So I was offered the following question...
"You work with people who live with failure every day. Have you found that 'backsliding' draws them further from God, or presses them toward God?"
Failure in who's eyes I ask?
Surely failure is more to do with social norms, preferences and ideal isms?
Yet, to answer this question, I have seen in our women, a spirituality , a connection with God, that I have seen nowhere else.
I have come to trust that the greater their knowledge of their own misery, the more profound their confidence in the goodness and mercy of God...for surely mercy and misery are so closely connected that the one cannot be exercised without the other?
Henri Nouwen worte of a constant struggle to distinguish between the voice of his wounded self, which never went away, and the voivce of God. Gradually he came to see that the voice of God only speaks through wounded selves.
In my own life I mainly hear the voice of a wounded self trying to articulate the voice of God.
I live in daily awareness of how much easier it is to edit a question like the one above, than edit a life.
If Emma and I stand long enough we always sense a thirst and a restlessness, and so hope for new life.
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3 comments:
The language of woundedness evokes something in me. Partly I don't like it, yet it also, resonates so deeply.
I don't like it, for it leaves this sense of us lacking. Not being fully human...as if there was some ideal of what it is to be "complete" or "whole" or "healed", or all those other needles in haystacks. The elusive state, that is probably nothing other than the language of perfection, wrapped up in a more beguiling way.
Yet, it does feel true enough, to touch a raw nerve...a tender part in the hiddenness. The language of the "wound" speaks to me of a tearing, and a separation...and the language of "God" in relation to that, speaks to me of reconciliation.
In the space in between, there is longing. The longing speaks to me of desire. Big desires. Desires that feel way too big for us to carry or contain.
So, it seems to me, that there are those of us who run away from all of that language...the wound, the reconciliation, the desire, the movement, the journey, the change, the unsettling etc. The conflicting desire for security, stability, and the familiar prevent that language being birthed...maintaining a smoke screen of status quos, and ritualistic balance.
These people always seem a bit fake to me, and that is why i resonate more with those who call themselves broken, or wounded. The ones who don't pretend. No white-wash...just humanity in its rawness; just humanity struggling under the unanswering heavens. and there...in that little spot, in that little moment, when we have stopped trying to pawn off our shoddy answers to other strugglers...we, then, are compassion. suffering with. human to human without pretence.
sorry for the ramble. you just got me thinking.
i love the ramble, anonymous, and the sentiment of your post sarah, if i have sensed it correctly.
laying down striving for success,
striving to hear the voice,
laying down pretending to have it together and only because the obvious wound ooze into every interaction i lay it down, i surrender and i give up the pretence.. failure? i'd say that is damn successful..by my standards.
w.
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