Faith

I can rarely catch my dreams. Sometimes, I can catch a feeling; perhaps fright or concern or confusion. If I am really lucky I can capture a scene, but on the whole I don’t know what I dream, other than I feel sure that I do dream.

This morning I woke up feeling quite rested but again: nothing. No dream was remembered. However, Psalm 23 was running through my head: 

“Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me.”

I lay there on my side with the words of the psalm running through my head over and over and the words conjured a memory.

It was rather a long time ago. My children were little; one of them not yet born. I was living in the United States but I had returned to Australia to spend some time with my family: a little holiday for me and the children over the American summer. I’d put the children to bed and my very sick father was asleep. My mother and I were sitting by the fire and the night was very still. Out of nowhere she said to me that she knew that something was wrong. She could feel it, she said and she wanted to know what was troubling me.

I remember feeling that the issue was so buried inside me that no words would rise to the surface that  would enable me to share my sorrow with anyone, but as we sat in silence I heard words coming from my mouth; not my voice in the slightest, but my words emanating from somewhere very deep within me.

She listened and she said to me that I had been through something that must have nearly torn me in two but she was glad that she knew; that she could understand my failure to engage with her completely now. She told me that I was very strong and that she knew that I would be all right.

Although nothing had really changed and my situation was still exactly as it had been half an hour before, I felt much better. Perhaps it was the sharing that made a difference; that I had “unburdened myself”, as they say.

When I was back in my home in the United States, I received a letter from my mother and in the letter was a cutting from the newspaper. It was this poem:

I Had a Dream

One night I had a dream
I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene I noticed two sets
of footprints in the sand,
one belonging to me
and the other to my Lord.
When the last scene of my life shot before me
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
There was only one set of footprints.
I realized that this was at the lowest
and saddest times in my life.
This always bothered me
and I questioned the Lord
about my dilemma.
"Lord, you told me when I decided to follow You,
You would walk and talk with me all the way.
But I'm aware that during the most troublesome
times of my life there is only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed You most,
you leave me."
He whispered,”My precious, precious child,
I love you and will never leave you
never, ever during your times of trial and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints
It was then that I carried you."

Margaret Fishback Powers.

The gesture meant a great deal to me; not only that she had thought of me and felt the words would help but because the words were exactly right. I had been to the beaches close to where she lived all my life and the image of there being only one set of footprints because I had been carried by ‘the Lord’ in my hour of need, truly resonated with me. I kept the cutting close; referred to it often. (I think to myself at this moment, that I never told her...never told her how much the little gift meant to me...)

When it was time to pack and return to my homeland, the cutting came with me. And, when something happened where I again needed a great deal of strength and faith that this too shall pass, that I was again walking through the shadow of the valley of death, I retrieved my cutting, taped it all over for fear it would disintegrate and kept it beside me on my desk.

One day, my husband saw the little cutting and asked about it and I simply said without fanfare that my mother had sent it to me years ago. My relationship with the poem was just too private to say any more.

This morning I realized that I have not only walked through the shadow of the valley of death but I have come out the other side intact. Perhaps, this is what I had dreamt...

I would not say that I am a particularly religious person. I don’t attend church regularly although I love it when I do; get a great deal from it. I was brought up Church of England even though my mother was Catholic because when my father heard the stories of how terrified the priests had made my mother during confessions, he said he didn’t want his children going through that.

That I am not particularly religious in any organized way makes my sense of faith all the more intriguing, I think. For it is faith that has sustained me in my hour of need; faith that I am not alone and that I have the inner reserves to walk through as many shadows of the valley of death that I may need to traverse.

A few years ago, I received a call that my aunt was dying and my mother and my sister were on their way to the hospital. I dropped everything to go to be with them but I was too late and when I arrived at the hospital they told me she had passed away.

We went for coffee. To be honest, my mother and aunt were not close to their sister but I had always found she touched me in some way. On the other end of politics, a trade union person through and through, she signified for me “the battler”; that person who doesn’t have an easy life but keeps on going. My mother and aunt told me that in her final moments on this earth she had sat up from a deep sleep, thrust her arms into the air and said, “Take me”. I have thought of her often since and what her inner world must have been like.

I cannot put into words; this sense of things that one is not alone; that there is someone walking beside me. I feel it; feel it sustaining me.

It is said often, on tumblr sites and the like that if someone chooses not to be in your life, you should forget him or her. I get the point but I am not prepared to be so rigid about absence. The spirit lives on sometimes; connections are felt; nothing is over until it is over, unless you choose to end it in your heart.