Where Do You Stand: Realm of God or Fear?

My Life, My Story: Naked Before God

The story continues or, more accurately, it unfolds.

Today I present the first part in a series of unknown length, entitled “My Life, My Story, My Gifts.”

Part One of these Words of Comfort, which I chose to call “Naked Before God,” is a story I began writing some years ago. In fact, it is a story that was so hard for me to think about back then in 2000, that I stopped writing it.

I share this portion of a half-written story with you not to elicit sympathy, to be scandalous or to create drama. Neither is it my intention to dwell in the past, constantly reliving and/or rehashing my haunted memories.

Along with Sacred Words and the Words from the Heart, this article is intended to serve as a touchstone for healing for you and in fact for me. While, your journey might be very different from mine, I am confident that we share some of the same emotions, feelings and attitudes, albeit to varying degrees.

What I also do know for sure, is that we all yearn for wholeness, for peace and more significant, for love and acceptance. Therefore, I share this portion of my life to show how far I (and indeed you) have come. I share this story in the hope of creating deeper understanding of the process of healing and transformation - that it can take a minute to hurt someone or be hurt but years or a lifetime to heal.

As I did last week, I do again now in asking that you read this posting with compassion, not sympathy, with love, not judgement and with a sense of the hope and strength that it was written with.

Further, after reading this and any other article (s) here and you find it helpful and/or insightful, you are invited to return regularly for more of the same. Be counted as one of the Comforting Words community members by simply clicking on the “Join Our Mailing List” feature at the right of your screen and follow the prompts.

Your ‘membership’ gives you a chance to receive one of the monthly surprises! The first “surprise” draw will be done on August 31, 2005 from the Mailing List. The winner will be notified by email on Thursday, September 1, 2005.

The obligations for being a member of this community are few. In fact, there is only one – a desire to live authentically. As the host of this Blog and the Comforting Words Community, I willingly open myself to you. I am here to support you as I am able to, whenever and however needed.

You may contact me via email or you can join the continuing conversation at the InComfort Discussion Forum. If needs be, I will call you, if you provide a telephone number or you can call me - members have access to a number to me.

Whenever you visit, spend some time participating in the Poll, use the Gift Reminder feature, read your Horoscope daily and catch up on Human-Interest News items. Interested in a book mentioned here? Well, make your purchase through our connection with Amazon. All these features are to the right of your screen.

Sacred Words
(By using Sacred Words to describe the quotations that I chose to use in this section, my intention is to share with you words from a variety of sources that are dedicated to Truth and to what is holy in our experiences as human beings.)

From Mary Bigg’s Women’s Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women, 262, 53:

“I said to myself, “The only thing they can do is to kill my body. They are not going to get my mind, and my soul will live on in my children and in other people.” Shahieda Issel (b. 1957)

“So much missing, no sense of self, no core, no trust. Only a deep hollow we need to fill.” Sister Michele (Indian Nun on child prostitution)

From A Course In Miracles, Textbook, 13: VI. 5. 1- 4

“The miracle enables you to see your brother without his past, and so perceive him as born again. His errors are all past, and by perceiving him without them you are releasing him. And since his past is yours, you share in this release. Let no dark cloud out of your past obscure him from you, the truth lies only in the present, and you will find it if you seek it there.”

Words of Comfort

Hellshire, Jamaica: February 2000: Lying stark naked on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan, spinning and quietly humming its own tune, I am crying.

Crying because I simply cannot remember. Crying because the harder I try to remember, the vision fails to appear on the blank, black screen of my eyelids.

“Why can’t you be like her?” I hear my voice asking. “Everything else fits almost perfectly, so why can’t you remember?” The her my voice is referring to is Iyanla Vanzant whose books I had just poured over.

I have been lying on the bed for almost an hour now, but it felt like more - it felt like I have been exposed all my life but as the emperor with his new clothes, I was the only one who could not see my nakedness.

“Just go back,” my voice was coaxing. “Just go back!”

However, I could not and it was getting cold, a sheet of goose pimples was slowing creeping up my body. Covering myself with the warm sheet, curling on my side and pushing my old friend - my thumb - in my mouth, was all I wanted to do.

“You are thirty-five, damn you!” screamed my voice. “Thirty-five year olds don’t suck their thumbs,” it admonished me. “That’s why you can’t remember, you always suck your thumb and pretend that all is well.”

