Category Archives: women’s mothers

Those Moments

Devotion, Poetry, Spiritual Formation, women's mothers, , , ,

Those moments when you can feel the spirit like the breath of a lion pushing you to the edge of real and tangible, panting and gasping for the supernatural more real than breath.

Those moments when you know what you know by the Divine in you, the essence of truth, the light that hasn’t faded, the rich vastness of eternity telling you what you see with your naked eye….is not all there is to know.

Those moments when prayer ascends like a baby descends. Gripping writhing agony of purpose and destiny. On behalf of another. For another. For life. For hope. For the promise that awaits in the holding.

Those moments when you find your voice is not alone. You are surrounded by a chorus of keening tears lifting  you by the strength of individual sorrow shared in community. Those moments.

Those moments when your faith is something more than a declaration of creeds, it is a life moving in tandem with eternity.  It is real, in those moments when you feel prayer leave your lips and kiss the face God.

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Seed Silent

Devotion, Mourning, Spiritual Formation, women's mothers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have been silent of late. Not the sulking, depressed, anti-social, need to be hidden kind of silent, but the seed kind of silent.  Surrender silent.  The way the seed falls into the cool, dark blackness of earth and gives up one identity for the promise of another. Expectant kind of silent. The promise of the hard outer shell of familiarity cracking under the pressure of the moisture and the weight of the soil.  Longing silent. The way the lover sun pulls on the tenderness of the sprout coaxing and wooing it to the surface with promises of union and purpose and destiny.

This has been my silence as I walked my  earth wet with tears and felt the weight of the reality of my dust.  I have learned a lot about my seed self.  I have experienced paradigms shifting in every facet of my being.  Who I thought I was as Child, Mother, Wife, Friend, Worshipper…all being touched by the Master Gardener’s hand each time with one question:  “Do you yield?”

Will I yield to the work of the silence and surrender? Or die, a hardened intact seed with all of my potential locked inside me?

I bow and stretch and embrace pain as escort.  For the first time I am learning what it really means to be alive.  The why behind each breath and heartbeat.  I want to live.  Live intentionally and purposefully.  I am done with existing. There is so much more to it than that.

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Dimah-The Weeping

Ancient Hebrew, Christian, Devotion, Mourning, Poetry, women's mothers, , , , ,

A wooden carving of Virgin of the Seven Sorrows is displayed in a church in the Andalusian capital of Seville

Dimah

The Weeping

There is an ancient word for tears, a woman word, a feminine word, a womb word-

Dimah

The bitter shedding of the blood of the eyes.  The kind of bitter that comes from hearts ripped open by the ravage of divorce, death, addiction.  The kind of bitter that comes from wrong roads wrong loves, wrong gains and the feast made from them.

Dimah

The way the mother heart spills out all over the place like a gut pile from a kill, helpless to defend against the vultures unable to put itself back into its body, laid bare to the picking of its pieces.

Dimah

The sound that moves in the emptiness of home, that echoes in the ashes from the cold hearth shadows of life sounds that has been shattered by the violence- the violence of dishonor, departure, divorce.

Dimah

The blood of the eye that drips down with each glance at the babies the ones who never get to be. The ones who are but don’t know why, the ones who are but think they aren’t and so they disappear from the earth taking their beautiful life force with them, nd we wade in a river of blood that comes from our eyes…

Dimah

The blood of the eye that is ever present as we watch the ones we’ve held to our hearts and our breasts be flailed against the rocks of life in a relentless pounding of pressure. We long to give our bodies to the ragged edge, to weld for them a bridge of peace, but our hands don’t reach that far, all we have is the scream.  The here I am where are you? The scream we hurl at God, to God, desperately groping the blackness for the thread of light begging for his ‘here I am, I see you’ in the silence of the crucible.

Dimah comes unsummoned from the depths of us as we put one foot in front of the other and live because that is what we do. Dimah comes in the circle of the tribe as we lift weary heads and trembling hands to wipe the blood from another’s eyes away.  Dimah comes in the collective life lived and the common bond of sorrow as we raise one voice, shed one consolidated tear.

Yes, we know the ancient word for weeping.  She is with us an integral part of the living and breathing of mothering.  Yet, she comes with a promise, that the valley we have cut out from the torrents of our tears will one day become a door of hope. And so, we weep with you who weep, we mourn with you who mourn, we wipe the blood from your eyes through the haze of red in ours.  Together, we wait for the dawn and the day star to arise in our hearts and we hope.

 

Waiting For You

Christian, women's mothers, , ,

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Dedicated to the mothers of daughters, waiting by windows

Tonight,

A circle of heart

Mothering,

Wet tears falling,

Threatening to become an ocean

No one caring,

Linking arms to stay afloat-

All for you.

You. 

You who are every daughter lost-

To the needle

The pill,

The lovers,

The lights-

The darkness.

We wept for every daughter dream

We dreamed for you

When you were catching butterflies,

Or fly balls

Or air over the hurdles.

You.

You who fill our nights with aching memory of laughter

A sound of innocence taken too soon.

We prayed for you.

We prayed for us.

You are us.

We rattled dungeon doors tonight with mother love,

Sent an ocean to cover a desert

We wait now by the lamp post,

Expecting. 

Expecting you.

-Christina Dammerman