In today’s meditation, CAC teacher James Finley shares his personal experience with domestic abuse. We invite readers to ground themselves as Finley describes growing up with a violent, alcoholic father. Beginning at age twelve, he stayed awake at night, terrified for his mother’s safety.
If my father was in a good mood when I went upstairs to bed, I felt it was safe for me to go to sleep. But quite often he would already be in an angry mood when I and my younger siblings went to bed. And so I would keep my vigil, sitting at the top of the stairs, listening, trying to figure out if he was just hitting [our mother] again, grabbing hold of her, pulling her hair, or if he was starting to kill her.…
It was in these ongoing traumatizing conditions that I learned to survive by being hypervigilant, looking for the first signs that my father was beginning to become angry at my mother, my younger brothers, or me. I learned to survive by being as passive as I could, doing my best to do whatever my father wanted me to do, so as not to trigger his rage…. Most of all, I learned to survive by being as interiorly grounded as I could be in God’s sustaining presence, which protected me from nothing, even as it inexplicably sustained me in the ongoing, atmospheric traumas that pervaded my life in those days.
Seeking solace, Finley created an altar with the Bible, and images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, at which he prayed every night.
As I look back at these experiences now, what most stands out to me is a truth of the awakening heart known to those who have been fortunate enough to have experienced it. This truth being the surprising realization that from the hidden depths of a darkness too terrible to name or explain, God can emerge as a sovereign, silent presence that carries us forward, amazed and grateful, into realms of clarity and fulfillment that we could scarcely have imagined.…
I recall how I would go to my room in the evening to pray. As I knelt on the floor with my rosary wrapped around my hands, the darkness in which I was kneeling was, at the surface level, merely the darkness of the room illumined by the blue light of the vigil candle shining through its glass container…. At an infinitely deeper, more interior level, the darkness in which I knelt in prayer was the primordial darkness in which God’s hidden presence was sustaining me in ways I could not and did not need to comprehend.…
In looking back at these moments, I can see how I was being led by God into enigmatic and paradoxical waters in which I was invited to realize that ultimately speaking there is no wall, no barrier between the polar opposite realms of trauma and transcendence that meet and merge and interpenetrate each other in endlessly varied ways throughout our lives.
Reference:
James Finley, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023), 11–13, 15, 18, 19, 20.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, barbed (detail), 2021, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Even in the midst of twisted barbs, green life survives and thrives.
Story from Our Community:
The Daily Meditations on Breathing Under Water are, once again, helping to awaken me. I’m realizing that I need to allow God to reflect back my own heart. Richard Rohr has long said, “Great love or great suffering can serve to awaken us.” I never understood what he meant by “great love,” but now, after 68 years in the church, I’m finally starting understand that I need to see more clearly my own heart. To see it clearly—and not be afraid of what I see.
—Deborah C.