“All is well.” That did it. Those words always get me.

The floodgates opened and from deep within me, instead of the warm jersey sheets we had recently bought, I felt a different kind of warmth rising. I could feel the tears bulging from tiny molecules and enlarging into juicy, hot, salty beads as they paused in my gut.

Travelling through my body with the tears was a pain so piercing yet freeing. As the companions reached their destination, my heart, I screamed “No!”

And so I remembered.

***************************************************************************

My earliest memories of my childhood is not in numbers. What I freely recall is walking across the street to Miss Gardener’s grocery shop directly in front of our house.

Miss Gardner was the ‘big’ lady on my avenue, not only because she owned her house, as most people who lived in Pembroke Hall in the 1960’s did. It was the thriving business, the grocery shop, that she had at the side of her house that gave her that status - at least to my five year old mind.

For me, at age five, this was the best shop in the neighbourhood as it had all I could wish for. Lollipops, mint and ‘plummy’ sweeties, cream soda and those absolutely wonderful cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. What more could a girl want! All I had to do to be in heaven was to look right, look left, then look right again and cross the street. I did not even need money.

Over the years, I would come to understand that my family was not as large as I had first imagined. There were numerous men and women who traversed through my mother’s life, people who I had to call Aunt or Uncle. It was one such Uncle, Maurice, a ‘boarder’ in my mother’s rented house, who told Miss Gardner to give me a bottle of cream soda and a pack of creamed-filled Hostess Cake every day on his tab.

I just had to make it across the street into the shop, careful to avoid waking the mongrel bloodhounds she had protecting her property and business. In those days, half-starved and therefore angry, dogs provided the security system an entrepreneur required. These dogs, however, were hell-bent on snapping at passers-by and good customers alike through the spaces in the wooden gate separating business from home.

In those days, it was drummed into children that “manners take you everywhere,” and my mother took this responsibility very seriously - drumming I mean. So, needing my daily supply of heavenly treasures, upon entering the shop, I opened my mouth and shouted at the top of my voice, to ensure that Miss Gardner could hear me over the counters that towered over my spindly frame, “Good evening, Miss Gardner!”

“Good evening, Cutie,” she would reply. “What for you today?”

Cutie. That was my nickname and one which I loved for many years. I am not sure who first called me Cutie but for some reason I believe it must have been my mother. Not that only a mother could have considered me cute.

I was a large baby, weighing almost ten pounds at birth. My mother spared nothing by way of food and clothing and so by the time I was a year old, my cheeks were as chubby as my rump.

My mother, it seems, had this need to prove to the neighbours and all who cared to notice that she had the cutest and the best fed child. Mama, as I call her, had me ‘late’ in life, at least according to the then Jamaican standards and therefore felt she had much to prove not least of which is the fact that she could afford to have a child.

She was a career woman, you see, and was busy honing her skills, first as one of the first batch of female conductresses on the Jamaica Omnibus Service (JOS) and later as a beautician. It was during her first career that she met my father, the dashing, debonair, JOS bus driver named Efitz or Fitzy for short.

Mama was more than a career woman. Measured by another Jamaican 1960’s standard, she was also a ‘loose’ woman. In love and lust, Mama was a fornicator and the fruit of her lust or love, whichever you prefer, was me - Cutie.

I really do not recall what Mama looked like in those early years of my life. My memory is dim possibly because I did not see her much during that time as she was so busy trying to make everything right and I, her Cutie, was left in the care of domestic helpers and neighbours.

Pictures of her show an average height, slender and shapely young woman, dressed in the fashion of the day - pedal pushers. Her ‘brown’ skin was smooth, tempting anyone to touch her bare shoulders which were exposed in the puffed sleeved, off-the-shoulder blouse.

To this day, I can remember her saying to me decades later, as she wistfully looked at that picture, “That was when I was Cherry, now I am the branch.”

Miss Cherry, as most people call her, was madly in love with Fitzy and, apparently, he felt the same about her - at least for a while. He was something of a playboy, not unlike many true-bloodied Jamaican men. Cherry hardly spoke about the details of their romance, except of course to tell what went wrong.

“He had another girlfriend, a conductress like me,” she told me once. “But him was good to me, ‘specially when I was pregnant with you.” With a sad smile, she would remember when they moved in together, into his parents’ house on West Main Drive in Maverley, the community neighbouring the one she and I would live soon after my birth.

