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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Monday, February 26, 2024

Wounds at work

Your wounds are hard at work making their sacred medicine in the hidden spaces below the scars. With loss, there may be nothing satisfying for you to reclaim. If a special person has died, or love went away, what we yearn for most is an impossible return. The sacred task at hand is to let yourself be reclaimed by something deeper than the immediacy of struggle and pain. This something need not be identified or fixated upon, but surrendered to.

          Pixie Lighthorse, The Wound Makes the Medicine

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What do we do with our pain?

What do we do when we are crushed by a parent’s death?

A lover’s betrayal?

What do we do when cancer comes?

When all the world unravels around us

and the righteous suffer, and the wicked prosper?

 

What do we do with the fear,

as hate and racism abound?

As inequity and injustice flourish?

As people worship power, and guns, and violence?

And love seems to lose, again and again, and again.

 

What do we do with the wounds,

with the broken parts of us?

 

Do we allow the pain to transform us?

Or do we go deep, to where Love dwells,

and allow the pain to be transformed?

 

Is it really that simple?

 

I do know that sometimes when I am hurt,

or when I am afraid, the pain transforms me

and makes me less.

 

It makes me angry, bitter, fearful, protective,

judgmental, and worse

 

I fear the hateful creep of fascism, and I become hate-filled.

Ugh

 

At other times what I have experienced makes me better, more.

It makes me more understanding and kinder,

it gives me the capacity to be “with” people in their pain,

and to promote healing.

 

It has been said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

People point to wood that has been broken and is now repaired

and how a patched section of wood has a new strength.

 

But is it not the pain

It is not that which broke the wood that has made it stronger.

It is the glue

 

It is not those things which tear us and erode us that make us stronger

It is the healing

created by Sacred Presence

 

As we allow God to reknit us, reform us

We do become stronger, different

New

 

We are torn and rent by many things

Our country, our world too, have been shredded

By hate and fear

By malignant leaders who grab power and abuse it

By war

By guns

By a love of domination

By greed

 

Those things can destroy us

They can never make us stronger

But

God is

Love is

And when God who is love

Is present in our lives

 

Healing happens

And when we are healed

We can be a force for healing

 

Thanks be to the God

Who makes all things new


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