To Temper Our Spirits into Swords of Peace

Tempering

Until about 10 years ago, I thought tempering was heating metal in a fire so it could be worked. After all, the song said, “Keep it long in the fire.” “Swing it straighter and higher” meant that a person’s spirit would be all aflame from being in the fire of God, and then God would hammer all that energy so that it would be as strong and as purposeful as a sword. When I thought of tempering, I thought of flames rising up and lots of energy. It was a very empowering image.

Then someone gave a message in Meeting about tempering that mentioned water. I thought, “Water! I didn’t know tempering had anything to do with water.” So I rushed to the person after Meeting and said, “What does tempering mean? I’ve clearly had the wrong impression.” I found out that metal is heated red hot, but then it’s plunged into cold water. Then it’s put in the fire again, and then into cold water again. This process is repeated, a process which makes swords strong and flexible—or else it breaks them entirely.

That process—that rhythm of tempering from fire to water, hot to cold—is a very good metaphor for how various tensions work among Friends to make us stronger instruments of the Divine. The first tension I associated with the rhythm of fire and water, fire and water, fire and water, was the constant tension between individual and corporate. You get fired up with a leading, and you have to test it against your faith community. Sometimes it’s just like cold water. And then you have to go back and fire it up again. But that process makes you stronger and more flexible.

Often I think of John Woolman bringing his leadings to his Meeting. We sometimes think that the support of our faith community means that when we bring a leading to it, everybody will say, “O John, that’s a great idea! Go do it!” But support doesn’t necessarily mean that. Let me illustrate. In a guessing game, you’re challenged to guess a number between 1 and 1000. You say, “Is it between 1 and 500?” If the answer is “Yes,” you cheer. If the answer is “No,” you say, “Rats!” You got the same amount of information with both answers, but the “no” answer made you feel you’d been “wrong.” It’s like that with testing leadings in a faith community.

John Woolman had a minute from his Meeting supporting his leading to go visit Indians near Wyalusing. As he was about to leave, people from his Meeting came to him to say, “There’s an increase in attacks by Indians out there. We feel concerned that you will be killed if you go. Please don’t go.” Those comments clarified his leading to go. Not that Friends supported his particular action, but the statement of their concern helped him find his own clarity. So that process of tempering—fire and water, fire and water—is one of the rhythms in the dance between the individual and the corporate.

Another Quaker rhythm is within us as individuals; we need to test our call against our experience, and it’s a constant test. I’ve said, “I’m called to do this;” then I’ve done it, and it doesn’t turn out the way I expected. And that’s like being plunged into cold water. So I’ve gone back into the heat of God’s presence and tested the leading again. In my experience, God works through this constant testing of our experience against the call we thought we heard. I think that process is part of what continuing revelation means.

During the worship at New England Yearly Meeting the year I became clerk, I felt a burning finger on my forehead and the words, “It sears, and it heals. It sears and it heals.” That image and that reality have been with me since, and it’s the same rhythm as tempering—searing and healing, searing and healing—but it’s continuous; I’m not sure I will ever become fully tempered.

So there are two examples from Quaker process of the metaphor of tempering: first, tempering focused individually, as we follow our leadings and have the experience temper that leading. Second, bringing individual leadings to our faith community and having them tempered by corporate testing.

When I was thinking about this rhythm, I was also reminded of the diary of the sculptor Anne Truitt. She was expressing how vulnerable she feels much of the time. She wrote, “My vulnerability to my own life is irrefutable. Nor do I wish it to be otherwise, as vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.” [in Turn, page 19]

The Quaker testimony of integrity is the essential one to me. We need to be really clear about what we do, to move forward, yet to remain constantly open to further guidance somehow. And if we’re tested, and we feel pain, maybe we need to change, or maybe we need to hand over the pain, but it is the testing that makes possible the perception of new life, new integrity.

As I was feeling words coming up for this talk, I was very much aware that all our words come from the same Source, and that most of the words that I am going to speak today I have heard or I have spoken myself in a meeting for worship. So there is a kind of continuing truth that we get just through experiencing meeting for worship with each other. I was aware that some years ago more quotes from books would have risen up, but that today what I am bringing forth is mostly what I have heard in meetings for worship. Of course, once a message comes out of us in worship, it isn’t “our” message any more; it belongs to everyone. What I share with you now will be the words of others which came alive in me, thus it becomes my message as well—and it may be a different message from what was actually spoken. But that is how drawing from the Source of words works. If something I say here moves you particularly, then it is your message, not mine. Its life in you is what is important; Life moving through us is the essential thing.

