Waiting to Receive

I have had both a wonderful and a dreadful week.  One steeped in not so much coincidence but I am told providence.  A week of beautiful communication mixed with complex and confusing communication, topped with awful life choking communication.

I spent a wonderful evening in the company of the Catholic performance poet/bard Sarah de Nordwall.  She were a great rich voice, with lingering middle-class tones of healing Manuka honey and mead.  Her biblical knowledge made her words ring in a poetic liturgy which extended her poems and tales from the realms of messy life to transcendent wonder. A kind of heavenly angel provocateur, enticing all goodness from our humanity to reach in extension towards God. Her musings were embellished with her warm energy, the glint in her eye resonating beyond all personality.  Such an inspiring Eve.  And a thread which I would love to reel in a little closer. . . . I connected. . . . and smiled to myself with knowing.

In fact all my female Eve’s have been inspiring this week.

Yesterday I spent a beautiful day in Abbotswick house of Prayer.  It was indeed a house of peace, imbued with natures spirit pouring in from the season beyond.  Such a breathtaking setting giving the house a character and ‘ambience gentle’ of its own.  And coincidentally almost in location backing on to my brother in-laws business ‘Essex Lift services’ which is on the Coxtie Green road, which also is in a beautiful setting with a cottage, business barns and a real well (which I have a deeply feminine intimate fondness for.)   The well . . . is where in spirit and contemplation I meet my Lord again and again and again.  In today’s contemplation I see within my heart the same family of deer visiting both properties. Silent hoofs treading upon the grassy dew fall, delivering by their meditative natures a unitive peace to both lands.  God so evident, reaching in restoration both the faithful and the faithless.

Replenished.

The souls within Abbotswick were warm and welcoming and easy and kind.  A space to Be . . .  to breathe, without provocation or expectation or demand or retribution.  Gentle thoughtful open intuitive conversation that leaves peace upon my peace, and peace upon my not so peace.  A kindly light.  I indulged myself in their rather special little attic library and completed reading about the spanish mystics, mystics mystically having also been brought into the poetry eve the eve before.  And then there were the coincidental outlines of a hermitage in both spheres too, just slightly beyond my vision, but no less there, just yonder the mind’s eye.

The ‘transformed in Him’ Eve’s of this world bless me with their honest communication and gentle understanding of the humanity of man.  Open to the bigger picture in a breathe easy way, and a footstep closer to the perfection of communicating female wisdom, a reaching beyond their gender alone to commune in ease with man, just as Christ showed us the way.  Contemplation fares well for such kindred spirits.  But being a wild flower I am unsure of being captured by someone elses vision.  I loved their Charism, though my saints would be of another choosing.  Alas distance and lack of finance makes for impoverished decision-making when it comes to reaching out to such a regular and beautiful retreat. Relocation would be my favoured option but I sit and wait to receive.

Sarah talked about the sacred quality of waiting and being open and able to receive, us a temple in time, something we are apparently not good at.  I am open to receiving, I love to receive, I am good at receiving, however that does occasionally get muddled with my good at giving.  Else my wanting to receive instead of just being and waiting, and then there’s the fear of maybe receiving nothing.  And then in my despair my mind is silenced! hushed by the ‘Be still and know that I am God.’  The temple eternal.

Sometimes the pull to be in total aloneness, and silence, and the waiting to see what emerges is something I can only snatch from a costly day away (I live in financial rather than spiritual deficit) else awake alone in the middle of the night.  The solitary hours spent never quite long enough.  I need that 13th hour.

There have been other communication Eve’s this week as well, all female in nature, all full of clarity and accurate perception and gentle wisdom.  My husband and I have been to four ‘relate’ sessions, where it is impossible to restore what is broken, because the frustration and lack of intimate communication is caused by a now celibate marriage, a marriage considered adulterous sealed in a covenant of sin, and now morally sealed celibate against a husbands will, enforced by the requirements of my reception into the Catholic Church.

That brings me to the communication skills of the Adams of this world.   This week complex, confusing, inconsistent, unclear, not perceptive,  not open and neither full of honest clarity.  Adam at home hurting and hearing only what he could hear, as we both discovered at relate.  How did we ever get to be a world of God’s children when the love we have lived so intrinsically feels lived out under such disfigured deception.

Else our authentic Love is denied so cuttingly, and our beloved ones can not express themselves freely.   In order for anyone of us to transcend beyond our humanity, we have to first be able to fully embrace our humanity, and this means our sexuality too.  It is so very important to be able to share in beloved intimate friendship with our soul mate, in a celibate way that is treasured and respected and safe.  In Soul friendship where on an equivalent scale from 1 to 100 . . . . 1 to 97 can be embraced in Love without fear, and on the same scale where 97 to 100 remains for God alone (so says Sr Camilla).   I look back to the present, If you can not Love true deep authentic and meaningful Love without sexual intercourse, then maybe true deep authentic and meaningful Love wasn’t there in the first place, my husband sees through different eyes.

A week of Adam’s and Eve’s, of highs and lows, of solace and communion, of peace and frustration.

I sit and wait in prayer and contemplation.

open to receiving all that He brings.

In Love.