In the 60’s, Maverley was a middle class community, a place where many working families purchased land and constructed starter homes. Mama and Fitzy renovated a couple rooms in the house and made it comfortable for themselves and the child that they were expecting.

If my mother is to be believed, and I have little reason to doubt this, it seems my father was a regular ‘cocks man’ at the bus company. “You were not your father’s first child, you know,” she told me quite matter-of-factly. “He had a son with another chick that also worked at JOS.”

Miss Cherry gave me this titbit when I was about five or six years old. “Louis’ mother went to foreign though, she went to the States,” was the next piece in the introduction to my half-brother, with whom I would later have an on/off relationship.

“Fitzy and I were really in love,” Mama would say, sounding as if she was really trying to convince herself about this than making a factual statement. “He would meet me at the bust stop on Saturday mornings, to help me carry the market bags,” she proudly recollected.

According to her, things changed six weeks after my birth when his mother, a devout Christian woman, finally got the upper hand and caused the young mother to flee the West Main Drive residence by night.

Recounting the story of that fateful night in 1965, Mama, her eyes full of tears and terror as if she was right back into the drama of the event, told me, “She never liked me. I don’t know what I do ‘dis woman but she just never liked me.” With the tears streaming down her face she recalled that little things would happen, that little things would be said about her which someone would tell her but she would disregard.

My paternal grandmother, according to Miss Cherry, did everything to frustrate her. “She locked off the water on our side of the house. I came home from work and see your clothes still in ‘de soap water,” Mama remembered. “The helper tell me that she couldn’t wash because Mrs. E tun’ off the water.”

I will never forget her words about the moment of decision for her, the decision which would have profound impact on not only her life but in fact mine. With steaming tears rolling down her cheeks she said, “Cutie, it was like something buss’ in me head when the helper said ‘dat she had to go next door to beg some water to make your feed!”

That was the turning point for her.

Always into the mystical, Mama told me that she had a ‘visitor‘, her dead aunt, in her dreams that fateful night. Her visitor had a message and it was a very simple one indeed - flee.

“I quietly got up out of the bed, careful not to wake Fitzy, and packed a few things in your baby bag and left.”

Mama would share this story about the dream and her flight over and over again with me throughout my childhood years. It was told to me usually when some bills were to be paid and I was asking for money to go to Miss Gardner or some other shop. This story is so indelibly imprinted in my mind, whether a deliberate act on my mother’s part or not I may never know.

The effect, however, was that my relationship with my father’s mother, ‘Granma’ as I would come to call her, was strained and remained ever on the surface. We never shared a hug much less a kiss or words of affection. That was how my resentment of ‘old’ people started to bud and when I began to question what it meant to be a Christian.

I became a stranger to not only my paternal grandparents but also to my father. By extension, I would soon become a stranger to the Christian faith and started to live life on my own terms.

In the years after the flight from Maverley, I was to see Daddy less times than the number of fingers on my two hands, including the day of his funeral in 1980.

Fifteen years old and with less ‘visits’ with my father than the number of years that I had been on earth, our good-byes were said with me standing to the side of a white coffin, looking down at this stranger, the shell of the man that I had in my heart.

I silently wept and continued to unknowingly grieve my loss until 2002 when, along with my daughter and Juds, I visited his grave for the first time since his burial and finally mourned him and our ‘relationship’ before leaving for Canada...

To Be Continued

Words from the Heart

Prayer for Our Parents
Marianne Williamson in Illuminata: A Return to Prayer

Dear God,

Please bless my parents.
Thank you, thank them for the life that they gave to me.
For the ways they helped me and made me strong, I give thanks.
For the ways they stumbled and held me back,
Please help me to forgive them and receive Your compensation.

May their spirits be blessed, their roads forward made easy.
Please release them, and release me, from my childhood ties now gone by.
Release us also from any bitterness I still hold.
They paved the way, in all that they did, for where I have been has led me here.

I surrender my parents to the arms of God.
Thank you, dear ones, for your service to me.
Bless your souls.
May your spirits fly free.

May we enter into the relationship God wills for us.
Thank You, Lord, for I am free now.
Glory, hallelujah.
Amen.

Blessings, until the next audiopost.

Fake It Until You Make It

My Life, My Story, My Gifts

This week, I open with an invitation. After reading this article, you are invited to join the Comforting Words community, if it helped or inspired you. You are also invited to share the fact that this community exists with a friend.

