I can't undo all I have done to myself, what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties and its injuries; some days, I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I'd asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water ready to be wounded on what you reel in.
Throwing it back was a nightmare. Throwing it back and seeing my own face
as it disappeared into the dark water.
Catching my tongue suddenly on metal, spitting the hook into my open palm.
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you'll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
*Maya C. Popa. Wound Is the Origin of Wonder: Poems.
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This poem was read in a centering prayer and meditation group I attend daily. We read a sacred reading three times slowly, giving time for silence between readings and after. Afterward, people can share with the group what spoke to them. The practice is called lectio divina, sacred reading.
One thing that spoke to me is how we might choose something we know or do not know will bring wounding. In the choice is pleasure and pain: "it's beauties/and it's injuries." Somehow, down deep, we know to enjoy life fully and know love more wholly, we cannot make the choice that would seem to promise freedom from suffering.
We want all we can know of the Good, True, and Beautiful due to our "appetite for love." This love will not comply with common sense, for we desire what is uncommon in our culture. We want experiences and learning transpersonal while we live where the personal is the norm. We want a transformation of ourselves into Love Itself.
So, none of us would likely say, "I want suffering." Yet, we might well want it. We want to take a path that will fulfill us and help us be a being of truth and compassion, and we know it will entail being wounded. Examples are someone choosing to be a parent or speaking the truth in a context where it will cost them their job, career, marriage, or friends. Many persons have changed religion, knowing their families would disown them.
I have told on this site how I was set against entering Ph.D. studies following my Master's work, yet I received inner guidance to enter. I knew it would entail much hardship, and it did. Yet, it was immensely rewarding and brought much joy and pleasure during those years of study, as well as prepared me to enter a stint as a Professor of Religion. The whole course of my life, to this day, was altered due to my "Yes" to a path I knew would bring much hardship. I am so thankful I chose to follow the inner summons.
I recall the Gospel saying of Jesus, "He set his face to go to Jerusalem." This visit was to be his last, where he would be abandoned by his close friends and executed by the Romans. The Jesus story hinges on his willingness to follow a path in which he knew suffering awaited him. Yet, newness of life awaited him via rebirth from the world of the dead.
Jesus is an archetype of our path to newness of life through dying to being ruled by our little selves. There is no shortcut to that rebirth, no way around some degree of suffering to resurrect spiritually. In fact, resurrection never ends on the Way, so neither does the cross. We repeatedly die to know the bliss of new life, moving increasingly into the Light.
Now, but does a time come when the getting wounded ends within this journey into God? Suffering changes in that it is taken less and less personally. Regarding wounding and the Light, I believe some persons have abandoned themselves to Grace and no longer need personal suffering to grow spiritually. In that case, personal suffering is no longer entwined with spiritual evolution - they always live in resurrection. However, this does not mean the being will be exempt from the everyday suffering of being in a body living among others in bodies. To live is to have some degree of pain. Living injures us, physically and emotionally (spirit cannot be injured).
I live with pain daily, as do many persons my age or older and many much younger. Yet, the pain is not personal. The pain is not "my" pain. In God, pain can be pain without being personal pain. Still, there is suffering. My life has been altered due to the pain. The injury to the body will likely last until death. I do not bemoan that, though. I am a human among humans. The pain I feel daily is the pain of the others - human and nonhuman. Freedom is found in my suffering becoming our suffering.
And to be a compassionate being is to welcome to feel the suffering of others, indeed, all beings. All Nature is wounded, and we cannot live as spiritual beings aloof to that injury.
I encourage you to read the poem slowly a few times and allow how it speaks to your heart to arise. How does it speak to you?
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
