We've all seen them: these barns and old cabins that are slowly being reclaimed by nature; stone walls being returned to earth by weeds and ivy; asphalt and cement walks and roads pierced by a blade of grass...Robert Frost has a poem about it -- Something there is, that doesn't love a wall -- and in it he asks, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out." We humans have a way of setting up everything we do to include or exclude: as Heidi Klum says on Project Runway -- "You're either in, or you're out." But as Frost notes in his poem, nature has a way of determinedly breaking down those differences, of dissolving boundaries. Even the shadows move as the light changes and the earth continues its daily and yearly rotations.
I have been reading Cynthia Bourgeault's book, The Wisdom Jesus, and have come to a piece that helps me understand that the wall we create between what is dark and what is light is another division that needs, ultimately, to be dissolved:
"We wish God could be only light. We wish this world could be only light. We wish that darkness and evil and cruelty would vanish, and we keep trying to work our way back up the great chain of being by rejecting the darkness and cleaving to the light.
But darkness goes right on being dark and the moral compass we use to navigate in some ways only makes the situation worse. For if God is light and only light, does that mean there are human states so dark, and so dismal, so desolate and crazy, that they are literally "Godforsaken:" outside of God altogether, completely beyond anything that the Divine can know or touch?
... the fatal trap in the "God is light" roadmap, the orientation that cleaves to the light by trying to deny or reject the shadow...only winds up empowering the shadow and deepening it. The resolution doesn't lie in collapsing the tension of opposites by canceling one of them out. Something has to go deeper, something that can hold them both...allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light..."
She goes on to explain that Jesus, and his "descending into hell" offers "a quiet harmonizing love infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them or cancel them, but gently reconnects them to the whole...to hold all the boundary conditions of this realm (time, change, and circumstance) "in and to love's embrace" and in such a way release them from the grip of duality."
What walls shall we tear down today?
2 comments:
Oh, my gosh. I would love to talk to you about this passage. I can totally see her Christian Science background here, and the path she is on, even now moving away from it. It truly amazes me that she was raised in CS and became an Episcopal priest; it's very hard to "get there from here." I LOVE it!
Often, she is a bit too wordy for me to get to the point, but this passage is exactly what Fr. Rohr is teaching, too. You cannot "put it out;" in the end, LOVE has to transform evil. Not necessarily change IT, but change the way we relate to it.
Her writing just conjured up images of caring for Katie while she was dying. You cannot "fix" terminal cancer, but you can bring all the love that you have to it, and that makes all the difference in the experience.
Love you!
It makes me think of that Madeleine L'Engle book, I think it was Wind in the Door, not Wrinkle in time, where the way Meg finally overcame evil was to embrace it and send it messages of love...
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