The Secret Place

Daily meditation is my lifeline.  For so many years I tried to cultivate a genuine prayer life. I started setting aside some time in the mornings, especially the weekends- sit down with my Bible and just casually talk to God.  When I could not find the words to use, I would use the Scriptures, especially the Psalms.  I always found in the words of King David the echo of my own inner voice.  Other times, I would be so troubled and distressed that, like Job: I would lay my cause before Him and fill my mouth with arguments.  Job 23:4 Then, over a period of time, Jesus shared in a little secret with me: Silence is my worship place, the place inside of  me where true communion with God is not only attainable, but it is eternal and uninterrupted. 

 For me it started when I felt so overwhelmed with the presence of God that I had no desire to talk.  I experienced the Silence, first as a gift of pure grace.  Now I seek it consciously and enthusiastically.  Inner Silence is my hiding place, my sanctuary, away from the appearance of things and circumstances in this World. I am speaking not only about quieting your mouth, I mean suspending the activity of thought. This is something that you can spend all your life trying to learn, but I have an excellent Master.  I followed Jesus into that Secret Place, and I have found no need of a better altar.

Note: Meditation and contemplation are ancient spiritual practices, common to all world religions, Christianity no excluded.   It is what clearly separates religious ritual from mysticism.

Today I just want to share a few Scriptures that to me, make clear reference to the experience I just described.

1. Psalm 27:5
   For in the day of trouble He will hide me in His shelter; in the secret place of His tent will He hide me; He will set me high upon a rock.
   
   
2. Psalm 31:20
   In the secret place of Your presence You hide them from the plots of men; You keep them secretly in Your pavilion from the strife of tongues.
   
   
3. Psalm 81:7
   You called in distress and I delivered you; I answered you in the secret place of thunder; I tested you at the waters of Meribah. Selah [pause, and calmly think of that]!
   
   
4. Psalm 91:1
   [ Psalm 91 ] He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall remain stable and fixed under the shadow of the Almighty [Whose power no foe can withstand].
   
   
5. Psalm 91:8
   Only a spectator shall you be [yourself inaccessible in the secret place of the Most High] as you witness the reward of the wicked.
   
   
6. Song of Solomon 2:14
   [So I went with him, and when we were climbing the rocky steps up the hillside, my beloved shepherd said to me] O my dove, [while you are here] in the seclusion of the clefts in the solid rock, in the sheltered and secret place of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.
   
   
7. Isaiah 45:3
   And I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, Who calls you by your name.

Let Me Introduce Myself.

I was born on October 22 of 1973 to a troubled teenage mother who had run away from home with a  young orphan boy from her neighborhood.  My mother was 18 when she had me.  She was coming from the trauma of loosing her father to Leukemia a couple of years before.  My mother was lied about her father's illness, no one told her he was going to die, and then, one morning she was getting ready to see him at the hospital.  She had laid down her clothes on her bed; she was proud and excited about a new pair of boots she would wear that day. She was her father's little girl, his pride and adoration.  She was just wondering when her father would be back home.  That day, my great grandmother entered her room and unceremoniously delivered the devastating news.  My grandfather had passed away.  She demanded that my mother did not cry.  I imagine my mother heard then the thunderous sound of a crack in the Planet, the loudest noise smothering her own inner wail. I heard stories growing up of how my mother suffered serious but partial memory loss at that time. Even now I know she is unable to recall events, names and faces of people she met before her father died. I remember walking with her in the market when someone approached her to greet her effusively.  She would be embarrassed not to remember that person claiming to be a former classmate or a childhood friend. 

I was born within the darkness of my mother's memory; I came forth out of  her alienation, her confusion and distrust of the world.  My birth was one of the events of the aftermath of the great tragedy of her life.  One of the stones stumbling down from an avalanche of disastrous, unplanned occurrences. I came into this world in an atmosphere of crisis and drama.  Those conditions shaped up the way I perceived life from the very beginning.   Pain became familiar, trauma was my emotional hometown.  

Those circumstances should be enough to make one's upbringing especially difficult, but to fully understand where I come from I need to make reference to my family's unique background. My grandmother joined a religious cult at the age of fifteen. She was homeless  after being thrown out on the street by her own father.  She had just become a young woman in his eyes and that, to him, meant trouble.  My grandmother left her parents' home in the Country, in our native Puerto Rico, and came to the city to work as a maid.  

At that desperate time in her life, she came across a group of people in a religious gathering who had very strange spiritual beliefs and practices.  They had come out of their Pentecostal church to form their own, led by a woman who claimed having received a special revelation from God, making her the messenger and medium of the Holy Ghost.  So was my grandmother's need to belong somewhere and be accepted by someone that she was willing to forsake her before cherished Catholic faith to utterly assimilate herself into this new cult. 

The beliefs, practices and idiosyncrasy of this communal religious group, latter called Mita Congregation, formed a parallel dimensional  universe in which I grew up inscribed in the outer socio-cultural reality of every other Puerto Rican girl in the 80's and 90's. My childhood and teenage years where anything but ordinary, with all the common characteristics of life within any religious cult.  You grow up controlled, manipulated, terrified of the outside world, denying your own thoughts and feelings every time they stretched out of the frame of their doctrine.  

Why do I feel the need to write about this and publish it for anyone to see?