The Common Experience

I had an experience yesterday: my heart was full of the pain of my family, the families of others, my pain, the pain of others. My heart was full even of pain of people who had died before of family members who had died with stories untold, apologies unspoken, loves not experienced. For a small period of uncontrollable sobbing, I felt like the pain of so many hurts:

accumulated wrongdoings,

inherited poverty of love and circumstances,

ill-treatment and abuses

the negatives ... these coupled with the positives:

the healings,

the courage to do the healing work,

the forgiving,

the returning to,

the letting go of ...

I felt like all these were literally trying to surface and gain release through me.

It was a difficult and embarrassing experience. Made bearable by two main things:

(1) that I had been praying for sometime for God to use me as a channel of His will in the world, and to make me a clear and open channel for His purposes.

(2) that the people around me while I had this experience were supportive, kind, loving and patient with me.

This does not negate the fact that I felt (and still feel) more than a little weird about the whole thing; more than a little embarrassed; more than a little overwhelmed.

Physically the experience was like having a shrapnel bomb explode right in my heart. There were splinters flying everywhere - the splinters were like pieces of my own life, pieces of the lives of others - the painful pieces, the parts that could not be expressed, the parts that had never been allowed to be expressed. The shrapnel was both visual and experiential ... I could see snippets of lives, like snapshots - or single frames from a movie... Frames in which love, forgiveness, self-esteem, shame, abuse, punishment, hatred, anger - all of these were in play simultaneously. The frames were flying every which way inside, and like shards of glass they pierced me from the very inside of my heart.

Physically, as I sobbed, I felt heat radiating from me... from the top of my head, out the soles of my feet. I had on a scarf and I felt like it was choking me. It was hard to breathe because the physicality of the experience was so powerful. It was frightening. My heart hurt and my breathe hitched. Emotionally, I felt this heartbreaking sadness, the sadness of knowing all sides of the picture, the sadness of knowing all the reasons for the inherently fucked up nature of the human condition - not knowing in an intellectual, analytical way, but knowing as in the Hebrew sense "yaw dah" or "yada" - knowing through all one's perceptive capability, knowing viscerally, knowing beyond linguistic capability to articulate ... the knowing of the soul.

It was the sadness of knowing how full the world is of love, yet how unevenly it is all spread around. The sadness also of observing what happens when love is spread unevenly - like peanut butter on bread, the parts that don't get spread are unpalatable, we want to leave them on the plate, throw them in the garbage. They (seem to have) nothing to recommend them.

Except people who don't get love are not disposable like un-peanut buttered bread ends. We may not choose to eat them, and wisely so - those dry and crusty bread ends might choke and kill us. But, whereas they may be disposable in the eyes of humankind, they are not disposable in the eyes of God. Poor God has to find somewhere to put the bread end people who did not get any love. Whose very poverty of love or circumstance has made them evil, wicked, pitiable and harm-mongers in this world. God also has a whole other project cycle to deal with - somehow finding a way into the hearts of those who are damaged by the unloved ones, so that the cycle of unloving can stop ... so that hurt, damaged parents can stop raising hurt, damaged children; so that hurt, damaged partners can go into new relationships with new hope instead of old crust scabs of hurt that in turn create new damage, new hurts, new scars in new relationships.

I felt the enormity of the common experiences of pain and suffering; at the same exact time I felt the enormity of the common experiences of hope and love. The experience was really a hard experience to have. But it was also a powerful experience to have, and a blessing. I believe it happened because I was open to it, because I had prayed for exactly such an opening of my own heart.

What did it yield other than a pile of used Kleenex and a high sense of embarrassment and self-consciousness? It yielded a deepening of my compassion, a deepening of my soul's understanding of this human condition that we all live - with all it's pains and agonies, with all it's beauties and blessings. It also yielded a drawing closer to God in faith, because I got a glimpse as through a tiny tiny opening or keyhole, I got a glimpse of the enormity of the work at hand, and the exquisiteness of what happens when we are able to be open to the workings of a world that is so much bigger than us.

Each of us is like a bookmark in time - one hand reaching back into our pasts, the other reaching forward into our future. We all have the struggles of negotiating through painful histories into hope-filled futures. It becomes somehow easier when we do this with others - in koinonia - in community.

The common experience is both pain and pleasure, both love and hate, both forgiveness and anger. If we are courageous on our journey, the common experience will yield growth, and we can break the negative cycles of history and make peanut butter sandwiches of which no crusts need be thrown away.