This one goes out to all the people who have hurt me.
Thank you. You will never know what you have done for me. Because of you I am not happier, not wealthier, not stronger, not more respectable, not better looking. Because of you I am holier. By holier I do not mean that I am more sinless, although that is a clear result, nor do I mean that I am better than you or that God loves me more. What I mean is that I am more set apart, more set aside. I belong less to you, your world, your organizations, your parties, your cliques. Thank you for hurting me, thank you for judging me, thank you for the whispering about me, thank you for sending me away. Thank you above all for the rejection that all the wounds carried. Because if you are a man of enough sorrows, if you become acquainted with enough grief, and if enough people hide their faces from you, then you get to a place where the only one left looking at you is God. And that’s a holy place.
Some people down through history have gone out seeking martyrdom in foreign lands with pagan kings. That those closest to me have hurt me the most has graciously spared me that journey.
From my heart, thank you.
3 comments:
C.S. Lewis said something in A Grief Observed or maybe something else...to paraphrase: Has the world been so kind to you that you should cling to this life?
I can answer that with a very loud and firm "NO!" I know what you mean about those closest to you hurting you the most. I still really lust for revenge though. That really sucks about me. I should have liked it better had the verse said to turn the other cheek after hitting the offender about 20 times with a Louisville Slugger. So I don't know if I can say all my pain has made me holier. It's certainly made me a smart allecy self righteous little snot...but perhaps that is just a rest stop on the road to holiness. I'm not quite thankful....yet. But, I am glad you can look at it that way.
Grief is the door.
If you still think you can go back to change what happened, to retell your story with you as the winner by exacting revenge or setting the record straight, then your piercings cannot finish their work. It is only when you exhale, grieve the loss, and accept it that the holying happens. When you let truth be true it will make you holy, and it will usher in joy.
It did hurt. It does matter. There's no going back. God sees me and loves me.
The biggest challenge for me today is remembering. I have to remember that I lost (even though I have recurring nightmares of being back in the big game, trying desperately still to win). I have to remember that I forgave. I have to remember that I am forgiven. All that effort I used to spend in self-justifying and re-playing I now channel towards self-forgetting and truth-remembering. Grief is the door through which I must pass, and remembering is the key. Like I said, it's a challenge.
Well, in that case I have one foot in the door at present. Today I cried on the way home from being away because I was listening to a song about a father and daughter taking a walk together and I realized I have never taken a walk with my father and I don't know if I ever will. It's such a simple silly little thing. But it just kills me. So I guess I am getting to the grief part of the journey. It's just easier to skate around it. Or at least I thought that it was. There's a lot of things that happened to me that I like to forget. But in forgetting that I underplay my redemption and that is not The Way. Someone said to me recently "If you numb the pain, you also numb the joy" Yeah, I do that. My husband once told me to approach my past like a scuba diver: wear protective gear, look around, get what gotta get, and get back out. But there are sirens under that water and you hear them singing songs of loss, songs of failure and they tell you these tales of what you will never get to be...and I forget what I was even looking for down there...and therein lies the danger. The "God thing" here is that I am seeing that now. That looks an awful lot like greif but smells a lot more like sin. I am learning to be mindful of that.
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