‘Happy are they who, passing through the valley of weeping, make it a place of springs’ (Psalm 84). Photo: Thomas Sees Jesus Wounds by Gloria Ssali (2017)
Walking wounded: Dana Smith’s Thought for the week
‘Our willingness to be vulnerable is linked to our ability to love.’
Vulnus, the Latin word for wound, embodies vulnerability. Like blood or hurt, it is a word we can feel, if we let ourselves.
In Israel, in Gaza, Christ stands wounded, asking us ‘Put your hand in my side. Feel this reality of being human’. Standing alongside the wounded, feeling our wounds, can be an agonising act. Many of us, in our daily disputes, in our wars, react first and feel only fleetingly. Who wants to wait on the Hill of the Skulls, weep in the garden of Gesthemane, or walk in the way of sorrows? Yet our willingness to be vulnerable is linked to our ability to love. And be loved. If we were impenetrable, would the heart rejoice or weep?
One of the terrible graces of pain may be that it brings us inextricably into the moment. We are alive. We are here. It may be beyond hard, yet here and now are the only places I can make change. Or be changed.
This week a Friend brought three texts to our Openings session, a place to reflect before Meeting for Worship. First, the Sufi Hadrat Ali (598-661 CE), who wrote, ‘Faith is the source of my power… Sorrow is my friend… Love is the foundation of my existence.’ The words echo my Quaker belief. What would it be if I devoted myself to living them?
Then Jonathan Wittenberg, a rabbi: ‘The Shema prayer, the most basic declaration of Jewish faith – Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is One – is also an appeal to bear witness… To testify to the unity of God is to bear witness to God’s image in every human life; to hurt or to destroy other lives, or to be indifferent to their pain, is to violate God’s presence in them and to hold God’s oneness in contempt.’
Finally Miguel D’Escoto, Sandinista foreign minister and priest: ‘I do not believe that nonviolence is something you can arrive at rationally. We can develop it as a spirituality and can obtain the grace necessary to practice it.’
To not react immediately to any situation, much less a terrible one, must be more than a grace, it is discipline. Hard-won. Daily practised.
Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor, learned that there was something no one could take from him in the Nazi concentration camp. He was free to choose how he would respond to any act, to any violation. To learn such a discipline, to practice it, seems a holy vocation.
What if in this present war in Israel, the entire population reformed their concept of victory? The friends of Dorin Atias, a young woman killed in a kibbutz, are planning to rebuild their community as a sign that ‘peace and love are more powerful than terror’. Perhaps in living their pain, they are transcending failed human law. Maybe something new is being inscribed into the fibres of their being. Maybe they know trauma is healed by bearing our grief; only then can it be born and released. Perhaps they can teach us all that our victories also include our deepest sorrows.
As the psalm goes: ‘Happy are they who, passing through the valley of weeping, make it a place of springs’ (Psalm 84). May I as a Quaker make this my faith. And my practice.