The obligations for being a member of this community are few. In fact, there is only one – a desire to live authentically.

As the host of this Blog and the Comforting Words Community, I willingly open myself to you. I am here to support you as I am able to, whenever and however needed. You may contact me via email or you can join the continuing conversation at the InComfort Discussion Forum.

Whenever you visit, spend some time participating in the Poll, use the Gift Reminder feature, read your Horoscope daily and catch up on Human-Interest News items. Interested in a book mentioned here? Well, make your purchase through our connection with Amazon. All these features are to the right of your screen.

Comforting Words is more than a Blog of inspirational articles – it is an online community, it is a place where stories are told and support is given.

Be a part of it by simply clicking on the “Join Our Mailing List” feature at the right of your screen and follow the prompts.

Join Comforting Words – read the weekly articles, listen to mid-week voices post and your ‘membership’ gives you a chance to receive one of the monthly surprises!

As for this week’s article, there will be no extended introduction other than to say that I knew the time had come to write it. In fact, this might very well be the first in a series – of how many I do not know – which will end, when it ends.

My Words of Comfort today, “My Life, My Story, My Gifts,” have been years in coming. Along with Sacred Words and the Words from the Heart, I ask that you read this posting with compassion, not sympathy, with love, not judgement and with a sense of the hope and strength that it was written with.

Sacred Words

(I decided to change the name of this section, as I felt the previous title did not adequately cover the veneration I hold for all words that serve as a link, a connector between my experience and the Divine.

By using Sacred Words to describe the quotations that I chose to use in this section, my intention is to share with you words from a variety of sources that are dedicated to Truth and to what is holy in our experiences as human beings.)

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”
Isak Dinesen (1885 – 1962)

If it had not been for storytelling, the black family would not have survived. It was the responsibility of the Uncle Remus types to transfer philosophies, attitudes, values, and advice, by way of storytelling using creatures in the woods as symbols.
(Jackie Torrence b. 1944)

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.
Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)

“I think it worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and “manage” by base arts a husband or a father, - I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.”
Frances Power Cobbé (1822 – 1904)

Quotes taken from Mary Bigg’s Women’s Words: The Columbia Book of Quotations by Women, 384 - 389

Words of Comfort

It was clear to me that the time for this series of articles had come when a regular reader of Comforting Words posed the question.

She identifies herself as my biggest fan – whatever that means. I would rather identify her as my newest woman-friend.

André, the tarot card reader who I had met on the beaches of Ocho Rios in Jamaica, had told me that there is a long line of women standing behind me – supporting and giving me their strength.

C is the latest in this line.

Living in Ontario as she does, we communicate by email and through Yahoo Messenger. Since this conversation started some months ago, I knew she was here to teach me something – to pull me up to a higher level of authenticity. One would never imagine that at first, that is if you were looking only at the surface.

To the casual onlooker, it was C, not I, who needed to be pulled up. Her life was a “mess” – her personal relationship not simply on the rocks but dead at the bottom of the ocean, bills piling up and little work coming in.

However, things are never as they seem.

Soon after listening to my audio post, Cloud of Loneliness, C sent me an email. This was to be the precipitator for an extended exchange of emails between us for a couple hours and then an online chat. Here is some of what she wrote:

Can it be that all this time I have been talking to you online I was so wrapped up in my own pain that I didn't recognize your own?

Having just now listened to your audio-blog I have an intense feeling of selfishness and I need to address this. The word selfish is not one I use often or use lightly... I believe it to be one of the most misused words in the English language...so when the word comes to my tongue (or fingertips, as the case may be) I mean it wholeheartedly.

I am very aware of the value of being able to offer support and comfort to someone in need, I know that what you have done for me has brought you some measure of validation and healing... having said that, I hope you will afford me the very same opportunity to not only help you understand your struggle, but also to navigate my way through my own quagmire.

Although we have very different paths to finding comfort and keeping the faith, we most definitely meet where it counts, and that is the undeniable need to be authentic.

I am amazed that someone who seems so strong, who is so quick to offer "comforting words" is in such a lonely place. And yet, it should come as no surprise at all... I am in the same place... always able to offer support and comfort to my friends... and damn good advice too...I might add. Maybe we just need to hear the same things from someone we love and trust in order for it to ring true for us?

