
The Walking Stick came out the same year my father died suddenly of a heart attack while he and I were downhill skiing. He was 52 years old and I was sixteen.

Music can express the human condition in ways words can not. That is why music has been so instrumental in my grief and disability journeys.
Cavatina was written for the guitar. There was a time, many years ago, when I was a skilled guitarist -- before multiple sclerosis stripped away my ability to play. At about the same time as I lost the ability to play my guitar, I started using a walking stick. One walking stick became two, then crutches, then a scooter and wheelchair. The MS was attacking many physical functions.
God said those words to Israel because He was their only saviour. God is that to you and me through faith in Jesus Christ. I happen to think that perhaps God might say those words to us too, His adopted children. Grief journeys are fluid like a river that can threaten to sweep over a griever and submerge him beneath the waves of his circumstances.
At first, grief can be so intense that the griever does not know how he or she can face another day or continue living. A bleak future stretches out before the griever like a barren desert. The griever's reality is distorted. Nothing interests him. He goes through the motions of living. (Daily routines can actually be a godsend that calls the griever to get out of bed each morning.)
BALANCE BETWEEN SOLITUDE AND COMMUNITY
Whether the griever knows it or not he needs both solitude and community. His "Whys?" are unanswerable. The only responses are tears and love. Solitude brings a needed release of tears and reflection on his new realities; community is needed to maintain human connection and give love -- even if the griever does not want it and just wants to be left alone.

I have learned from experience that although we may not be able detect God's presence, He is still with us. Like a crying infant too hungry to accept the bottle at its lips, the activity of early intense grief drowns out Christ's still small voice whispering to us. We may be too frantic for comfort to actually accept it.
Do not forget that in his darkest and most anguished hour, our Lord felt abandoned by God. He cried, "Eli,Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"[1]
Those words of Christ meant so much to me at my darkest moments of loss and sickness. They told me that He knows. He knows my anguish even though I may not sense His presence, I had to simply believe God was with me because God said he would not leave me or forsake me [2]. God cannot lie.[3]
It is in solitude that we begin to detect the first inklings of God's presence; it comes with the re-awakening of the interior life after the shock of grief has subsided. It is at times of solitude that understanding will eventually come.
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Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471) |
"I will listen to what the Lord will say to me.[4] Blessed is the soul that listens when God speaks to it[5] and receives consoling words from His lips."[6]
It is within a community that the griever has interconnectedness and fellowship in his grief. It is in a Christian community of concern that the griever should be comforted with the tenderness of Christ-like love. Sometimes it is loved ones in the griever's community of concern who can help the dark passage through grief and loss to eventually emerge with a renewed sense of self fostered by Christ.
I have been the beneficiary of this balance. No longer does Cavatina trigger heartbreaking memories of loss. It is the sheer beauty of the melody, and nothing more, that can move me to tears, even as an old man.
And now, here is that heartbreakingly beautifully song, Cavatina.
[4]Psalm 85:9.
[5] 1 Samuel 3:9.
[6] Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ: In Four Books (New York: Random House, 1998), Book Three, Chapter 1, p. 73.
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