ja_mageia

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain" (Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return)

For the last ten months in my life, there has been serial pain: flooding, homelessness, unexpected major building renovation, random shootings, fatal road accident affecting people I know, family illness and disability, physical injury … a time of great uncertainty; a time that is definitely out of any control that I might have thought that I had.

Rohr reminds us that “Life is hard – and then you die”.  These are two deep truths about human life.  There is suffering, loss, hurt and pain; and these culminate in our death at the end of it all.  Yet the suffering also leads us to death - that metaphorical death of our sense of self, of ego-self, of little self - than then opens the space for us to be resurrected in our higher self.  This is always the great teaching available in any suffering.  We are not in control; we are not that important in ourselves.  We can but let go of this little sense of self and open ourselves to that awareness of the greater mystery of life.

And still this physical heart beats, this inner Soul lives.  This pain is suffused with teaching.  The constant challenge is to live in liminal space, at the edge, beyond the comfort zone, and let go into the Unknown, knowing that "all will be well".

“Death and resurrection is lived out at every level of the cosmos, but only one species thinks it can avoid it – the human species” (Rohr).