The Pain That We Carry...

The greatest pain of all, and perhaps the one of which we are least aware, is not the absolute certainty of death, but the stunning ignorance of the wonder of our being. The great Jewish mystic philosopher, Simone Weil, wrote: We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love. This, really only this, is the pain that we carry...

Years and years in a Soup Kitchen and living in Community became for me the long, slow, road to a slight awakening -- "slight" because each and every "awakening" is but a "temporary shrine" on an endless wandering path in the wilderness of being... In the "wilderness" are all the hurts: hurts that chance tossed our way, hurts that others, intentionally or not, caused us, and the hurts that we have caused others, intentionally or not. I do not think that you need a list of examples! My "slight awakening" is the certainty that I feel down into the marrow of my bones that Simone Weil was right...

Another one of my teachers, Rev. Ellen Grace O'Brian (Center for Spiritual Enlightenment) has a poem in her book The Moon Reminded Me entitled "Wings of Red". It reads:

​Sweep the corners
of the heart with a feather,
a breath, a sigh,
a breeze of lovingkindness.

Offer seeds you find
to blackbird
let them be
gold eye flash
red wing promise
dawn flight
from bright grass.

How else to forgive
what we have done?

​All the pain that we carry, we carry in our hearts, stored there, as if for safekeeping, for the Day of Remembrance... We forget nothing: it is all there: waiting... waiting... All the things that we have done and all of the things that we have failed to do: unto the distant ends of the Earth herself... 

​Again, years and years in a Soup Kitchen and living in Community, likewise convinced me of the very few things that really matter... Simone Weil articulated the very finest philosophical truth imaginable, but left out of that sublime sentence the how, the way into becoming Love... At least, that is how I read it years ago, as sort of a spiritual shock therapy to maintain one's intention in living a "holy" life... But, I forgot that holy could / needed to be "wholly" as well!

​In other words, Simone Weil, like Dorothy Day, assumed that her readers were "awakened enough" to understand that Love always (and only) translates as "Loving": Love is always and only a verb: it is an action more than an intention: it is kindness, compassion, and justice activated: it is a living, constant, ever-present, Divine Incarnation! Do you see? It is by loving that the Divine Reality (the only Real Reality) becomes... Meister Eckhart wrote:

​The eye through which
I see God is the same
eye through which
God sees me;

My eye and God's eye
are one eye,
one seeing,
one knowing,
one love.

​Loving is the only Way of both knowing and experiencing the Loving that is the before, the during, and the after of our sublime chance of living... And, oh yes yes yes, loving requires the complete annihilation of our oh so tiny-humungous egos that hunger for the alternative "reality" of separation from every other tiny-humungous ego... Loving is likewise a complete overhaul of everything-every-system-of-privilege-profit-and-power that operates on the necessity of a willful separation, one from another, "us" from "them"... But, even more and even better, Loving is deeply satisfying, delightedly satisfying, indeed, Loving is Divine Pleasure unleashed... 

​We were created by Love, for Love, to become Love... so that we might dance our way into Paradise!