Cradled in freefall

Last week, the death was confirmed of the young American aid worker Kayla Mueller who had been held captive in Syria by Islamic State since summer 2013. Her parents, Carl and Marsha describe the 26-year-old as ‘a compassionate and devoted humanitarian. She dedicated the whole of her young life to helping those in need of freedom, justice and peace.’

After leaving university in 2009, she was active in India, Israel and Palestine, and spent a year in her native US working in an HIV/AIDS clinic and volunteering in a women’s shelter by night. She moved to Syria in December 2012 where she linked up with two agencies supporting refugees in the on-going crisis.

Two remarkable letters from Meuller, released by her family reveal the role of strong faith in shaping her life and giving her courage in captivity.

In the first of these, written to her father on his birthday in 2011, she said ‘I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine.’ Like Mother Teresa before her she was conscious that in serving those in need, she was serving God.

I often remind myself that God comes to me in the people I meet.  But I don’t have the spontaneous sense which Kayla hints was her experience that God self-reveals to me through others.

She acknowledges that people find God in different ways, including church, nature and love,  then adds ‘but I find God in suffering.’ I wonder if God comes to each of us in ways appropriate to who we are and what we are called to do? ‘I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is,’ Meuller wrote, ‘- using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.’

The second letter was written in spring 2014 when she was in captivity and smuggled out by another prisoner who was being released. It is a document of raw, visceral emotion, written, she tells us, with many tears.

She writes of her deep appreciation of her family. The only suffering she admits to is that of ‘knowing how much suffering I have put you all through.’ Her captivity has given her space for thought, and she has for the first time ‘come to realise your place in my life - the gift that is each one of you’ and to appreciate their role in shaping and in supporting her.

Her words encourage us to recognise, appreciate, and express our appreciation to those who are ‘gifts’ in our lives.

A second theme in the letter is Kayla’s recognition that there is always another perspective:

‘I have been shown in darkness, light, and have learned that even in prison one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see that there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.’

Whatever our pain, however dark our crisis there is hope. Our souls are present both in the grim reality of our immediate experience and in God’s unseen kingdom, and the light of this kingdom keeps breaking in as we open ourselves to it through expecting to see it.

Similar things are said rather tritely every day, but Kayla’s words have authority because of the situation in which they were written, and the spirit of the person who wrote them.

Kayla Mueller remembers her mother telling her ‘all in all in the end the only one you really have, is God.’ This is true. When you are physically ill, or in an emotional pain which seems beyond the reach of words or medication you feel utterly alone.

Kayla was able to entrust herself to the God she believed was with her, and knew that her family were entrusting her to this God in their prayers. The path had given way beneath her feet, she was hurling downwards into darkness, yet in that experience she felt ‘tenderly cradled in freefall.’

Not a phrase you’d choose, I think, if you were writing out of a great emptiness trying to persuade your family that all was well, but rather one springing from a deep reality.

Of course there were times in her life when she didn’t need cradled. Then God was her companion, her inspiration. God came to her in the weakness of others. In her strength, she cradled God. But now it was she who needed the cradling, and God did not fail her.

She wrote in 2011 that she ‘found God in suffering,’ meaning the suffering of others. But the phrase was true in another way. God came to her in her own suffering when there was no-one else to discern God in her troubled eyes.

We too, in our pain can know ourselves loved by God, even on those days when we don’t feel God’s presence. ‘Cradled in freefall.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highand news dated 19th February 2015)