Tuesday, November 01, 2016
The wound is the place where the Light enters you
“Don’t pick your scab” is an exhortation
most 10-year olds have heard their moms say…and ignored. For some reason there
is some perverse pleasure in peeling it off and thus keeping the wound from
healing quickly. What most boys do for fun some people do in real life with the
hurts, injuries and injustices they have experienced: rather than letting time
heal them, they pick the scab incessantly and thus re-open the wound. These
people never find closure and thus remain miserable. Don’t pick your scab!
There is a corollary to this truth, which the Sufi philosopher Rumi
puts as follows: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” When we first
experience injury, be it emotional, physical or spiritual, we feel as if life
is seeping out of us. We bleed, experience weakness, pain and loss. And
therefore we avoid any circumstances which inflict such pain on us: that is
simply our instinct of self-preservation speaking. But what Rumi says is that
you have a choice. Will you primarily fight the pain and rebel against the fact
that it has visited you? Or are you able to discover that your vulnerability
offers the chance of the light entering you? Most of us do not like being on
the ropes, feeling weak, especially when it is clear how long this condition
will last; but if we let it, our weakness can become an opportunity. We
suddenly realize the blessing of being whole; we come to appreciate those who
reach out to us, physically or emotionally; and we discover the truth of our
feeble condition.
A British Christian writer, John Henry
Newman, pitied anybody who was never struck down by a serious physical illness
because “that person had never experienced his true humanity”. The Bible puts it
slightly differently when it says that “we have this treasure in earthen
vessels”: when all is well we can assume that all is well because of ourselves,
rather than because of the life God has poured into us. But when we feel sick
we discover what is our feeble humanity and what is truly the divine spark.
We are not suggesting here that you go
looking for scabs in your life to start picking them indiscriminately. We
simply want to underline a truth which sages from many traditions have known, but
which is rarely mentioned these days: hurt, wounds, suffering are not all bad if we approach them rightly. Pain can kill us, but it can
also bring us life!
# posted by tino @ Tuesday, November 01, 2016 
