Spiritually Frozen

I am pretty good with the Spiritual but not Religious. I'm comfortable with them. I suppose they are my people.

I've got a knack with the immediate aftermath of traumatic death. Liminal Spaces R Us or something like that. I'm good at getting the narratives to hear each other. I'm good at keeping the energy flowing. I'm good at giving the Spirit some room to move.

But, I'll tell you, I'm used to people who are looking for that space or have been dropped in it so suddenly their guard is down.

I'm telling you - I've had it easy.

My friend has cancer. The relationship we have shared has been around volunteerism and art and Thai food. I knew she had some grown children and that she was divorced. I think I knew she was from the East Coast. But mostly, I knew that she loved the arts and loved finding ways to get in for free or cheap - don't we all.

Things I did not know include that she was an addict who went to rehab when her kids were young. Things I did not know include the interesting ideas that the best way to solve a problem and to show love is to throw money at it.

The things that chemo brain will reveal.

Somehow, either because cancer is perhaps tragic but not fast enough to be traumatic (personally, I'm finding a strange anxious numbness I've never before experienced), no one in this family is really interested in contemplating the spiritual. Perhaps this moment happened when the diagnosis was given - I didn't find out until the last three months, right before hospice became an option - and now there is a hard scab or perhaps that moment didn't come, the scabs are really decades of walls that have never been scaled.

So, I have this open space - but it's empty. Nothing is moving to fill it. And I don't have to be the center of the universe. It's hard work and exhausting for one thing. But I say yes. And that often is enough for currents to flow. Often, really, I don't have to do much of anything, just watch while it happens. But now, I've opened the gates and nothing.

This family is frozen. They might be talking to each other, but they aren't talking to or through me, and the anxiety and depression of my friend doesn't seem to move at all either. Because, it's ok if they don't want to talk to me. But I can usually feel the movement of the emotions, of the spiritual anyway, and I don't feel anything. I don't even have anything to work with when my friend tells me she is bored, that she doesn't know how to feel. She believes she has done all the spriitual work, decades ago through AA, so any nudging I send that way gets shut down.

I'm trying to figure out how to cope with the fact that I would like to stay open, just in case, but it leaves me personally unbalanced, that there is nothing but a dry wind blowing through the place. I find myself especially anxious when I go visit or even plan to go visit.

What is it like to minister to the spiritually frozen? This, like always, is the last thing I thought I was learning.