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!

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