Dear Friends ~ I recently participated in a conversation in which dissatisfaction or dissonance was a recurring theme poignantly and piercingly captured in a line quoted from a Mary Oliver poem:
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment...
Somewhere along the continuum from self-loathing and beating oneself up to don't worry/be happy and keep busily distracted, must be a way of channeling this disparity into learning. How do we allow that longing, that discrepancy between who we think we are and who we want to be, to become not a well of disparagement but fertile ground for discovery, the disquiet that prods and encourages us into growth and change? Sufi music interprets the plaintive sound of the ney, an ancient reed flute still in use from almost 5000 years ago, as the reed lamenting its separation from the reed bed. The Sema ceremony of the Sufi whirlers was explained to me as "being empty like the ney and listening with the eye of the heart to the breath of God within."
Jesus wept over Jerusalem ... tears continue to be an appropriate response to the suffering world today.
The gift of tears is a sign of change, of conversation of heart. The tears that are a gift are a sign of willingness to let go, of desire to let go, and the power of God acting in response to the person's prayer of longing ... The gift of tears is a sign of self-forgetfulness, a willing nakedness, a desire that comes from within to create space for God by letting go conscious pursuit of security, power, attachment ... The way of tears, while not seeking pain for its own sake, is a willingness to be continually confronted not only by painful truth about one's self, but also seeks to know this truth on a universal level of human suffering ... The way of tears quickly proceeds beyond focus on personal self-knowledge to an orientation toward the Other ... choosing to be related to the creation.