I sometimes say within myself that there are really only two things that draw and distract me from continual prayer - one, when all is exhilaratingly well. The other, when all is desperately unwell. The first can buoy up false hopes that life is 'fine...just fine', thereby missing the opportunity for real-time redemptive reach. And the other may present as an insurmountable pit of self - leading to, one presumes, some self pity, or at least a singular focus on the self, thereby missing the crux of that same reach.
I always thought the wounded healer was a balanced combination of each - or, perhaps, 'above all that'. But this is not my experience. It is frequently first and foremost a very dark place...a black hole journey, blinded by muddy darkness and seemingly insurmountable despair. And there is nothing fine about that. It is to be resisted, even in its chilling familiarity. And finally, gradually, embraced as strangely welcome.
So, to this place, I first come unwillingly. Slipping, imperceptibly but surely; skidding, reluctantly; landing - painfully. Efforts to dig out might be compared to ineffectual scraping rock with bare and, thus, bleeding hands.
Why shouldn't the dark night of the soul rupture? Why shouldn't black muteness be cleaved in two, speaking in gushes of redemptive blood? Pleading eyes - facing inward - turn out in redemptive empathy with the world's broken...tingling palms break open, leaving imprints on everything in their path?
And why not, in Christological inspiration, carried out in eyes of faith, a clean cut of a cross at the heart of my open palms, becoming a stamp of grace as those hands clasps others, on and on, with a never ending supply of sacrificial ink to go around. Perhaps smudging a crimson cross on a forehead like burning ashes... or carving one into burdened flesh. Whatever is the degree of pain, that is to be literally marked, covered - not with the coveted clean white bandages of humanity, but the messy ones from His side.
The surprise gift in all this? That, finally, as part of the process, the cosmos screams for an anointing of the self -- whatever is begging, aching...eyes, forehead, palms: all feel the pressure of the phenomenon of Grace bending back on itself.
No matter how many times it has happened, it's still an epiphany of suffering and grace and participation in such. So why, then, should I not look for it - welcome it, even deliberately seek it. And why should I hope for any escaping of my own oppressive pain, imperfection and frailty when I can participate in and through that into something that reaches so much farther out...with carved palms looking for their true home in others'...
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