I think of you often and yearn to understand your situation... you say you are an open book... here's one bibliophile that would love nothing more than to turn the page... tell me something, maybe I can help ameliorate your loneliness and your pain. I have much insight where your beliefs are concerned but I know little about your life...

I did not ask C’s permission to re-print the email and I do hope she will forgive me but she is such a wonderful writer, at least in my opinion, that it would have been very difficult for me to paraphrase what she wrote.

Understand that I have never met this woman, at least face to face. This apparently did not matter – she received me, she heard and responded to what Marc Gafni calls my Soul Print.

God knew I needed someone to do just that on that dark day last week and C was it. As an aside, is it synchronicity or an accident that we share the same initials?

What this email and the subsequent “conversation” between C and I resulted in, was a turning on of another light for me.

She commented that she knew very little about my life – a comment I initially discounted, telling her that she must not have read all my articles here at Comforting Words. C contradicted me by saying that she did but no where in those articles she heard my full story, the one that I shared with her through six or seven very long emails.

In that moment it dawned on me that I have not lived up to my own commitment to be an open book, to provide a sanctuary, a safe place for women, gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people and young adults who are existing in difficult circumstances.

You see, this blog is just one portion of a wider commitment I have made to myself before God. I committed myself to tell my stories to this community of people, to humanity and the world, with the intention to comfort and transform through the core message of love.

Some people, thankfully very few, in my personal space would rather that I “shut up,” and just live my life. “Why,” they ask, “do you have to write and talk about these things, especially to strangers?”

Read the quotes again that I have selected for Sacred Words and you will begin to understand why:

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

“If it had not been for storytelling, the black family would not have survived.”

“Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.”

The last quote is for me the most powerful:

“I think it worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and “manage” by base arts a husband or a father, - I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.”

There are other reasons, other motivations for telling my story in such a public fashion.

I firmly believe and have witnessed that secrets kill the spirit and to be spirit-less is to merely exist, not living to the fullest of one’s capacity and potentials. Worst yet, mere existence renders one incapable of loving wastefully as you are caught in a quagmire of despair, confusion and hate of self and the world.

I tell my story in order to live fully the life that God has asked and designated me to live and grow through. I tell my story to pass on a philosophy of personal healing, transformation, freedom and love to the child that God has blessed me with, so that she might live fully and be all that she was meant to be.

What C helped me to understand – she probably does not know this yet although we have spoken on the telephone, I told her to read this first – is that I must continue to tell my story and with even greater intensity and passion.

“Why?” you may ask along with those people in my life that are afraid of my brand of storytelling.

My story honours the woman that I love and the journey we have and continue to share. Also, being 'courageous' and telling my story helps her to recognise her story, and one day maybe she will tell it - in her own voice.

When I tell my story it serves as a testament to the healing potential of Love - in whatever form, shape, colour or size it comes – to the power of Love to take those who have been broken, battered and bruised at the hands of humanity and make something new.

There is a Negro Spiritual that I learnt at the Conference I attended earlier this year in Toronto. The refrain has stuck in my soul: “Something good in my life, do something good in my life I pray.”

Unconsciously, that has been my prayer for many years. Fervent were my prayers for something good as a child growing up with an abusive mother, as a survivor of childhood sexual and physical abuse, as a survivor of domestic violence and rape.

I continually hope for something good in my life as I unrepentantly speak up for racial and economic equality, as I walk the difficult path of being a lesbian, especially one of African-descent and who one dares to call herself a Christian.

My prayers for something good became even more sincere as I watch my child grow into her womanhood and sense of self.

I knew something good happened in my life the day Juds, my partner of 15 years and one of the most beautiful women the Divine has created, entered it. “Teach me how to love her, to keep this ‘good thing’ you have blessed me with, despite what everyone say,” has been my cry since that day.

The journey continues and many a good things have happened – in my life and in the life of others. However, not all is well, in my life and in the lives of countless others.

How can it be when we see the evidence in the media, we witness poverty and desperation by walking on the other side of the tracks and we hear it through the walls that separate us from our neighbours.

Too many children are being sexually assaulted, too many women are being raped, too many are going to bed hungry, too many LGTBQ are in hiding and too many men are aimless and homeless for us to think it is okay to be quiet and stop telling our stories.

Therefore, I will continue take the risk and tell stories.

