— w.i.p.  Cat Charissage, (c) 2013

Dear Friends,

Here is Part Three, the end  of my article Praying When God is Silent.  Part One is here.  Part Two is here.

The painting with this post is only half done, just after putting the veil of a glaze over what I had painted.  I thought it fitting for this article, as I do believe that though we see through a veil, there is much behind it, AND there is much more to learn.  I often laugh that forty years ago I knew a whole lot more about the mystery we call God than I do today.  But that’s okay.  Whatever is here, now, is alive and growing into something even more  beautiful, just like the vines in my painting.

Also, an invitation to come to my “What I learned at Wounded Healer with Dr. E” event, here in my home studio, on Thursday June 30.  Email me for more info.

With much love,

Cat

Praying When God is Silent, Part Three

Short, small phrases, easy enough to align with our breathing are helpful in calming monkey mind.  One line of a favorite hymn or prayer can be used, or if this is too painful while experiencing God’s silence, you can create your own:  “Open to mystery, open to love,”  “I live with love,” “in darkness, bring light,” “in doubt, faith,” “in despair, hope.”  The rhythm and repetition of these short prayers is calming to our neurological systems.  They are also an ongoing reminder of our intent.

And then there is silence.  When our friends are bereaved, there is often nothing we can say that will help.  Our presence, though, is witness and comfort.  We can sit in silence for 10 or 20 minutes a day, focusing on a word, on a short prayer, or on our breath, and whenever our mind wanders we calmly and gently bring our attention back to the word or breath.  We can listen for the word from within, or we can listen to the silence.  The silence can become a refuge.

When God is silent we are left alone, whether in feeling or in fact.  What should we or can we do now?  We can discover how other people have dealt with this; we can look for metaphors that may help.  We can struggle to examine our own lives and actions; we can face the fears and despair.  We can write all this down in a journal, or we can speak of this with a soul friend.  We can treat ourselves with the kind of love we search for in God, and we can develop other practices for calming ourselves and keeping our loving intent before us.  And there is a kind of silence that can become a refuge.

Sometimes God’s silence in our lives is a temporary rough spot; sometimes it seems to have become our new way of life.  Why is God silent?  There is no answer to that question.  The only helpful questions are “How am I going to live now — with love?  In my depths, with whom will I live — with love?”

Yes, I will live with love.

— w.i.p.  Cat Charissage (c) 2015

Dear Friends,

Here is the second part of my article Praying When God is Silent.  Part one is here.   Also, if any of you live in Southern Alberta, you are invited to join me in either (or both) of two presentations on what I learned from the Dr. Estes training, The Heart of the Wounded Healer.  They will be held on Saturday, June 25, 1:30 – 4:30, and Thursday, June 30, 7-9:30.  Just send me an email at catcharissage at gmail dot com if you’re interested.

With much love,

Cat

Praying When God is Silent, Part Two

However, there have been a few metaphors that I have found to be helpful at these times.  One is that of stormy seas.  The surface of the ocean can be all churning, tempest, and chaos, but only 10 feet down the great depths of the ocean are calm, moving and flowing in ancient ways, holding mystery and life underneath it all.  The circumstances of our lives and the confusions of our psyches may be caught within a powerful and destroying storm of common human experience, but underneath, and not even too far underneath, there may be calm and a life-filled mystery.

Or we might be living as though on the very edges of a wheel for a cart, spinning around faster and faster as the horses, or the motor, speed up.  We will be crushed on the surface of the road; certainly we cannot see where we are going.  But each cartwheel spoke is connected to a hub, just as each of us is connected to our deepest self.  This hub or center of each wheel moves at a much, much slower speed and is protected from the mud and stones of the pavement.  Our hub can be our calm center.  As well, a cart has a driver, a driver who knows where we’re going, and who will bring all the cartwheels safely to their destinations.

Now I want to suggest a few practices that are helpful in times of confusion and pain.  These are things you can do rather than just think or talk about.  Are you taking care of your physical body?  A loving God would want us to be as healthy and as strong as possible.  So many things at times of crisis and pain feel so out of control, but taking good physical care of ourselves and those for whom we are responsible is under our control — at least a little bit.  Can you try to eat as healthfully as possible?  Will you continue to feed your children well?  Can you manage your days in such a way that you get enough sleep?  Can you create peace and calm in your home to nourish both yourself and your family?   Will you engage in gentle — or strenuous — exercise?  These, too, are prayer.

Sometimes when God is silent, our minds are anything but.  Our thoughts tumble over each other like lion cubs in play.   They jump around like monkeys swinging from tree to tree in some jungle of the mind.  Not only are all those thoughts tiring, but sometimes we’re bitten, or feel like we’re hanging by one arm with no tree to swing to next.

