A Broken Hallelujah

I named my blog after a line in an Ani DeFranco song - "have the strength to just sit inside your sadness, even if you're sitting there alone".
The past year has been a difficult one and as I am journeying through it I realize how alone we all are, mostly, how alone I am. There are moments when I hold my daughter that I am overwhelmed by my love for her. I smell her breath and skin and feel her little heart beating away and I want to take her in to me. I want to be connected to her in a way that we can never be separated from, but I know that even in my womb she was an individual being, living through my blood but with a life of her own.
I am sitting there alone.
It is a terrifying thought on the one hand and yet on the other hopeful. Henri Nouwen writes of the terrible loneliness he stuggled with in his book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. He says, "Once we have given up our desire to be fully fulfilled, we can offer emptiness to others." When we offer our emptiness we offer freedom to feel what is calling to be felt, to be still and not distract ourselves from our pain by doing, to move within our world safe and secure in our own bodies.
I long for that freedom. To be able to give it and receive it. But of course, like everything else it is a slow and painful process. I want so much to feel and to be fully fulfilled, but there is nothing like an immensely painful experience to make one accept that we will never be fully fulfilled in this life. God works with us in our emptiness and loneliness but she does not take it away. And yet... "we may start to sense that in the midst of our sadness there is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness there is the possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginnings of a quiet solitude." Henri Nouwen
If I had a Pentecostal bent I might be tempted to shout, "Hallelujah," but as I am a Canadian Baptist I will only whisper it softly.