Blessing in a Curse's Clothing

I am feeling quite pensive this evening. I am not sure if this blog post will make sense to everyone, but I am going to meander around my own mind for a bit and see what I can come up with. I invite you to come along. It feels like it's a great time of year to entertain a little optimism and even if things get a bit lengthy, I trust you will find some worthwhile nugget along the way if you stay with me until the end. Let's hope so! 

To begin with, in reference to the title of this post, I would like to mention there are certain terms within my canon of language versus imagery-connectivity that kicks my mind into gear immediately upon the hearing of them. The word curse is one of those terms. Without fail, it is a word that brings dark connotations to life for me. This time of year, feeling a little bit spooked is not uncommon, of course. Everywhere we look, our eyes are confronted (or perhaps assaulted) with themes of death, hell, the grave, inflatable creatures too many to name, and pumpkins galore. This is Halloween, in other words, and we seem to like to celebrate it with a lot of dubious scenery. I'm not a fan of Halloween, per se, but I understand the appeal. When I see the imagination overload that Halloween produces in some of us, I can only say I hope I never become comfortable with seeing a cemetery spring up over night in the yard at my neighbour's house, for example, but suffice it to say, it gives me pause to see such a thing there now. I am just not sure why that's supposed to be amusing, but I am not here to spoil all the fun. It's considered a decoration, nothing serious. I never liked store-bought decorations very much even though I know they're meant to scare us on purpose, which is supposed to be fun, I know, but I can only take so much of that sort of thing before I am ready to bolt. That tells me everything I need to know, personally. Have I digressed?

I feel a similar repulsion to the word curse. It implies something awful, but it is a word I have fumbled around with a lot in the last several years, for very personal reasons. As with the theme of Halloween, the term brings with it an intense sense of drama and its dark connotations became embedded within my mind to the point of near obsession due to over-exposure, but like the fake cemetery still embedded in the frosty grass on November 1st morning––I feel its time to dig it up and pack it away––its outlived its usefulness. The Halloween decorations must go so the poppies can take up space on the lawn. The next holiday is Remembrance Day (in Canada, where I live), a time to focus on cemeteries once more, but on a much more sobering level. On that same note, as the word curse conjures portents of an ill wind, the reverse observation is equally enthralling, but much more positive. The opposite of a curse is, of course, a blessing. 

This point brings me to the title of this post. I am going to assume the direction I am going to take is becoming obvious but even as I write this, the nuances and various shades of my intentions are very muted. I know I have something good to say, but how do I say it and keep it bright enough for you to want to read to the end? This is not Chicken Soup for the Soul. It is more comparable to bone broth for the malnutritioned, at least that's how I am feeling, with current world events in mind.

I had been researching an old family curse (historically documented and can be read here), and it lead me down some very dark and frightening paths. I had been seeking how to "dismantle" it and I can't tell if, in using that word, I've meant to take it apart or to shrug it off my shoulders. Perhaps both. 

The journey has been arduous and unrelenting, yet I left no stone unturned as I sifted through events, ideas, circumstances and the paranormal, seeking an answer. I love a good adventure and I had nothing better to do, so I jumped down into the rabbit hole of this investigation. Mainly, I was afraid for my family. 

One footstep fell in front of the other and there were times when things got so bad and so dark for me, I will be honest when I say I was convinced I had already died and was a ghost in my own life, so solitary was this journey. Yet, I don't think I've been lost so much as I feel I've been tucked away, for safe-keeping, like a ruby in a jewelry box. No matter what I experienced, however, I want you to know, even in the darkest moments, I took each step in faith.  Something held on to me and for me. Somehow I knew enough to just cling to my understanding of one basic precept; the footsteps of a good (man) (person) are ordered by the Lord. I believed in my vision for a better day. Every day I looked for clues that might show me how to break this curse off my family. 

Then one fine day, just the right person came across my path and that right person brought me to another right person. That right person knew how to break family curses and I had never heard of anyone who could do such a thing in our area, but I was more than happy to seek assistance from them and as my footsteps brought me before this right person, at just the right time, who knew just what to do to help me with that thing I really needed help for, I saw that my curse was morphing into a blessing. Line by line, step by step, the burden was lifting, the yoke was breaking. As the light began to shine, thanks to the lining up of circumstances and people, the darkness receded. 