Once our thoughts are no longer useful in helping us to understand or strategize about our situation, once our fears have been catalogued in our journals or witnessed by an understanding friend, the spinning repetitive thoughts are no longer helpful.  Catastrophizing, especially, is not useful.  So what can be helpful?  How can we turn this into prayer to calm us and remind us of the immense love we yearn to know?

—detail, painting, acrylic on canvas, Cat Charissage (c) 2015

Hello dear friends,

Happy Solstice and Full Moon!  Yes, I know it was yesterday, but I’m behind on a lot of things these days!  I’ve returned from my training with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her intensive The Heart of the Wounded Healer:  Walking in Two Worlds as a Way of Life.  Travelling is very difficult for me — I was so appreciative of my own bed, and of my comfortable lazyboy chairs dotted around my home.

The training was the first of a five-year series of trainings.  While the five-year series that I completed with her last year, The Mysterium,  was based on Jungian psychoanalytic teachings, this new series, Wounded Healer, is explicitly concerned with helping ourselves and others live a full human life WITH the spirituality included.  Among other things, Dr. E. deconstructed many traditional religious practices, separating them from both superstition and exclusive relation to a particular religious tradition.  We then learned the value of these kinds of practices in the full expression of both our humanness and our relationship with Mystery.

It was so worth going; it leaves me with a bit of a personal challenge, though.  Dr. Estes is fully comfortable with using words such as “Creator” or “Source without source” (which I quite like).  I, however, am still finding my language when it comes to that Mystery many of us call “God”.   Absolutely everything I am about is concerned with this Mystery and our relationship to/with that Mystery, yet I am not comfortable using traditional religious language because that language has been historically used not only to help and educate, but also to control, oppress, and obfuscate.  While Dr. E. is interested in recovering the treasure in that language, I am not comfortable using religious language unless I define almost every word to be clear that I’m not advancing the controlling and oppressive subtext that I believe has tainted most of it.  And that, of course, does not lead to smooth narrative!

I hope, with time, openness, and much reflection, to either discover or create that language.  Stay tuned!

In reference to my last post,  New Moon Wonderings: Have you never doubted?, I want to share with you an article I wrote several years ago in response to a friend who was deeply distressed when she no longer felt any answers to her prayer.  Since it is rather long, I will publish it in three sections over the next week or so.  Please contact me with any of your thoughts and ideas.

With much love,

Cat

Praying When God is Silent, Part One

I have heard from some of you about one of the most poignant and difficult of life’s experiences:  when God does not answer prayer, when God is silent.  At first, people bring this up to me in roundabout ways, because you know that I’m not a church goer, that I do not profess any creed.  Yet you also know that I used to be a devout Catholic Christian, so much so that as a young adult I spent 3 years in the convent, formally studied theology for 7 years, and have bookshelves groaning with the scriptures and wisdom literature of the world.  I seem a mismatch with my evangelical Christian and LDS friends, so when you tell me of God’s silence I know that you are suffering deeply and that your questions are not some idle intellectual exercise.  I do bear witness to your pain.  I, too, know God’s silence.

There are many ways that people have responded to this situation, but some of these responses have not been helpful to me, nor, I doubt, for you:  “This is God’s testing of your faithfulness.”  “God does not abandon us, so if you don’t feel his presence, then who moved?”  “Are you harboring some hidden sin that needs to be repented of?”  These responses seem to only blame me for my suffering.  Yes, we must examine if and how we might be contributing to our own pain, but once we know we’re truly doing our best, what do we do now?

Some other responses to those who don’t feel God’s presence are kinder:  “God is molding you in the dark; you may not see his hands on the potter’s wheel or his intentions, but don’t be concerned, for he is here.”  “God is our father, and just as parents cannot always fulfill their children’s desires but still love and guide their children, so God is doing so for us.”  “Sometimes God is silent, but he is there, just as the stars, though not visible during the daylight, are still shining in the heavens.”

Many are comforted by some of these responses.  Others are only left confused.  I have known only God’s silence for many many years.  One of the responses to God’s silence that is never voiced in Church circles is an obvious one, to me anyway:  “Well, maybe this is evidence that there really is no God at all.  Maybe the atheists are right, and my previous religious experiences were only the result of indoctrination, wishful thinking, or psychological projection.”  While rarely voiced, I know that many people are secretly tortured by this thought.

You may think I’ve wandered from my stated topic of praying while God is silent.  I want to encourage you, though, to go ahead and face all the discouraging and frightening thoughts that niggle in the dark corners of your mind.  God — if there is a God at all — is love.  That immense love that we call God is certainly big enough and strong enough to take any questions our minds can dream up; immense love can understand our frustration, our fear, and our anger.  And even if our worst fears turn out to be true and there is no God in the ways that we have been told, if God is only an imaginary friend, this exploration of our deepest questions is of value, for there is not time wasted when one asks sincere questions and seeks to find true answers.  This is prayer.

(Part Two will be published later this week.  Thank you for reading.)