Over the next one, two or three postings, I know that the journey with some of you will end. I, however, must tell my story, which is the story of the millions of children, women, LGTBQ people and, indeed, men who are voiceless.

So, I say farewell to those of you for whom truth and storytelling is too much and to those of you who prefer to remain in the darkness, hiding from the realties that many live with.

On the other hand, welcome – to the fireside, to the dance, to the story of my life and to the story of yours – those of you who thought you were alone, who thought no one understood, who thought no one would listen, who thought Love had left the building.

Words from the Heart

Still I Rise
Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words
You may cut me with your eyes.
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a [woman, homosexual, battered wife, survivor of sexual abuse, homeless, poor] black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise.
I rise.
I rise.

Blessings.

Cloud of Loneliness

Exodus: Movement from the "Narrow Places"

Initially, my idea for this week’s article was that I would do a quasi report of my trip to Vancouver and things I discovered about myself while there.

No, that's not me in the picture! Hopeful as I am to be free of inhibitions - I am not quite that advanced yet. I took the picture though with my new camera phone - what a wonderful thing technology is!

I mulled about how to approach such an article and the issues that I wanted to discuss. High on the list was the relationship of the recent announcement that an immigrant, a woman of colour, a child of Haiti is to be 27th Governor General of Canada and the Gay Pride Parade in Vancouver. Intriguing, right?

As I arose Sunday morning, at my usual 5:00 a.m. or there about, I had a sense that this week’s Comforting Words would take a different twist.

While mention must be made of the trip and the upcoming appointment of Michaëlle Jean as Governor General, I share my thoughts with you on, “Exodus: Movement From the 'Narrow Places'” as my Words of Comfort this lovely summer day.

Along with Words from Scripture and Words from the Heart, I invite you to use this article as a starting point to explore your own exodus. Should you need support, please know that I am here.

If this article or any other in this Blog provoke or stir a memory, a thought or an emotion and you need to talk about it, send me an email or, better yet, sign up and be a part of the InComfort Discussion Forum.

The Comforter forum is part of the continuing expansion of Comforting Words along with the other additions to the experience of this community.

Whenever you visit, spend some time participating in the Poll, use the Gift Reminder feature, read your Horoscope and catch up on Human-Interest News or Women e-news .

Interested in a book mentioned here? Well, make your purchase through our connection with Amazon.

If this Blog has been an help or inspiration to you, why not Tell A Friend. All these features are to the right of your screen, simply scroll down.

Comforting Words is more than a Blog of articles – it is an online community and you are invited to be a part of it. Cost of membership is free! You simply have to click on the “Join Our Mailing List” feature at the right of your screen and follow the prompts.

Membership however has its privileges – only members can add a comment to each post and have a straight line number to me!

Join the Comforting Words – read the weekly articles, listen to mid-week voices post and remember, your ‘membership’ gives you a chance to receive one of the monthly surprises!

Words from Scripture

From Hebrew Scripture:
Exodus 6: 7

“I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.”

Words of Comfort

All week, I thought about the direction this article would take, how I would intertwine the stories of my trip to Vancouver – the events, the worship services and my new perspective on Gay Pride Parades – all of which are somehow connected to Michaëlle Jean’s appointment.

On the day designated to write, as my eyes opened to the sound of the rain softly beating on the windowpane, I knew the focus had somewhat shifted. A rainy Sunday morning was not the backdrop for the hard-core report I had in mind. This was a day for remembrance, gentleness, coffee and maybe even breakfast in bed.

Honestly, I even thought of not writing today – this was too gorgeous a morning to spend at the cold, gray screen of a computer. The afternoon was booked too, with my woman-friend, A, coming over to join us for dinner – one which I was scheduled to prepare single-handedly as my partner, the Chef, went to work.

The cable guy was also expected – as we had decided to switch our telephone service to a digital service – and so I had the prefect excuse not to write or post an article today.

However, Spirit, works in mysterious/mischievous ways, Her wonders to unfold.

We had gone to the Cariwest Parade and Festivities here in Edmonton the previous afternoon and as I witnessed the anticipation and excitement of the throng of people downtown, waiting for the ‘bands’ to go by, I thought, “What a wonderful country!”

Here we were in the heartland of Canada jumping and dancing to Caribbean beats – a mingling of Anglo-Saxons, Asians, Africans, Aboriginal and Caribbean people – mindless of any racial or cultural differences, intent only on experiencing the soul of the music.