As the image of tempering was growing in me, I remembered being touched in a very deep place when I heard these words spoken in a meeting for worship: “We can feel ourselves walking through fire without being consumed. All that is unnecessary is burned away and we are left with the strength of a tempered heart.” Now that is a kind of strength that can transform the world!

I’d like to end this section with one of the prayers “after the manner of the Lord’s Prayer” that came through Judy Brutz. In Malachi 3:2 is a reminder that God is “like a refiner’s fire.” Given those words, here is Judy’s prayer:

Refiner’s Fire,
who comes to our relationships,
may we open ourselves to You.
As You burn through our dross,
we will become merciful to one another.
Give us the hope of new understanding
and forgive us our defensiveness
as we forgive those who seem to be against us.
Do not forsake us in our separated state,
but do remove even the appearance of duplicity;
for your realm is in Truth,
your power in compassion,
and your glory in renewed life.

Truth

To begin this section, I’ll share one of my best quotes ever; I have it taped on my desk. It comes from a source of great wisdom, the tag of a Salada teabag. Years ago I picked a teabag out of the box and read this line: “Never be diverted from the truth by what you would like to believe.” Oh, yes. How often I have fallen into that trap, and not seen a given truth because I didn’t want to believe it.

There is a well-known Quaker phrase using the word truth with which I find myself increasingly uneasy. It’s the phrase, “speaking truth to power.” I credit Paul Lacey, in his pamphlet, “Quakers and the Use of Power” for getting me to think about this phrase. He talks about how that statement puts truth on one side and power on the other, and given a choice between truth and power, you know which side we Quakers are on! We use the phrase to mean truth as opposed to power in a “worldly” sense, but we need to be cautious about the implication that truth and power do not belong together. Gandhi affirmed that Truth has its own power, which nothing can touch. Truth and power belong together.

There is a Light in which all of us are one, one big Truth we are all part of. That’s the truth I’m speaking of here. It has the power to transform us, and each of us sees only part of it. All of us can only speak of the truth we have seen, based on our own experience. Our expressions of truth thus differ, given the variety of our experience, but they are all part of a more complex Truth which we glimpse when we share our truths with each other.

One of the great Quaker insights, I think, is our requirement that the truth we speak go no further than our own experience of it. George Fox had a great hunger for truth; he knew the scriptures well, yet he spent years and years searching for their meaning for his life. He asked “professors” and many others about their faith, yet was not satisfied until he heard the voice of Christ Jesus, on a hillside, alone. Then he knew what integrity was: whatever we profess must come out of direct experience, and as we gain more experience, our faith will grow and deepen. So we need to constantly test the faith we profess against our experience.

Isaac Penington has some wonderful words about “not running into religious practices without the spirit…not to take things for truths because others see them to be truths, but to wait till the spirit make them manifest to me.” Plenty of us do that, profess a truth because someone we respect does so, not because our own light has taken us there.

Penington also reminds us that anyone who draws people “to any practice before the life [in them] leads [them to it] doth…destroy the soul of that person.” We need to speak our own truth as we see it, not expect to validate it by forcing others to share that truth if they have not experienced it. To summarize: our truth, only one part of the larger Truth, begins and finds its integrity in our own experience, and deepens as we live it.

Two weeks ago, I worshipped at First Friends Church in Des Moines, Iowa. From a friend there I heard how a woman in a small Bible Study group there shared how painful it was to her that the pastor always used “Father” for God since she had been abused by her father. It was not her theology, but her own experience which excluded her addressing as “Father” the God in whose hands she could find comfort and grounding.

One of my favorite examples of coming to truth through experience is in the Epistle of the World Gathering of Young Friends, part of which I will read now:

Our differences are our richness, but also our problem. One of our key differences is the different names we give our Inward Teacher. Some of us name that Teacher Lord; others of us use the names Spirit, Inner Light, Inward Christ, or Jesus Christ. It is important to acknowledge that these names in volve more than language; they involve basic differences in our understanding of who God is, and how God enters our lives. We urge Friends to wrestle, as many of us have here, with the conviction and experience of many Friends throughout our history that this Inward Teacher is in fact Christ himself. We have been struck this week, however, with the experience of being forced to recognize this same God at work in others who call that voice by different names, or who understand differently who that Voice is.

We have often wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim this: there is a living God at the centre of all, who is available to each of us as a Present Teacher at the very heart of our lives. We seek as people of God to be worthy vessels to deliver the Lord’s transforming word, to be prophets of joy who know from experience and can testify to the world, as George Fox did, “that the Lord God is at work in this thick night.” Our priority is to be receptive and responsive to the life—giving Word of God, whether is comes through the written Word—the Scriptures; the Incarnate Word—Jesus Christ; the Corporate Word—as discerned by the gathered meeting; or the Inward Word of God in our hearts which is available to each of us who seek the Truth.

This can be made easier if we face the truth within ourselves, embrace the pain and lay down our differences before God for the Holy Spirit to forgive, thus transforming us into instruments of healing. This priority is not merely an abstract idea, but something we have experienced powerfully at work among us this week. (emphasis mine)

We have to start with the truth—about ourselves both personally and corporately—to say “this is who we are.” And then we can open ourselves to transformation.

The other thing about the phrase “speaking truth to power” that bothers me is that it doesn’t say anything about listening. Listening for God is one of the primary ways we find truth. Elise Boulding has a wonderful phrase called, “prophetic listening.” She defines this as “listening to others in such a way that we draw out of them the seeds of their own highest understanding, of their own obedience, of their own vision, that they themselves may not have known were there. Listening can draw forth out of people things that speaking to them cannot.”

There’s a program called “The Listening Project” in North Carolina. Trained people go around listening to people in communities as a way of bringing about social change. They do not ask them to sign petitions and work against the military installations where some of the people to whom they listen may have jobs. They simply visit people to listen, asking them to tell about their lives, seeing if anything comes out of that listening. There was an article in the June 1988 Friends Journal telling of Listening Project people going to listen to the contras in Nicaragua. Listening is very powerful.

The most recent proof I’ve heard of the power of listening was at a conference on child abuse, during a panel on male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. A question was asked of the two panelists who work with perpetrators in prisons—who are usually themselves survivors of childhood abuse: “What do you work on first with the prisoners, the survivor material or the perpetrator material?”

One panelist replied, “The perpetrator side, of course, because those survivors need to take responsibility for what they have done in the present in order to begin healing. After all, not all survivors turn into perpetrators.”

She talked about some experiments that have been done to see what the characteristics were of survivors who become perpetrators and of survivors who do not. These experiments were done across racial, economic, and gender lines to see what social and cultural factors might be involved. To their surprise, the experimenters found that in all of the research there was only one difference between survivors who became perpetrators and those who didn’t. For survivors who became perpetrators, not one person in their entire life ever listened to them with respect. Survivors who did not become perpetrators had at least one person who listened to them and took them seriously—and this didn’t necessarily mean listening to stories of their abuse. All that made a difference was someone listening with respect to them as a person, taking them seriously.

Listening is a powerful tool for transformation. Listening people into their truth.

To you, Yahweh, I call;
my Rock, hear me.
If you do not listen,
I shall become like those who are dead.
[Psalm 28:1]

Here I see the power of listening to bring us into Life. In this Psalm, I take “dead” to mean the lack of capacity to feel connected to a larger Life of any kind. This is based on my own experience: at times when I have lost the capacity to feel, I have felt totally isolated and alone, dead.

Another fact about truth for me is that it is often paradoxical. Neils Bohr tells us that “the opposite of ordinary truth is a lie, but the opposite of one profound truth can be another profound truth.” And I think of Rollo May, “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.” Putting these two ideas together, I say that the opposite of our speaking truth may not be conscious lying, it may be denial and indifference. One thing I have learned experimentally in recent years is that denial of our own truth is not something we can control; it may very well not be a matter of our stubborn will, but of our psyche protecting something very precious in us.

I’m sure there are plenty of us with large areas of truth in our own lives that we can’t see for a variety of reasons. When we disagree, it may be that the origin of the disagreement is not the ideas we are articulating, but some deeper “reason.” So when disagreement occur, can you feel the Light between you and know that there is Light in both of you? Or do you feel only indifference and denial in the other person? In this case, you may be led to speak differently because you feel the other person’s reality means they are incapable of listening to the particular point you’re trying to make.

What gets in the way of perception of truth? Denial, for sure. Personal history. Corporate history. Survival mechanisms. Lack of feeling. To feel is so essential. If we feel something, anything, it can be transformed. Even if we feel hatred, it can be transformed, but if we feel nothing, transformation is not possible.

There’s a powerful children’s book called The Nargun and the Stars by the Australian writer Patricia Wrightson. In the story, she creates a being called the Nargun who is indifferent, not evil. It has no will or awareness of causing pain to others. It is described as part of a landscape, a rock which will suddenly get an urge to move, which it does very slowly and deliberately, destroying things in its path. Through the Nargun, she conveys a keen sense of the moral indifference of a being totally centered on its own needs for survival, period. This total indifference is like a rock—it can’t be touched by any other living being. And since it can’t be touched, transformation is not possible.

In contrast, if someone recognizes and lives by supernatural powers, even if those powers are destructive, transformation from knowledge of destructive power to knowledge of life-giving power can occur. In one of my essential books of spiritual guidance, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula LeGuin, there is a child who has been taken from her home at age 5 and trained to be High Priestess of the tombs, trained to serve the dark masters of the undertomb. She is the only one who can wander through the labyrinth of the underground tombs, and she knows them well. One day as she wanders there, she finds a wizard in one of the rooms. Suddenly everything changes. If someone has been able to come here where supposedly she is the only one who knows the way, why haven’t the gods she serves struck him down? Are there more powerful gods than hers?

There is something in this wizard Ged that awakens some new life in her, so she takes him to the very center of the undertomb, not sure why she does so, perhaps giving the gods she serves an opportunity to kill him. When she returns after three days, he is still there, alive. And she weeps to feel that her own gods are dead and that she will have to change her life. She has spent her whole life serving something that wasn’t there, that wasn’t worth serving. But Ged asks her,

“Did you truly think them dead? You know better in your heart. They do not die. They are dark and undying, and they hate the light: the brief, bright light of our mortality. They are immortal, but they are not gods. They never were. They are not worth the worship of any human soul.”

She listened, her eyes heavy, her gaze fixed on the flickering lantern.

“What have they ever given you, Tenar?”

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place, and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor for gotten,but neither should they be worshipped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in people’s eyes. And where [people] worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness…” (page 118)

Those powers are still around. There are immortal things that are not life-giving, and their own survival means death for others. We can’t deny them, but we also don’t need to worship them. And that’s the message: that sometimes you can’t come to the truth unless you acknowledge these forces. I think that madness is in fact, a terrible, terrible isolation. It is an incapacity to feel connected to other human beings, or with any Life force (Life with a capital L), either in plant or animal, or anything. Quakers concerned over the years with mental illness have hoped that in trying to speak to that of God in such persons, they could come out of isolation into a sense of connectedness.

That sense of connection to an energy, a life-giving Power is one of the ways to recognize Truth. I remember George Fox’s message, “I was not called to bring them off forms, but to bring them off forms without power.” [my emphasis] It may well be that we need to examine our Quaker forms which have grown up since Fox, to see if they still have power. The truth we perceive at a given time must constantly be tested to see if it remains vital. If it is not, we can be grateful for the Life it did bring us, and open ourselves to continuing revelation, in the faith that we can be led into further truth.

The monastic community Taizé has had great success with young people. Their abbot Brother Roger was once asked, “How do you have such success with young people? What is your secret? What do you do?” He said, “It’s very simple. We do two things. One: we listen to them. Two: we point them to the Source.” This reminds me of George Fox saying he was called to bring people to the feet of Christ and leave them there. We cannot force our own truth on another person. Our task is to listen deeply to others, share our own truth, and then draw back, allowing people’s own Inner Teacher to work in them. Truth does not come to everyone in the same way, and we need to respect the integrity of others, respect how truth works in them.

I’d like to give you a break here by having you do the following exercise: Turn to the person next to you and name the source of power in your life. And if you don’t have a name for it, describe how it works. What confirms you in your own truth? Take no more than 5 minutes—This is the “twenty-five words or less accompanied by a boxtop” version.

BREAK to do exercise

From seeing how animated you all became, I would urge you to share more at length on this. It is a powerful experience. I have done it in a large group where we spent all evening at it. To name the source of power in our lives is very, very moving. Because when you name it, it brings that Power into the room. This might be done especially before a meeting focused on exploring differences; when we explore differences without first bringing the unifying Power into the room, we are in danger of bringing only the differences into the room. We need to bring Light and Power first.

Transformation

I’m going to remind you again that it isn’t just a matter of perceiving truth, but of feeling it. Feel your truth deeply, feel the life in it. And whatever you feel—joy, pain, whatever—it can be transformed. Until you feel it it cannot be transformed. Here are some words which have often sustained me. They came in Sparrowlight, through Helen and Karl Schantz of Odessa, NY, whom some of you may know.

Our unceasing weeping for our world needs to continue.
Our unceasing awareness of pain needs to open us up to healing energy to
meet that pain.
Our unceasing joys need to be lifted up.

The reminder I need to hear in this is that weeping, awareness of pain and joy are all unceasing, so that we can feel them simultaneously. Joy is not a “reward” for pain; we can feel joy and pain at the same time. And even as we feel one pain, another may be healed. So these words remind us that you need to feel whatever it is that you feel even if it seems paradoxical. We can weep for our world—or our Yearly Meeting—and also lift up our joys.

Personally, I have discovered the truth that once I feel a truth that has been very difficult for me to accept, I offer it over and I’m liberated. I think, “how can this be?” Feeling horrible liberates me? Then I realize that it is the perception of truth that is liberating; the nature of the truth doesn’t matter. Liberation begins in the perception itself; whether the truth is a joyful one or a painful one does not seem to be relevant to its power to heal and transform me.

To illustrate further what I mean, I’ll share some new insights which have come to me lately about the story of Moses and the burning bush. When someone in Meeting quoted Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “…Every bush is afire with God, but only she who sees the flame takes off her shoes…,” it brought up the image of that burning bush again. I’ve long imagined that the burning bush whose flames did not consume it had been in that desert for a long time. Finally Moses wandered by and said, “Ah, I think I’ll go see this wonder,” and when he did, he heard a voice and took off his shoes.

Browning’s words led me to see that every bush is burning in the sense that every bush has the form of “bush,” and the flame that does not consume it is Life. This is that Life with the capital L that started way back even before God said, “Let there be Light,” and continues today. We are a very, very small piece of this Life, this wonderful force moving through time. So the flame that doesn’t consume this particular bush is that Life which was, is now, and always will be.

Once we see the Life in something, whatever bush it is, we take off our shoes. And we don’t just take off our shoes in awe, but we take off our shoes to ground ourselves, to be able to take the Life we perceive in that bush and walk in it. Here we are back to the tempering rhythm again: this time fire and earth to make us strong and flexible.

Grounding the power we see in that bush means bringing it into the time and space where we just happen to have been born. When we do ground the power that we see in that small bush, then we are open to see more of that power. That is continuing revelation. And the more we can ground the power we do see, then the more power we can perceive. So that’s how that works, I think. Once we acknowledge the Light we do see, we can be given more. And if we let that Light and Power work through us, we can be transformed.

Now I want to add a word of caution, lest you think that once we see the Life in the bush and take off our shoes, we ground the power, violins play, the sun rises and all is peachy—keen. Any of you who have walked around barefoot where there are bees, have no doubt been stung. I’ve been stung myself and I probably will be again in the future. So beware: when you take off your shoes, you might step on a bee. What a test of your call!

What about the source of peace in a community—whether in our Meetings or in the wider world? If we learn to let a transforming power work in us, tempering our hearts, we will know the place from which peace can flow. What Brother Roger of the Taizé community says is, “We are called to fight not with weapons of power, but with reconciled hearts.” That’s what we fight with: reconciled hearts. Reconciled to our own call. And reconciled to the people around us.

There’s another element involved in reconciliation. Brother Roger continues, “When two estranged people seek reconciliation, it is essential first of all for each of them to discover the special gifts the other has.” That’s how to start reconciling: to discover the special gifts of people with whom we are in conflict.

Adam Curle expresses this in another way. He is a British Friends who does a lot of international reconciliation whose latest book is called Tools for Transformation. In order to bring about reconciliation, he says it is necessary to sit in a room with the person with whom you want to be reconciled, perhaps someone who has been responsible for the deaths of 10,000 people. It is necessary to sit in silence with this person until you feel the God in that person. Then you can begin the work of reconciliation. Until you feel that of God in the other, reconciliation cannot happen.

In order to encourage you to discover the special gifts in each other, I made multiple copies of two exercises on drawing out gifts (see appendix) which you can take home with you.

Healing

Just as with truth and transformation, we have absolutely no power except to be open. We can’t transform ourselves, we can only be open to it. We can’t heal ourselves, either, but what we can do is open ourselves, open our hearts to be healed. The healing is not in our power.

I’d like to share three messages on healing from three different Meetings for Worship. The first one is this: “We are already whole, even if we can’t feel it. Sometimes I can’t feel my foot, but it’s there, even if I can’t feel it. And for a long time I ate too much because I couldn’t tell when my body was satisfied. But my body knew when it was satisfied. The same is true of our communities. They are already whole, even if we can’t feel it. We need to remind ourselves of that. The power that makes us whole, that one power, that one source of truth, that’s what makes us whole, and if we rest there, we are whole. But for lots and lots of reasons, sometimes we just can’t do that.”

A message which came to me was this: I saw the image of that experiment with babies to see at what age they have depth perception. A piece of clear plexiglass is put over a chasm and the crawling baby needs to cross over this chasm to get the toy on the other side. Younger babies simply crawl right over the chasm, safe on the plexiglass, but at a certain age they see the chasm and stop at its edge. It is the supposedly more mature baby who stops. But how do we know that the baby who crawls across isn’t less perceptive for not seeing it, but more perceptive for acting on the feeling of something very solid under his or her little knees and hands? We surely cannot see the spirit, but if we feel that it is there, we are safe trusting it, even as that baby is safe.

I believe that is just what we’re like a lot of times. We have our prejudices and all sorts of things that make us see a chasm and so we don’t try to bridge it. Someone has sung a song about building bridges across our divisions. Perhaps we don’t have to build bridges across our divisions; the glass is already there. We have to get down on our knees, and crawl, and feel our way across the spiritual connections that are there already.

Finally I’ll share a message in a meeting for worship for the purpose of business of Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns where a concern was raised that some women felt uncomfortable, perceived that FLGC was mostly a men’s group. Friends were speaking to what could be done to make the women feel more comfortable. How could this problem be solved?

This was the message: “I do not see the discomfort of some among us as a problem to be solved, an issue, something that can be fixed. It is our condition. We live in society that is hostile to women. We know that. We live in a society that is very hostile to gay and lesbian people. We would be naïve if we thought that would not affect us here. Our culture does affect us, all of us. What we need to do is to listen to each other more deeply. To listen to each other’s condition—actual condition—and speak to that. Not manipulate the group so that it’s comfortable for whoever and whoever.”

So this message drew us back to the root of truth, our experience of the condition of other people that we cared about and could actually listen to.

Lastly, there’s a common belief that if you are healed, you won’t hurt anymore. A message that came through me in a Meeting for Worship last summer contradicts this: This I know experimentally. It is possible to play at joy and not feel it. It is possible to play at pain and not feel it. Healing is not the cessation of pain. Healing is an increased capacity to feel. When Jacob wrestled all night with the angel and finally in the morning got his blessing, he built an altar in that place because he said, “Here I have seen God face to face, and survived.”

I love the title of Zora Neal Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The title quote comes from a scene where people are watching the approach of a hurricane, and she says, “They thought they were looking at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

During many nights in recent years and many mornings when I awake, I have felt like building an altar, for I did not believe that I could have felt this much pain and survived. But I have. There is resurrection. I know when I lose the capacity to feel, when I cannot feel my foot or my hand, I feel dead inside, I feel alone, unconnected. When I begin to feel any feeling again, it is a resurrection, a return to life. I know experimentally that to heal is an increased capacity to feel. And we can only feel incredibly grateful when we perceive again that vibrant Life that is the center of everything.

I will close with another prayer of Judy Brutz.

“I will heal them and reveal to them abundance of peace and truth.”
(Jeremiah 33:6)

Divine Healer who is part of the great I AM,
may You be known and loved.
As You transform our lives
we will become people who live in the Spirit.
Give us this day what we need to be healed,
and release us from the brokenness and pain
we have brought others
as we release those who have hurt us.
Lead us not to a returning to our former ways,
but do deliver us from deceit and corruption.
For yours is the place of healing,
love,
and sanctity forever.