“Oh, I have missed You, my Beloved. How much I have missed You…”
Have you ever had a fight – a real fight – with someone and things just got further and further and further in the wrong direction?
I am a very emotional person, and I am stubborn to boot… And what that really means is that when I am experiencing the heat of the moment and I am conveying the strength of my convictions I am completely and utterly caught up in the communications that I make. And when that happens, one hurt becomes two and two become three and onwards and onwards and over and over until we get to the end of the war, and nobody has won anything. All that is left is a burned out shell and an awful lot of destruction…
And I have been thinking about what that is because I have been remembering the incident when I stopped fighting with God about a year before my conversion, which occurred through Grace and no merit of my own…
When I was a little girl at school, once a week on a Friday, our School Chaplain would offer Benediction and expose the Blessed Eucharist in the Monstrance on the Altar for us to worship God – Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity – in Eucharistic Form. During the exposition of the Blessed Eucharist, we were taught to Genuflect on BOTH knees as a sign of respect for God as exposed in that form. We were also taught that we should not leave God alone in the Church during exposition. And therefore, we would take turns to sit in the Chapel and Adore God Himself and we would wait in the Chapel in the presence of Our Lord and when a peer came in to “relieve” us we would return to class.
I used to enjoy the quiet of these times…
And then, as I grew older and went about my way, I rarely Adored God in the Blessed Eucharist as I had fewer opportunities to do so.
After my little baby died before he was even born, I was very very sad. I was also very very angry. And in many ways, I spent the next few years fighting with God. Clearly I still believed in Him, but I believed that He was cruel and mean and unloving of me and that was why He took my child away when I would have loved that child very much. And then, one day I popped into the Church at my children’s school after dropping them off in the morning. And the Blessed Eucharist was exposed in the Monstrance on the altar.
And there – in the quiet of that empty church, my eyes filled with tears and my heart lifted and my soul rested and in an instant I recognised my God. And I said to Him in the silence of my soul, “Oh, I have missed You, my Beloved. Let’s stop now. Let’s stop fighting now. Can we please just stop…?”
And He allowed me to stop fighting Him in that instant. And though I remained very very sad and though the anger still sweltered in my soul, it was not a burning living anger that consumed everything. It was more a glowing ember that remained…
And when I look back at my experience of conversion a year or so after that morning, what I recognise is that my Beloved came to me in little steps along the journey – because He knew I needed time to put my burden down.
And He knew I was not ready to give away my grief and my anger. And – for love of me – He waited with infinite patience, enduring all my stupid miserable anger, until I was ready to ask Him if I could finally stop and rest…
And today in great gratitude I say again, “Oh, I have missed You, my Beloved. How much I have missed You…”
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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