The Temple of the Inconsolable Mother
Good Friday is not lost on me
When my daughter was lost to addiction
When I couldn’t save her or myself
My sole salvation was an inner Temple,
The Temple of the Inconsolable Mother.
I found it the day the sorrow was too much.
I stepped inside and
found it to be plain and quiet.
The altar was bare.
Nothing expected.
Inconsolably, I knew,
It is holy to surrender
All hope of consolation.
My beautiful daughter battled for her life from her early teens until she was thirty. And so did I. The opioid crisis was the cross on which we were crucified, a cross firmly planted on the hill we call Genetic Propensities for Addiction.
As too many parents know, losing a child to mental illness, or any illness, is devastating beyond words. No amount of love will stop the struggle. It drains you entirely, takes everything you have. Parents become anonymous, necessarily silent, and as we carry society's shame burdens. Institutionalized Western medicine, in my case, was a cruel and costly maze for our family’s battered and broken mental health.
On Good Friday, in a worship service, I will hear Katie sing music that she understands. Hers is a Good Friday/Easter story. A few years ago, at death’s door, she submitted to recovery and found not only sobriety but her lifework in the addiction field. Now a lead counselor with men in recovery in the California State Prison System, my daughter is alive.
The world we live in is harsh, even horrifying. I think of the Pieta and multiply it by every mother whose child gets crushed under an insurmountable weight.
If you want to know the way of body and soul, be a mother. If you want to understand holy love, cradle your loved one in your arms, then put them down. Crushed, there may be a temple somewhere. It’s not certain. Not everyone finds it. I found mine in part because I had Alanon and met with a group of moms who devotedly transformed these impossible sorrows with another month after month.
What if Good Friday really is about the powerless, inconsolable love of The Mother?She who does not choose her child’s death, but stays to witness it. Hers is a love beyond belief.
Perhaps we might turn to the Mothers and Fathers sitting in the Temple of Inconsolability around us and ask them about Love, where it comes from, how to endure the unendurable, and which way to go from here?
Thank you for expressing your sacred mother’s tears in such an artfully truthful way. Mothers all over the world resonate with your words as we too have struggled with systems that ignore or rebuke us. I am encouraged and inspired by you and your daughter’s Good Friday/ Easter resurrection story.
Thank you, thank you. I love the image of a bare altared Inner Temple. In despair, I often go to my inner garbage truck, where I continually toss and turn the garbage. It never turns to compost, just leaves me inconsolable.