A Small Hint of Something...Happy

A few years ago I read a passage in the Bible that said God included pain in the world on purpose.  Or maybe it was a fortune cookie.  Anyway, my first reaction was- God's a total dick.   

Of course I followed that by becoming an Armchair Universe Creator, where I talked shit about the Dick, and described how my Universe would look.  
First, everyone would get a puppy, and a balloon.  Second, I would replace Grand Canyon scale wounds like Human Suffering, and Heartbreak, and Tragedy, with the Small Dent variety of boo-boo's, owies, and ouchies.

Did you hear that, Dick?
Boo-yaw! 

No pain in my Universe.  
No darkness to counter light.

You listening, Dick?  
You watching?

No razor blades in apples.  
Boo-yaw!
No child abductions.  
Boo-yaw!
No disfiguring boob enhancements gone wrong.
Boo-yaw!
No amputating of wrong limbs.
Just balloons, and puppies.

Not that hard.
Dick.

Unless, of course, 
I care about the people who inhabit my world. 

Unless, 
I want them to develop their Humanity to the full capacity of their Human hearts. 
Unless,
I want them to enter the unlimited realm of  the spirit they carry.

Unless I love them.

If I want them to know that, if I want to encourage them to center their lives in those things,
I'm going to have to hurt them.  
I'm going to have to include Pain,
and I'm going to have to devastate them with it.

I'm going to have to do that, because I Love them, most of all.

Agree to Enter

   There's no point in experiencing anything difficult if you don't take advantage of having to go through it. To be more direct, there's no lesson in what hurts if you don't
stop down, to find it.
   Most people entering dark, internal spaces, choose to hurry in, and hurry out, like sprinting through a Haunted House. Some look down at the ground, refusing to acknowledge the sounds, and figures, they know are with them (The "If I pretend it's not real, it isn't" response).   
And others are content to tread water, and stay on the surface.

I understand the inclination to employ any of those tactics. I understand the objective behind all three.  I understand because those tactics kept me safe, and stagnant for decades. They aren't effective for advancing the individual wanting to grow. They're a feel good effort, and a diversion for a silent retreat made by the individual who doesn't.

It wasn't until I got myself into a situation where the alternative to genuinely entering what I kept buried was less appealing than the entry, that I finally did.  

It was at that point that I began wondering why I'd been given a life,

and if the purpose of the life I'd been given, was separate from my own. 

It was at that point that I was allowed to see how each independent event, and each individual, were essential elements in a much larger scene, and they were tied together to write the story that I would live.

I could see there was a cause and effect relationship between everything that had previously seemed random, but wasn't.  

I could see that the things that I'd been asked to carry, or to endure, or accept blame for, weren't random either.   

I was able to see the relationship between every individual who ever told me I helped them, and everything I'd been through, that provided the insight and experience that prepared me to assist. 

Pain provided the perspective to see all that had been hiding in what hurt me.  The pain I was asked to carry was also the key to understanding my life.

When I entered it's immense expression I understood that any agreement that was made to carry it, was fair.  I saw in the pain I carried, for the first time, a small hint of something happy that had been there all along.  I just had to enter, to see it. 

Hurt is Good

Entering a wound also instructs the embracing of it. There are some scars I now accept as permanent, either because I've done all I can do toward their healing, or because I refuse to do any more.  

If I refuse to because it's too difficult, or because the wound is bigger than I am, I need to learn how to fold it into who I am with the same level of acceptance as the parts I love.  It's not important if others embrace these parts of me, or if they ever do.  It's important I do.  No one else's spiritual growth is affected by that decision but my own.  If I'm ashamed of something that makes up who I am, there won't be any growth at all.

I can say truthfully that I have unhealed parts I feel gratitude for.  Even profound gratitude.  I'm grateful for them because they introduced me to a lost knowledge, knowledge you only learn from catharsis or seeing another side of your darkness. I have.  I can tell you there is one. 

The arrival of those insights, however, would still be a far off, distant maybe, had the circumstance that forced my entry never occurred.  

Life & Duty

Ironically, that circumstance, the one that forced me in, was the worst of my life.  I also know now it wasn't random, or accidental.  I view it as an ultimatum.  
I believe God was letting me
 know that if I'm going to

be of any value to the world, or anyone in it, I have to discover the lessons hidden in my pain.  He was letting me know I was down to my last chance, and if I couldn't muster what it took to enter, I was of no use to Him.  

He'd trusted me to carry a lot, I believe that. 
He was asking now, to confirm his decision. 
He was asking if I was ready to know why.

If you're one of those who has been asked to do the same, or something similar, let me share this:

No matter what it is you need to enter- a repressed memory, shame, insecurity, guilt, trauma, abuse- you have to walk into it's center, and hold. 

When you're steady, and you feel your legs beneath you, you must agree to feel everything you've spent a lifetime avoiding.  

Expect to be reconfigured when you do it.  
You can't hold that kind of violence down as long as it was, and expect it's force to be the force you recall.  

It's going to be worse, much worse, and it needs to make its way, through you.  If you can allow that, if you allow yourself to be pain's filter, you'll gain a perspective of who you spared by carrying it.  When you see that, you'll agree to do it again, and your life will have mattered, after all.

You'll discover what was buried within you. You'll see the faint, small hint of something happy.

Dar Williams "After All" (lyrics below):

You go ahead, push you luck

Find out how much love the world can hold

Once upon a time I had control

And reigned my soul in tight

Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled

But I held the evil of the world, so I stopped the tide, froze it up from inside

And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then

You catch your breath and winter starts again

And everyone else is spring bound

Then when I chose to live, there was no joy it's just a line I crossed

I wasn't worth the pain my death would cost, so I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell

And so I traveled down a whispering well to know myself through them

I'm growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there

Her father raging down a spiral stair, till he found someone

Most days his son and sometimes I think my father too was a refugee

I know they tried to keep their pain form me

They could not see what it was for

But now I'm sleeping fine

Sometimes the truth is like a second chance

I am the daughter of a great romance

And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose, with so many colors it nearly broke my heart

It worked me over like a work of art and I was a part off all that

So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me

We will push on into that mystery

And it'll push right back and there are worse things than that

'Cause for every price, and every penance that I could think of

It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all

'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be

And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I think life chose me after all

Songwriters
WILLIAMS, PAUL H. / NICHOLS, ROGER S.