Halloween is going to come, many will celebrate ghouls and goblins and the 'dark side', but right on the heels of this is the season of Remembrance, where we honour our war veterans. Death is no longer a joke. And then comes the season of light (Christmas), the time to celebrate the birth of Christ, harbinger of Life-Everlasting. I don't want to debate views on these holidays in this blog post. I only want to highlight the ways in which our world turns on an axis of circular motion and, if you will notice, the darkness always gives way to the light, every single time, without fail. If something blotted out our sun, we would be goners. But that is not going to happen any time soon. Our sun will provide the light we need for a very long time to come. The laws of the universe will operate precisely as they are designed to do, regardless of how we behave down here on planet Earth. I take comfort in that. The same is true within the things we carry in our hearts and minds. We need the light to shine within us in order to operate as we are designed to do.

As for me, I carried around the burden of tragedy most of my life and in searching for some way to make sense of it, I latched on to a particular word (curse) and used it as a rope to pull myself along in the darkness of despair. It is a curse related to religion, but not God. Sorting out the difference was a mighty task and it required focus and the expertise of those who wield the Two-Edged Sword (the Word of God), which slices lies away until only truth remains. For example, it is a provable fact that the name Jesus Christ dispels demonic forces. As I made these connections, within this paradigm of good versus evil, something flashed brightly in my mind and I saw where and how the perceived separation between us and our Creator exists and is being subsequently obliterated, in real time, with every step we take in faith. 

The very darkness within me trembled as I grew to comprehend this. Evil is not a joke, death is not a decoration. Our souls are forever. In confronting these truths in various ways over the last several years, I can confidently say, the curse was broken, though I could not do it on my own. Even so, the sun broke through the clouds. The moonlight cut through the veil of night. Ah, but I am digressing again, aren't I?  

I want to acknowledge that something happened along the way of this journey from darkness to light and I cannot take credit for it at all. The thing that happened was that I did not find grace. I didn't find it at all. Rather, grace found me. It followed me like a moth to a flame, landing just outside my periphery until I started to notice its presence, even while holding tightly to this chord that was initially tethered in the darkness of the connotations of a curse, grace seemed to be actively seeking me and when it found me, it lead me to back the light, urging me to release the tether that held me back and held me down. 

Grace lead me to the right people. The right people only appeared when I surrendered my will and followed in its footsteps instead. It's hard to describe what grace looks like and feels like, but we know it when we see it. It is a bestowment of goodness, deserving or not, through channels and mechanisms that I can only describe as the Love of God. Oftentimes, I didn't feel very deserving. Nevertheless, it showed up for me. I could give numerous examples as to how but I want to give something easily accessible to you, such as the imagery of a butterfly, for example. If you don't like butteflies, then I would urge you to think of a feather, drifting through the air. It gently lands, eventually. The love of God is like that. It will find you if you choose to see it and walk in faith of its presence. 

As for me? I know this to be true. I have a huge feather collection. Once I started looking for them, they started showing up. I did not fall into blindness, though I could have, at times––but by the Grace of God, there go I. It is grace that calls us home, towards safety, towards shelter. 

In using the metaphor of the butterfly, I want to mention this is how blessings have been arriving in my life, lately. They appear to me on the wings of grace, gentle and beautiful, and in perfect timing, comparable to the rhythmic beating of a butterfly's wings. Blessings have started to trickle into my life but the initial channel that allowed them to flow began with a journey related to a curse. The curse became the blessing in disguise. 

In the end, it was the little drops of grace that revealed themselves to me which suggests one thing and one thing only; the footsteps of a good woman (person) are most certainly ordered by the Lord (it bears repeating). I believe this to be true and, more importantly, based on experience, I trust in that and have faith in that. If you want me to share my vision with you in its entirety, when I envision an entity deemed to be The Lord, I always picture Leonard Cohen in his suit and fedora. If you take the letters E N A out of his first name, you have the word Lord. And the word ENA, in Hebrew, means fire. These are the things I think about. I feel I am waxing a bit esoteric now, but I'll take the risk. 

At any rate, I would like to say this–– if you're in the middle of the middle of your darkest hour, start looking for signs of grace. You will find them and more importantly, they will find you. Follow these signs because they will always leads to the light and within the expression of light lies all eternity, healing, and all that we are called to be. The light is our home within the unified field of grace. Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet.