Tears Can Help Remove The Veil
‘In dark times, the eye begins to see.’ Roekthe
Greece beckons. Summer calls.
An entire pantheon of invisible gods stands on the shoreline of hundreds of islands that necklace the coasts of an ancient world.
They invite us to remembrance of our own immortality but, likely as not, we will shrug them off — that’s if we can hear them whisper of things long ago– or simply not notice them at all.
For behind everything on the convex side of life, all that lives above ground and draws the eye-line, are ten more things out of sight which most of us will never see.
The gifts of brokenness are many, perhaps the first is an uncanny perspicacity.
We should always travel toward our wounded-ness but we spend our lives scuttling in the opposite direction, filled with a terrible shame, handed to us by the people who should love us the most who in turn had it handed to them.
People in denial about how wounded they actually feel and suffering from the internalization of early injunctions to ‘pull themselves together’ by parents or caregivers equally cut off from their own emptiness are the norm, the spiritual deadwood that clogs, and finally strangles the culture.
Most of us have done such a good job of hiding our pain from ourselves — often behind a veneer of success or competence — that it seems there is either no way back to the Self or no need. This is mirrored in our disconnection from the earth.
As the late, great John O’Donohue writes: ‘We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.’
The truth is most don’t know they are in exile and it often takes life to seriously derail to bring them face to face with reality. A divorce, a major loss, an accident, failure, addiction.
All of these are sudden initiations that can deepen a person, pulling their soul towards meaning, purpose and new beginnings, which might otherwise remain out of reach. Crisis and opportunity are natural bedfellows.
In older, wiser times initiations were prolonged and planned encounters that acknowledged the need to mark, honour and ground the movements of the soul. The most well-known, still practised in earth-based societies, are the rituals and markings that transfigured boys into men providing a brush with death that may or may not be survived.
Such initiations took place only after initiates had been held and contained within the bosom of family, culture, and community and had incorporated the Paradise Garden within the Self. This making and unmaking of personhood is a sacred craft that honours all involved.
How different to the sudden shocks modern westerners encounter, sometimes as soon as they hit shore. But if the culture is lost and cannot provide what is needed consciously, pressure will gather within the psyche to provide what the soul needs to experience to turn back towards a sense of wholeness.
‘The organism,’ as Jung said ‘is self-regulating.’ Without the necessary container of family (and I don’t include families that demand convention and conformity in the child and quash individuality) and community, the soul finds itself in exile, often without knowing it.
This sense of exile lies somewhere within each human being whether it is felt and accepted or not. Such alienation was experienced in earlier times as a physical banishment, exile to France for instance. It was understood that separating a person from all they had known and loved, stripping them of all possible comfort and sending them to foreign lands was a fate worse than death.
The sense of exile is carried within us all — even in an abundant life it waits quietly in the shadows — but so too is the inner king who will one day return to centre stage, though perhaps in another lifetime.
For the brush with death is real. Without the right nutrients and soil during early life, things are hard enough. With abandonments and abuses, the child is too raw to risk moving out into the world.
Adulthood cannot be adequately faced as there is simply not enough ground beneath a person and not enough nourishment within. Or there is simply too much adult, the one that had to grow up too soon at the cost of the joyful, playful child they needed to be dominant.
Whichever way the head turns things look bleak. The wilderness is all around and the wolves are everywhere. If you arrive at a crossroads either road looks unpromising. The first involves bringing out the survival bag and again toughing life out from within the limits the mask of competence provides.
That way involves living from a false self where no authentic healing is possible. The second involves drowning in the sea of sorrows and turning towards escapes, addictions, and fixes. Or you may do a combination of both.
Yet the truth remains hiding in the rubble. The poet Emily Dickinson understood it: ‘There is a pain..so utter..it swallows substance up…Then covers the Abyss with Trance…So Memory can step around..across..upon it.’ No-one is heading in the right direction, which is towards the wound.
Almost everyone is scrambling like fury away from the abyss. But those drowning in the sea of sorrows are infinitely more able to grab the life raft than those trapped by their self-sufficiency and pride. For the waters of emotion and feeling are flowing and can carry the floundering soul to safe harbour or new adventure — the next initiatory experience.
The sea of sorrows has another vital function: it acquaints us with longing. Out of the wound of exile come many gifts, perhaps the chief of which is the experience of longing.
The soul calls for home and somewhere in this world and the Otherworld the call is heard and messengers, unseen and otherwise, come to our aid. Earthly exile mirrors our longing for our divine origins and draws us back to our beginnings, before the world turned.
As the Sufi master Rumi says, your longing itself is the return message. Crying out for help becomes both call and answer.
Twenty-five years ago, I was privileged to take part in a three-day grief ritual led by the Dagara tribal chief Malidoma Some and his wife Sobonfu. Suddenly, I was in the bowels of the earth, the realm of the ancestors.
I discovered another life which I had known intuitively but could never quite grasp. Tears, often outlawed in Western society because of our shame, bring us home.
Sorrow is a must if we are to know true joy.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
