In my youth I would wonder how someone could pray multiple hours a day or "without ceasing" because I thought prayer was talking to God. I think contemplative prayer answers that question. As I have been reading my spiritual guides over the past two years, I have been learning to understand prayer as so much broader than what is typically assumed. Richard Rohr tells of a prayer learned from a Jewish rabbi that involves simply breathing in yah and out weh. Breathing God in and out. Listening for God, experiencing God in each moment. What a riveting concept and a practical way to abide in Christ and let Him abide in me. God is as necessary to me as breathing air. He is as present as the air I breathe. 

Eleven days. That's how long I have been metaphorically "sitting" here in Ohio feeling like time is crawling because events are unfolding languidly like a movie in slow motion, the film blurringly stretched. Jordan's crash has been exceptionally painful and the way back has been fraught with warring in his soul, not the "quick fix" of the last hospitalization eight years ago. The vigorous attempt to find the right medicine regime, the arduous search for a new residential placement, the agony of crushing his dreams and accomplishments, the outraged response of challenging my guardianship--these are all in a swirl of emotion and thought (both rational and irrational) and Jordan's own version of alternate facts. (It's interesting how he mirrors the world.)

Though experiences like this are shatteringly painful, I always find myself on a deep spiritual journey through them. It is as if I walk through these circumstances on two different plains, like Bilbo walking toward his destiny, sometimes keenly and sometimes vaguely aware of a dimension of reality in addendum to the tangible "in the flesh" reality. I find at times that the disappointments which occur during these struggles tend to drive me deeper toward understanding and connecting with truth and love. My soul is cultivated and enlarged in ways that I can't always describe, but that I hope produces a more thoughtful, more compassionate, more hospitable me, one with paradoxically more gravitas and more joyful celebration.

So here I am waiting, watching, working--hoping and praying for a positive outcome for Jordan, and, at the same time, watching and hoping for the refinement of my own being. So I search--search for God, search for meaning, search for signs of growth--like a terrier sniffing under every bush. Sometimes my search is rewarded, like this morning when I picked up Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. I'm reading a chapter about the tragic sense of life, "the 'tragic' natural world," and came upon a passage that blazed with light. Rohr says that, "In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions than by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit. You can see perhaps what Jesus and Paul both meant by telling us to honor 'the least of the brothers and sisters' (Matthew 25:40; I Corinthians 12:22-25) and to 'clothe them with the greatest care.' It is those creatures and those humans who are on the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who often have the most to teach us. They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things...The exceptions keep us humble and searching, and not rushing toward resolution to allay our anxiety." (italics mine) Wow! Jordan keeps me experiencing humility, searching for truth, grasping for ways to love, trusting when I can't see deliverance, and willing to live with tensions and mystery. I can't line up all my thoughts, all the facts, all the events and circumstances into a tidy line or logical progression. I have to live with the grief and loss that forever accompany this son of mine. However, Rohr reminds me that "Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions," and his love and grace sweep us all up and are enough to deliver us into his presence.