Recently, I was asked to help craft a ritual honoring a writing partner and friend who tried to end his own life ten years ago. This is the blessing I wrote for the occasion.
Blessed are you, Michael. Blessed are you whose story was almost cut short.
Ten Years ago, a part of you placed a period at the end of what you thought was the sentence of your life. But it turned out that that period was really a comma, a semincolon, an ellipsis… November, 2013 was not the end of your story. It was the beginning of a different kind of story.
Blessed are you who have worked to understand despair and befriend sorrow. You did not conquer despair and sorrow. Rather, you asked them to be your teachers and you have testified to what you have learned.
Your willingness to revisit that place of hopelessness and to provide language for the wholeness of your experience has been a gift to me and to many others. I lost my beloved mother to suicide nine years ago. Our conversations and your writing have helped me gain more compassion and understanding about her struggles.
Blessed are you, Michael. As you write, you are also being written. Your writing is a prayer that expresses gratitude, embraces mystery, and seeks possibility. Words are the clay you have used to sculpt a new life.
Along the way, you have gathered companions around you. Your beloved PJ and your Benedictine writing companions and Richard your counselor who was able to listen you into a new story. You have also gathered companions across time and space. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber. William James and Arthur Frank. These companions offer you words of their own and their words are woven into your spirit as you return to them again and again for sustenance.
Blessed are you, Michael. Your story testifies to resilience, but not as happily-ever-after, For you do not write simple answers or tidy endings. You have woven your most heart-wrenching despair and most tender aches into the fabric of your life, along with kindness and delight and love.
Blessed are you Michael as you treasure the beauty of another ordinary, extraordinary day.
Blessed are we who get to witness the beauty of your unfolding, ever-evolving story. Amen.