Purgatory, Hanging Trees, and Wailing

Vessel of Sorrow, Transmutation for Clear Roads

Blessed Wednesday!

How do we move the grief? How do we reach the spirit? I want to offer this personal reflection even as I sift through it all.

This Monday I went to Adoration as usual. I never spend the whole hour as I would like, more like 10-20 minutes because I am on my lunch break, but the time is always needed and this past Monday was no different. I sat down with the intention of coming to Jesus in a meditation, the context being seeing him as the Hungry Dead, the forgotten, the harmed and at risk, the punished dissenter, the son and brother and perhaps lover never seen again. With my Ancestors and the wider body of Dead and Hoodoo on my mind, this meditation turned to a space of heart witness, of beginning to touch the frayed edges of those burning and sometimes consuming sorrows and rages. For the second time this month, and actually in my whole life, I saw fire on my body. I prayed and rocked kneeling directly on the floor, screw the kneeler. I rocked and prayed and saw. There was fire on my hands and head, and green leaves in a garland right below the fire. Previously I saw flames on my head and hands. I saw body shaped spirits running on fire, some made of fire. I was praying for either ease and rest, a final respite, or for those inclined a transformation into a new type of spirit. From potential haint to fiery and temperamental ancestors of purification, rectification, underground justice, and swift change for the lineage or area. I had to pull myself out early so I wasn’t taken up right there in the middle of the chapel around the older ladies praying. For me, the kind of wailing sure to come is always private. What should be and likely was a community effort in the past is something I hold alone, that I perform alone, calling in and closing out. To be taken up though is a long middle process if alone, it has to be carried to the end. So I caught myself early, and left. The vision of fire bodies and fire-dressed garland remained.