it at short notice.
She was clear that she didn't want to talk about it. Period. Done deal. So...it's now 2:30 in the morning and the only 'one' I have to talk to is God. Strangely, even for a priest, at first that seemed totally inadequate.
In retrospect, of course it did. Anything feels inadequate at times like these.
But I did talk to God. Pouring out my heart--with long breaks for worry and imagined work-arounds. After maybe an hour of this I began to shift to the realization that I'd done enough 'talking:' now it was time to be quiet and to embody God, to incarnate, the best I could, God's love and wisdom in that moment and in my body.
I went back to bed and brought every ounce of attention to my breath--trusting breath as Spirit. Any tiny distraction from focusing on breathing in and out, in and out, I let go of like it was a wasp or a spider.
I knew there would be time later to think through the immensity of separating from my partner and best friend of 32 years. Lots and lots of laters. My work the rest of that night was to incarnate wordless peace in the only realistic way I knew: contemplative prayer in the form of concentration meditation--also called tranquility or one-pointed meditation. Following the breath, noticing air coming into my nose as I breathed in, noticing the rise and fall of my belly, noticing the relaxing of my diaphragm as I breathed out. Just this. Just this.
Just this. Over and over and over.
There were lots of other ways as the days and weeks progressed to embody God's love and wisdom and I kept coming back and back and back to what helped, what worked, what kept me sane and more than sane--what brought me back to the Center--and to what I knew was trustworthy and whole-making.
Whew. Grateful. Grateful. Grateful.
I felt so lucky, so blessed that I knew, at least a bit, how to hold pain, confusion, anxiety, anger, dumb-struckness as they came up over and over again.
One of my favorite 'go to' prayers during that time was this:
O God of peace, you have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray,to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God.
Also, I was very grateful for a basic process that Pema Chodron had introduced me to some years earlier in her book When Things Fall Apart (below).
Wisdom, love, trust, prayer, mindful practices-they don't just get us through the night (though thankfully they do that too!): they move us through life and continually reconnect us with LIFE--even when life is its most challenging.
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"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
"When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
"We try to do what we think is going to help. Bet we don't know,. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there is a big disappointment, we don't don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.
"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs."
