Welcome back to the ever-heart-wrenching saga “Shards of My Soul” . . . [dramatic organ music here].
Near the close of our last episode, we found our heroine pining for a secret sauce that would align her will to the Father’s with ease — a veritable tonic to make that surrender to Him so easy as to be second nature to her.
OK, I’ve had my fun; we’re back to first person and present tense.
You can’t blame a girl for looking for the laughter in life, however.
In fact, many times it was my number one survival tool over 48 years of spiritual trial, and I highly recommend it.
Thank goodness for the Irish in me.
This column is a complete departure from what I had planned for August.
My orderly German half intended to do the very structured thing, e.g., pick up where I left off at last month’s end: Sharing my first of epiphanies as to how to concoct that secret sauce of surrender to God.
I even have a tidy little list of ingredients, and figured I’d focus on the first one.
But many days and even more scrapped columns later, I am tossing aside my plan and taking up the Father’s.
You see, every time I approach this exercise, I ask Abba, Son, and Holy Spirit for direction; in essence, my prayer is more or less, “What do You want to say through me?”
What I feel came to me were two things: Grief and atonement.
Truth be told, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with this response.
In fact, my reaction was, “Really??” Neither one of these is on my sacred list, you understand, so this was kind of messing up my whole plan.
Forget about a woman’s scorn; Hell truly hath no fury like this woman when her plan has been thwarted.
I actually fought it for a whole week.
You would think I’d be a much quicker study after so many years of training in acquiescence, but it just illustrates that aligning yourself is a never-ending process.
It was time to circle back to that humility I so proudly felt I’d mastered from 11 years of Adoration (insert face palm emoji here).
I could picture Abba up there with a warm, gentle, fatherly smile, shaking His head ever-so-slightly, “My beautiful daughter . . . I’m going to have to coach you until the day you return home to Me, aren’t I?”
Yes, it appears He is, for as I started down this avenue of reflection, I began to see His wisdom, realizing that a key ingredient for my recipe was missing: Keeping uppermost in mind why we were willed into being, the One we serve, and to Whom we ultimately belong.
This will never hit you so hard (or effect more shards) as on the day you surrender a loved one back to Him.
My daughter and I did exactly that just five years ago when we surrendered our loving father and husband on August 27, 2019.
He was only 67, I was 58, and our beautiful girl was just 20.
He suffered greatly, as did we while loving him through that suffering.
Losing him was losing a full one-third of our family, and to all of us, it happened much too soon; our collective bucket list had barely been touched.
Such a loss can only be lived, I believe; words are insufficient to articulate it.
Why he had been deemed to have run his race, none of us could understand.
With time and God’s grace, you realize it can only make sense in the context of the big picture.
In that picture, we are the Father’s children, simply on loan to one another here — siblings in Christ who serve Him by helping each other through this life and successfully to the eternal one.
I pray that we helped Joe home to Abba, that we eased his pain on his very hard road to Him.
I remember an exchange quite close to the end, as he was given glimpses beyond the veil: “I SEE BREAD!!”, he suddenly said, finger pointing skyward, and eyes fixed well beyond the room.
“Is Jesus there?” I asked.
“Oh yeah . . .” he said.
That moment tells me he is on his way to that perfect place — the place where he can only feel Perfect Love.
Our surrender was not in vain.
He is interceding for us as we finish our race without him, asking that we be met with every joy this life can give.
And just as our surrender was not in vain, neither was his. In our former pastor’s words:
“At some wonderful future era — when all the blessed are gathered in the presence of the Lord they love — who knows how many people will thank Joe that, in his epic suffering, he carried for them the suffering that they could never have endured.
Farewell and requiescat in pace to a man whose manner was so easy to enjoy!”
“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” — John 15:13
Maria Burns is a lifelong Catholic and writer who lives in Madison.