Poverty of Spirit

The following article recently appeared in Desert Call, the journal of The Spiritual Life Institute. The Spiritual Life Institute is the community that has the Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado, where I spent my two week retreat this past summer. For more information on the community and their publications, please visit http://www.spirituallifeinstitute.org/Nada.html

The poems I love the most are written by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. His words have given me comfort in times of sadness and have bolstered my conviction that God is present, even and especially in the darkness. The one poem that has helped me come to terms with the assurance of God’s indefatigable love is I.17 from The Book of Hours:

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth-
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of the evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

This poem above all other writing has assured me over and over of Jesus words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The past year has been one of sadness and sometimes overwhelming fear as I’ve watched the two bookends of my life disintegrate. My father had several strokes a few years ago and began to deteriorate with vascular dementia shortly after we returned from a family trip to The Grand Canyon in the summer of 2007. Last spring he “got in the hospital bed” (my mother’s euphemism) where he spent the last ten months of his life. His dying was a slow process, but my family did what we could to ease his last days. He died at home on January 1st at the age of 75.

My son who served in Iraq for fourteen months came home in 2008 addicted to pain killers. Between the time he returned home and today, he has gone through a marriage, lost the home he bought with his bonus, wrecked several vehicles and his life. He currently serves as an inmate in a correctional facility for trying to steal drugs from a pharmacy.

The fact that this double trauma happened to me simultaneously sent me into a deep state of anxiety. At one point, our son was living with us, and I was taking him for daily Methadone treatment before I went to work each day. My husband and I were being held prisoners in our own home by a son who had an arsenal of guns hidden in the bedroom closet, and he knew how to use them. One day my husband drove him to the clinic, but it had already closed. Our son tried to break in and was picked up later and put in the local jail for fifty days. We lost track of him until he called us from the jail in the town where he committed his last crime by which time we had exhausted our financial and emotional resources to help him. We made the difficult decision to let him go to trial with a public defender as his attorney.

All of my son’s drama did not lessen the fact that I had a dying father and an exhausted mother three hours drive away. My life certainly was full of “ill-matched threads,” and it was taking everything I could muster to keep them woven into a single cloth.

That’s when I picked up my copy of Rilke’s poems once again—a dog-eared and marked up copy—and sought comfort in the poet’s words. Rilke, even at a young age, seemed to know that God knows. I realized by re-reading his poetry that what I had to do during this extremely stressful time was to take good care of myself and allow God to take care of me as well. I had to recognize my poverty of spirit, and come to rely more and more on the “partner of my loneliness.”

Rilke’s poem speaks of driving the loud mouths from the hall so that the woman in the poem can focus on God and the kingdom. One loud mouth that I had to drive from my hall was the crystal clear voice of “but you should have…”. I should have been there the moment my dad breathed his last breath; I should have been in the courtroom when my son was sentenced. I should have tried harder to get him into a rehab that would have “fixed” him. I should have taken more time off from work and spent it with my mom and dad.

In those moments where I could and did make room for God, “in the softness of evening” or in the early morning moments of meditation and prayer, I soaked up as much mercy and grace as I could manage.

It has been six months since my father died and almost a year since my son was locked up. I finally made a retreat in a place where I could come to terms with the losses and absolute inability to have done anything to change my circumstances My heart is broken, but I am stretching “beyond what limits [me] to hold” God.

I do go visit my son in prison. His dad and I have committed to giving him one weekend each month. He has a ten year sentence to serve, so I will be spending a great many weekends in prison. It’s true what they say about a man’s family serving time with him. But I am coming to believe that my son is living his own dark night of the soul, and it’s best if I let it happen for him.

The experiences of losing a parent and, in effect, losing my son have caused me to pay careful attention to my experiences, the relationships I cherish, my vocation and most importantly the time I make for God. It is only by loving God and accepting God’s love in return that poverty of spirit can be filled with the promises of the kingdom found in The Beatitudes.