christened in light…
We are not abandoned & alone
in suffering as much as we insist.
Could we sense that many others are suffering
the very same thing we are enduring?
Could we suffer with them & for them?
Could we sense that God suffers with us, too?
We do not need to explain or fully understand
how love is right here with us in the pain.
We only need to feel it.
How can there be hope in hopelessness?
How is despair held
in an unconceivable ‘nevertheless’?
We don’t know. We don’t know.
But unknowing is the most intimate we can be.
It is here that we can come to feel
the vast, ongoing aloneness of God.
Are we weeping God’s tears
as well as our own?
Is God weeping through us?
Can we be trusted with this pain?
……Gunilla Norris
this suffering is our nest to brood from, initmately & fully….this is the romantic side of spirituality….that place where we find meaning from torment & despair….here we do not feed on perfectionism….we do not resolve the questions….we sink in the complexity…calling only on our ever-deepening depths to find unity…..
reach in to the romance of raw emptiness….
Last night, at the end of a long week of late nights, I went to bed at 2:00 am, then tossed about like a small boat on a choppy sea. Outside, rain blew in on a cold wind, & in the darkness, middle-of-the-night despair pooled in my little boat, like water from a slow leak. Despair is a nondiscriminating fellow. When he throws a late-night party, he invites in every hopeless situation that troubles the mind. Nothing is stable, I thought, floating in my bed, listening to the rain. ‘Today, like every other day, we wake up empty & frightened,’ Rumi says. I wake up empty & frightened. I wonder what to do next. There are hundreds of ways for each of us to counter despair with an act that connects us to our most essential, simple self. I go out into the day, kneel down in the leaves, & kiss the ground. I will stop trying to solve anything. I will revere the mystery. Then I will raise my face to the brilliant blue sky & receive the sun on my skin. I will wash myself with gratitude. I’ll notice, for the umpteenth time, that I am a small creature, looking at the smallest segment of a huge painting. Here, from our little corner of the canvas, how can we fathom the purpose in the design, the overarching message, or the end of the story? And so today I will just stretch out in the leaves & drift into space. I’ll let myself be a child, safe in the arms of the Great Mother & the Great Father….Elizabeth Lesser
