The 36 days between Aug. 1 and Sept. 5 are so full of milestones and memorials for me that it’s hard to keep up.  Our wedding anniversary; the birthdays of my father and my mother-in-law and the death day of my beloved and spiritually formative Khalo (all three of these are on the same day); the anniversary of the death of my baby within my womb; the anniversary of my ordination as a priest.  And, even if I were to forget one of these milestones (which I can’t imagine ever actually happening), my body would remind me.  I can almost feel the chemicals in my brain realigning themselves as each of these days passes.  I can definitely feel the nausea of grief and the comforting but severe pain beneath my ribs that signals the presence of love, of the inherent goodness of things even in the midst of chaos and loss. 

And these days have been especially hard this year.  There’s the pandemic, of course.  And then there’s the ongoing (never-ending?) more personal suffering that is the result of my collision last spring with patriarchy, racism and the evils of the “good ol’ boys.”  Crossing the “usual” milestones that this month brings while in the very center of this particular wilderness is a new kind of heady experience.  To be able to see how those past events were so very defining of who I am now and to be able to know simultaneously that this current experience will be equally defining, to experience the refiner’s fire even as one knows it to be a refining fire… Well, even I don’t have the words for that…

One of the gifts of this current wilderness is that I have learned that I am an “8” on the enneagram, a sort of personality-diagram that’s an excellent tool for self-understanding and psychological growth.  I took a shortened enneagram test to find it out, but actually, anyone who knows me and who knows anything about the enneagram probably could have told you I was an 8 pretty immediately.  I have little patience for doing anything other than addressing the realities of life – and it shows.  Many people experience 8s as “intense” when they’re being polite about it.  As my friend Allison says, “When they’re not being polite and they’re talking about a woman, people usually call her a bitch.”  I like “intense” better.   

But, as my therapist helpfully pointed out to me the other day, it’s not just other people who experience 8s as intense.  We experience ourselves as intense, too!  Which was good for me to have acknowledged and affirmed, because, y’all, it has been intense here inside my head and heart for the past six months or so.  And this past month-of-all-the-milestones??  Well… there have been a lot of tears and a lot of seemingly-random Facebook posts and a lot of miles ridden on my bike as I try to release some of this emotion.  It has felt, of late, as though my skin is too tight, as though there is too much within to be held within, as though something is always just about to break, or break open. 

And the thing is, I don’t know how much longer this season is going to last.  I have no clue how much stronger the fire will burn before it burns away.  It could be months; it could be years.  It could get even more painful, even more searing, before the end.  Sometimes, I wonder if it will ever end at all.  But that’s on my bad days. 

In my mid-twenties, I used to get migraines pretty regularly.  When the pain was almost unbearable, I would comfort myself with the knowledge that migraines do always, eventually end (or at least mine did).  The pain does stop.  And I would think to myself that each moment that I endured it was one more moment closer to the end.  I’ve used this technique for calming myself when my kids have been sick, too.  When I have agonized over watching them suffer and felt overcome by the sense of my own powerlessness, I have managed it by remembering that each agonizing minute has moved us all one minute closer to their wholeness and health. 

The truth is, like this bloody pandemic, all seasons come to an end, eventually.  And each day, each moment that goes by, we are that much closer to the end of it all.  At some point, even Moses’ burning bush must have stopped burning and just gotten back to some semblance of normal.  Though I imagine you could always catch the scent of singed leaves nearby.

In the meantime, if anyone needs me, I’ll be over here, dwelling in my emotions, set alight by the Refiner’s fire and yet, amazingly, not burning up.  I hope.