“If Canada isn’t the most multicultural and full-of-possibilities country in the world, then I don’t know where is,” was my next thought.

The Cariwest Parade in Edmonton, like the Gay Parade that I witnessed in Vancouver are testaments to a country full of unlimited possibilities, a place where people can live to their fullest potentials and expression. It is in this that I saw the connection with the appointment of a female, Haitian migrant as Governor General.

The announcement came a few days after returning from Vancouver, where I came to realize that the Gay Pride Parade is more about making a statement about Canada – at least in the Vancouver version.

What I learnt in Vancouver was that the Parade is more about exhibiting the fact that homosexual orientation knows no socio-economic, geographic, career or racial boundaries than it has to do with sex or a promiscuous lifestyle.

The Prime Minister of Canada echoed this statement, at least to me. The Honourable Paul Martin in presenting Michaëlle Jean to the nation said that the appointment tells the story of Canada. His words deserve full quotation:

[Michaëlle Jean’s] is a story that reminds us what is best about ourselves and about Canada – a nation where equality of opportunity is our most defining characteristic, giving testament to our longest-held values.”

These values spurred me to write this article and write it in this way. Half-heartedly I had decided not to write an article today but that quickly changed as I started my morning meditation and prayer.

Reflecting on the day and the week past and the lessons learnt, offering the irritation that was deeply affecting me as I knelt at my personal altar to the Divine, I asked for truth to be revealed to me. As if The Creator was simply waiting for me to ask, it all came together.

Freedom, justice, equality and respect I am sure are some of the values that Paul Martin had in mind. Maybe he did not mean it in this context, but I am also sure that the biblical Israelites who fled slavery in Egypt were in search of these same values. (A sidebar: What is interesting is that the Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which literally translated means “the Narrow Places.”)

I know for sure that I left my island home and in fact, my own mother – the source of my irritation – I left my Egypt for these values.

Tearfully, I called Juds at work and shared the revelation about my irritation. “I thought I was over it or at least much further down the road,” I mumbled. “Coming to Canada was supposed to be my chance at real freedom, justice, equality and being respected for all that I am.”

You see, my personal Exodus, my physical journey from a ‘narrow place’ called Jamaica, was an escape from the clawing and nauseating experience of self-denial, being dragged further into the closet by a society fearful of differences and by a mother fearful of her own light.

My Exodus was as much a movement forward into a community where, as my favourite preacher man Bishop Spong describes, all are free to “live fully, love wastefully and be all that we are capable of being.”

Rising from my prayerful posture, with swollen eyes I sat at the computer screen and in a spirit of gratitude I wrote this article to thank the people of Canada for providing such a community.

As I wrote, I had to acknowledge that my journey continues, with my bags of memories, forgiving but not forgetful of the personal and cultural history from which I emerged and hope-filled that as time passes the wounds will heal further.

Indeed my heart is full of forgiveness towards the country, Jamaica, her/my people and towards my mother who could not provide the community of wholeness. However, like Michaëlle Jean, who in her acceptance speech made it clear that she values her heritage, ancestry and her personal story, I do too.

Like the people who paraded the streets of Vancouver and Edmonton naming their realties and telling their stories, I love doing the same – no holes barred.

Moreover, as I continue on my spiritual journey from the mental slavery that many people in my land of origin and my land of adoption remains locked in, I am inspired by the words of Marc Gafin : “Telling the story of our [exodus] – is the journey itself.”

This is living authentically. This is living from the expanded self, remembering the past but embracing the Now and knowing that by Grace you will be ‘delivered’ into the future.

Words from the Heart

Clearing Up The Past – A Prayer
Written by Marianne Williamson in her book, “Illuminata: A Return to Prayer.”

Dear God,

Please take my past and take my future.
Transform them both through the miracle of
Your power into energies of love and love only.

May I know the present as You would have me see it.
May I see only You in everyone and everything
that I might be dazzled by light, lifted up by the light,
given joy by the light, and made new by the light.

Release me from my past and deliver me to my future.
In You I trust; nothing else is real.
In You I have faith; nothing else has power.
And so it is that I am where I belong, and I shall strive for nothing.

I am at home; may I feel this and be at peace.
For I would rob myself no longer through my vain imaginings and tormented thoughts.
You are my life.
You are here and now.
Amen.

Blessings, until my mid-week voice post join the Discussion.

Am I Enough?