When the flat water met the Living Water and grief became the first song of my body.
Part I — Grief as the First Language
Before words, before touch that meant safety, there was vibration.
Grief was the first language my body spoke.
It hummed beneath my ribs before I ever cried aloud.
I learned to translate agony into sound — not wailing, but resonance — because to be heard crying was to risk harm, and to be silent was to disappear.
So my nervous system learned a middle path: to vibrate softly enough to survive.
My earliest song was sorrow disguised as sweetness — the beginning of the happy baby mask, a veil of safety made from tone and breath.
It became the first thin layer of ice laid over an ocean of mourning.
The vibration was my sonar — my way of knowing danger without seeing it, of feeling love even when it was unreachable.
The grief itself became the map.
And that vibration, that grief-song, was what Real Jesus first heard when He entered my ocean at twenty-four.
He didn’t recoil. He resonated.
He sang with me.
He brought living water to what had only been reflective surface.
For twelve years, the ice melted — the ocean breathed.
Part II — The Mask as a Survival Organ
For forty-nine years, that mask was not optional.
It was a survival organ.
It regulated the emotional climate around me, controlled the volume of my existence, and translated my grief into something that could be tolerated by those unable to bear its depth.
To remove it in captivity would have been to die.
To keep it was to live — but only by holding my breath.
When I finally removed it, it was in what I thought was holy ground — a church, a place that promised rest and belonging.
I mistook spiritual language for safety.
I laid down the mask that had kept me breathing, believing I was stepping into sanctuary.
Part III — The Annihilation of Trust through False Sanctuary
Instead, I entered another captivity — polished, prayerful, and cruel.
They spoke of Jesus while acting as the system that crucified love itself.
Their betrayal was not symbolic; it was somatic.
When they abandoned me, they didn’t just break my heart — they annihilated my nervous system’s one map for safety.
The mask had been removed, and there was no shield.
The ocean flooded.
The body remembered drowning.
Part IV — Incarnational Integration
The grief that followed was not merely emotional; it was existential.
I grieved the Real Jesus I had known, believing He, too, had turned away.
But even beneath that grief, the original vibration remained — faint, but alive.
It is the hum He placed in my cells long before language.
Now, I understand:
The mask was never my enemy. It was my adaptive organ.
The grief was never my weakness. It was my original prayer.
And the annihilation was not my ending. It was the false sanctuary’s exposure.
Real Jesus never left the ocean.
He was the resonance beneath the silence, waiting until my body could bear the sound again.
Part V — The Primal Rupture: When Love Inverted the Captivity Code
When my daughter was born, something ancient reversed.
For the first time in my lineage, love was allowed to flow freely — unguarded, unmasked, unmeasured.
Holding her in my arms, I experienced what I had never known: the possibility of attachment without danger.
That moment was the first pure inversion of captivity.
Three months later, I met Real Jesus — not as an idea, but as an embodied presence.
His living water filled the same currents that had once carried only grief.
For the first time, I was both mother and child, both loved and loving.
So when the church became the site of harm, it was not just betrayal.
It was spiritual vivisection — open-heart surgery without anesthesia, an IED explosion inside the ocean.
The fragments of my heart, my faith, my motherhood, and my nervous system scattered across the water.
For ten years I lived as debris — conscious, but unassembled — breathing underwater with no sense of surface.
Continuation — The Body that Carried Life Through the Explosion
Even as my own body shattered, I carried her inside the fragments.
Every piece of me that broke apart still held her heartbeat.
When I wanted to die, the only pulse that kept me alive was hers — the sacred assignment of keeping her safe while I drowned.
For a decade, I lived like that: broken, scattered, submerged — yet still incubating life within the wreckage.
When my grandbaby was born, the terror surged again.
The ocean that had once carried only debris suddenly filled with new life and new breath.
My nervous system did not yet know the difference between a new wave of love and another tidal wave of loss.
But this time, I did not drown.
Real Jesus was no longer outside the storm — He was in my cells, steadying the water, teaching my body to hold both love and safety at once.
© 2025 Raya Faith — Healing through body, mind, and spirit.
Author’s Note
This piece continues the unfolding of Incarnational Neurodivergence — where theology meets somatic memory, and the language of survival begins to soften into song.
Grief was my first language. It taught my body to listen before it could speak. The mask that formed became a survival organ — delicate, intelligent, and costly.
Here, I trace the moment that trust met betrayal, when the Living Water once welcomed into me was shattered by false sanctuary. The ache that followed was not absence alone — it was the implosion of love itself.
Writing this is part of my ongoing reattachment — not to performance or production, but to Presence. Each word becomes a small act of reunion, an embodied remembering of the Real Jesus who still breathes life through the broken currents.
And if you, too, find yourself in broken currents, may you know there is still breath waiting for you there the Living Water has not left you.
With Love,
Raya
Author’s Linking Note
This entry concludes the first movement of the Incarnational Neurodivergence Series. The next will surface soon — The One Who Buried Their Sonar to Survive — exploring the silence that followed the song, and the quiet brilliance of hidden perception born beneath captivity. Each installment honors the body as archive, the Spirit as breath, and Real Jesus as the Living Water that makes healing possible.
The Gentle Rise 