The Wounds of Love: Part Eight – Marc Gafni

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The Wounds of Love: Part Eight

I am willing now to feel hurt. The deepest hurt for us all is the recognition of having hurt others. Even if unconsciously. We hurt each other and then we do it again.

The second most powerful hurt is being betrayed, devastated, and even murdered by those we loved.

When the genuine hurt of a broken relationship, the hurt that so often accompanies intimate engagement, is seen by one of the parties through the lens of his or her own untransformed wounds, the hurt can morph into malice. In that malicious spirit, the wounded person inflicts pain on the former lover that is often wildly disproportionate to the pain they may have suffered. When we are not willing to enter into our own pain, we demand reparations in a spiraling escalation of hurt.

If we are going to allow pain to take us into love, it is utterly necessary to let go of the drama of our pain. Either our pain will evolve us to the divine or it will devolve us into the depths of hell on earth.

We need to see clearly the mistake we so often make imagining that deeply feeling our pain means feeding our story about the pain.

Feeding our sense of being wrong.
Feeding our feeling of betrayal.
Feeding our anger and above all our hurt.

*****

The paradoxical key to moving towards enlightenment through the door of pain
is to retain a deep recognition of the importance of balance.

Balance is the ultimate secret, by a thousand different names, of every great mystical tradition the world over. Whether it is Yin and Yang, Anima and Animus, pathos and comedy, wisdom and foolishness, Shekina and her consort Tiferet, Astarte and El, balance as the portal to goodness and love is the spirit that animates all of these pairs. It was Edith Hamilton who reminded us that for the ancient Greeks the ideal of the human being was the idea of utter proportion. It is only a deep felt sense of proportion and balance that can eliminate suffering.

An understanding of what is sufficient and what is too much.

Even if cannot evolve our pain to our enlightenment, we can at the very least hold the pain honestly without losing our balance. And so, when we look into the pain we suffer in love, it’s important to recognize that there are hierarchies of pain, and that there is a moment to move past our own pain.

Here, I am moved to share with you the story of the Hassidic master Naftali of Ropshitz who was called to help the King. You see the King’s son was crying desperately. All of the wise men of the kingdom, the doctors, the psychologists (such as there were at the time), the magicians and Shamans, and all the rest―none of them could comfort him or stop his crying. Indeed, it seemed to always intensify after each failed attempt at healing. Until a wise old simple woman from the hinterland of the Kingdom came to the palace bringing milk. She happened past the boy who was wandering near the kitchen crying, as he was wont to do. Apparently hearing his tears, she approached him not realizing he was the son of the king. She whispered some few words in his ear. Lo and behold, he looked up, looked at her, and his crying little by little began to abate. Until, after a few minutes, he is not crying at all. The End.

“The end!” said the Hassidim. “Please, holy master,” pleaded the disciples to their teacher, to the Ropshitzer Rebbe, “You must tell us; what magic, what amulet, what secret did the old wise woman―who we know must have been the Shekinah herself―what did she say?” The rebbe smiled. It was very simple, he said. She told the boy, “You must not cry more than it hurts.”

Sometimes we hurt someone in a relatively small way and they respond with a cruelty and vengeance that we never imagined existed in their heart.

I am always surprised by malice.
I am devastated and on my knees for any pain which I have ever caused others.
I am shattered by allowing others to hurt me.
I am devastated to my core at having hurt others by participating in creating a situation in which others would have to bear the pain of their own great untruth.

And all of us must not cry more than it hurts.

If we learn to live wide open, even as we are hurt by love, then the divine wakes up to its own true nature. To be firm in your knowing of love, even when you are desperate, and to be strong in your heart of forgiveness, even when you are betrayed, this is what it means to be holy.

I turn to Rabia, the great Indian mystic, Shekinah incarnate, to guide us home.

“My Body is covered with wounds

this world made

But I still long to kiss her, even when God said

Could you also kiss the hand that caused

each scar

for you will not find me

until you do.”

Marc Gafni