"My present trial seems to me a somewhat painful one, and I have the humiliation of knowing how badly I bore it at first. I now want to accept and to carry this little cross joyfully, to carry it silently, with a smile in my heart and on my lips, in union with the Cross of Christ. My God, blessed be Thou; accept from me each day the embarrassment, inconvenience, and pain this misery causes me. May it become a prayer and an act of reparation." (Elizabeth Leseur, My Spirit Rejoices)

***

These words carry to my ear a scandal: joyfully, silently, reparation.

Humiliation. 

I'm writing to you from a trial of my own, from a multifactorial illness with few facets of accompanying joy. My notes here are for the restless, for persons who like me spend their hours scrapping for tiny graces -- a conversation, the smell of cooking garlic, a normal blood test, a birdsong or distraction or moment without pain.

I have nothing to offer you but my dark places.

What does it mean "to accept and to carry this little cross joyfully," Elizabeth Leseur? We do not all share the mystic's inclination, her habitude of immediacy with God.

For myself, I have almost no faith. I am bitter from my suffering. At twenty-four, I face a life of chronic illness and a rehabilitation from recent traumas which seems so un-beginnable. Failure and solitude have been my long friends these ten years, with only scattered lights of activity or love.

Here I am, humiliated, seeking a hermitage where my silence can turn to speech, where my wracked body can find reparation, where dark places become holy (though they remain dark) & where I might find joy.

If you read this blog along, you will find poems and paintings and philosophizings along with rank & heartless groans. Here, too: stories of brightness and trouble and more.

May it (all) become a prayer.

          --- Noel