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Two sections from The Epistle from the Sixth World Conference of Friends speak to me. First, it's hard for me to imagine just how diverse global Friends are. I know how difficult it is to bridge the diversity of Friends in the US. So when i read, "We found ourselves reluctant to go beyond polite acceptance and avoidance of difference. We are not united in all of our attitudes and beliefs, yet we choose to come together to listen, to share, and to hear things we may find uncomfortable and upsetting," i think about the things in the US that each branch finds upsetting. Then i read Sizeli Marcelin's words about her experience in Rwanda as a peacemaker, a path she began when 92 of her family were killed in the genocide, leaving her and three children. This is a different uncomfortable and upsetting.*
I should take the time to read more of the other messages at the site.
The other section that spoke to me stated, "A speaker challenged us to consider that brokenness may also be opportunity. We are uncomfortable with feeling brokenness and seeing it around us, yet from it we gain strength, empathy and compassion. Rather than trying to heal our brokenness as quickly as possible, we challenge ourselves - and Friends everywhere - to consider what God's plan could be for a hurting individual, and for a hurting community."
I refuse to join a cult of suffering because i believe it covers up cultures of injustice. "Oh, that is your cross to bear," was a refrain that i heard growing up, used to affirm that someone was living in a painful condition but enforcing an idea that it was a static, unchanging, God-willed state. I don't think the theology was particularly good, but the effect of saying, "Your job is to shut up and put up with it," seems to me incredibly noxious.
Some years ago i was working through healing for myself. (See my "clearing the spring" tag in LJ.) I remember the vision i had of myself as a vessel -- a bottle or jar of fired clay -- and the broken places i had "healed" by sealing off the cracks. I didn't want the cracks to show, i didn't want the gaps to be there. But i "learned" in a moment, and then through the years, that healing was not returning myself to some imagined pre-break condition. Instead, clearing away the patches, scars and barriers allowed Light to move through me.
The emotional and spiritual being is not like the physical body or a physical vase. Integrity is found not in patching and restoring to a previous state. While a body needs bones to knit and cuts to scab and heal and a vessel needs chips and cracks sealed, it seems that the growth of Self comes not from restoration to a previous state but a transformation of the experience, allowing change to continue. Integrity comes from integration into the whole self, transforming the self, not reverting the self to a prior way of being.
Brokenness of spirit isn't resolved in the way the brokenness of the material world of humans. I was about to contrast it to the brokenness of the physical world, but then i thought of hurricanes and forest fires, of toppled trees and weak animals becoming prey. The natural world dealt with "brokenness" in the ecological cycle in a very different way.**
* I acknowledge that there's death and terror in the "culture wars" in the US, in the violence against women and those identified as LGBTQ, against immigrants and the "others" and "them."
** I watched two different environmental restoration documentaries this weekend. One, Braving Iraq, was particularly striking in how the Iraq Central Marshes, drained by Sadam Hussein, are recovering. The other was the restoration of the American Northern Prairie.
I should take the time to read more of the other messages at the site.
The other section that spoke to me stated, "A speaker challenged us to consider that brokenness may also be opportunity. We are uncomfortable with feeling brokenness and seeing it around us, yet from it we gain strength, empathy and compassion. Rather than trying to heal our brokenness as quickly as possible, we challenge ourselves - and Friends everywhere - to consider what God's plan could be for a hurting individual, and for a hurting community."
I refuse to join a cult of suffering because i believe it covers up cultures of injustice. "Oh, that is your cross to bear," was a refrain that i heard growing up, used to affirm that someone was living in a painful condition but enforcing an idea that it was a static, unchanging, God-willed state. I don't think the theology was particularly good, but the effect of saying, "Your job is to shut up and put up with it," seems to me incredibly noxious.
Some years ago i was working through healing for myself. (See my "clearing the spring" tag in LJ.) I remember the vision i had of myself as a vessel -- a bottle or jar of fired clay -- and the broken places i had "healed" by sealing off the cracks. I didn't want the cracks to show, i didn't want the gaps to be there. But i "learned" in a moment, and then through the years, that healing was not returning myself to some imagined pre-break condition. Instead, clearing away the patches, scars and barriers allowed Light to move through me.
The emotional and spiritual being is not like the physical body or a physical vase. Integrity is found not in patching and restoring to a previous state. While a body needs bones to knit and cuts to scab and heal and a vessel needs chips and cracks sealed, it seems that the growth of Self comes not from restoration to a previous state but a transformation of the experience, allowing change to continue. Integrity comes from integration into the whole self, transforming the self, not reverting the self to a prior way of being.
Brokenness of spirit isn't resolved in the way the brokenness of the material world of humans. I was about to contrast it to the brokenness of the physical world, but then i thought of hurricanes and forest fires, of toppled trees and weak animals becoming prey. The natural world dealt with "brokenness" in the ecological cycle in a very different way.**
* I acknowledge that there's death and terror in the "culture wars" in the US, in the violence against women and those identified as LGBTQ, against immigrants and the "others" and "them."
** I watched two different environmental restoration documentaries this weekend. One, Braving Iraq, was particularly striking in how the Iraq Central Marshes, drained by Sadam Hussein, are recovering. The other was the restoration of the American Northern Prairie.