The Church of Unseen Children

I became an adult at age 6, when I first realized no one would dry my tears but me. What happened that day is a story I may tell another time, but my point here is that there is something very ancient and very tragic about the child who weeps without hope of comfort. In short, they are no longer a child, but an adult who carries the world’s weight on shoulders too small to sustain it.

I mention this because today I woke up crying. What happened the night before is also a story I may tell another time. But my greater grief—that on this Blue Sunday I no longer expect to love and be loved by the same person passionately, tenderly, specifically–only exacerbated my tears. It was that small child still crying, now stripped of a future happiness to soothe her brow.

I believe in God. Some people say the Universe, or Divine Intelligence, or Divine Feminine. I say God, because that one word encompasses all those concepts with a greater economy and why should zealots get the monopoly on it?

So I believe in God, but sometimes—usually as temperatures drop and nights grows long and my heart is unmet—I am not sure if God believes in me. If someone said that to me, I would know that they were wrong, and would say so without faltering or blinking. I would say we are all beloved children—children of the universe, I would say—and that faith is a two-way street that goes nowhere if we do not get on it.

I know all this holds true. I also know that people leave this earth unmothered, unseen, unhealed. That many die under a cloud of injustice and cruelty, and that their lives do not end with a period so much as an ellipses with great pain roaring between each dot. Such sad stories are not the true end, of course—as an intuitive you learn fast that love and light are the only energies that last—but on some days what looms seems like the worst kind of eternity.

What to do in those moments–how to make your bed, coffee, face while despair yawns mightily–is where true adulthood offers its greatest grace. You rise, you open the curtains, you bask in the sun for as long as it shines. You hold others’ hands when they need you, and you take the hands offered to help you up. You are still alive, and you are old enough to know this is a blessing. You have lived long to know that only change is inevitable, and that this is the greatest blessing of all.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy