Today RLP linked to Ann Voskamp’s blog, A Holy Experience. Her lapidary writing and photos took my breath away. In a post about her family’s loss of her sister, she writes:
Maybe in those first few years my life curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts He freely gives. But I have no memories of then. For they say memory jolts awake with trauma’s electricity. That would be the year I was four. When blood pooled and I snapped shut to grace.
Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents huddled in horror, I wondered if they had held me, their firstborn, in those natal moments of naming, like they now held my sister in death. In sharp fall light, they rocked her in their arms, not with prayers for sleep but with pleas for waking and wholeness, miraculous and dazzling. It did not come, only the police with accident forms while blood seeped through blankets. I see that too, even now. Memory’s blazing surge burned deep.
The story continues in a second post, and ends with this prayer:
Lord, losses burn holes in the soul retina. Leave us blind to You. And the infection spreads. Heal, Lord. So we can see You, find the well of Your living, spilling waters. And end the drought.
As a fellow sufferer of soul holes, all I can say is Amen.
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