HEALING

"Jewish teaching includes frequent reminders of the importance of a broken-open heart, as in this Hasidic tale: A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place its words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because, as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in."   -- Parker J. Palmer

Oh, how we want to escape our pain.

Worry, loss, death, exhaustion, anxiety, economic instability, the unraveling of our democracy, the destruction of our planet, the ever-present trauma of racial injustice. It’s all overwhelming. We want to stitch up our protective coverings as soon as we can, so our exposed and tender nerves can rest. We want the pain behind us as soon as possible.

But what if the work is to travel toward it? What if proximity to our pain, not distance from it, is the real route to healing?

This seems to be what Parker Palmer is trying to tell us. And what our faith teaches us as well.

Here’s what else Palmer has to say: “When the heart is supple, it can be “broken open” into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.”

This doesn’t just reframe pain and healing; it also helps us reimagine our relationship with vulnerability. Maybe vulnerability isn’t the cause of our pain, like some chink in our armor. Maybe, instead, it is the first and needed step toward healing our pain. Or, to put it another way, maybe vulnerability isn’t so much the problem as the ticket that allows us to get on healing’s train.

If this is true, then our instructions this month seem to be this:
Forget eliminating your pain; lean into it! Don’t run from it as fast as you can; befriend it. Hold it in your frightened and tender hands until you realize it’s more malleable than you thought. Until you realize that your strong and courageous hands can shape it. That you can take its sharp edges and mold them into pathways that connect you with other people’s pain. That you can transform it from a weapon that has wounded you into a bridge that connects you to the beautiful, broken hearts of others.

When we do this, we may discover that pain can be more than a cage cutting us off from the world. It can also become a tool that makes room, carving open an entirely new space to live in. A space where we are more deeply connected to each other than we imagined possible.

This of course doesn’t mean the hurt goes away. But it does mean we end up feeling larger, more
whole, and more tightly held by the holy web that reminds us we are never alone.

And maybe that is the most important healing of all.