Reading Psalms and the Wounds of Love: Marc Gafni

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marc gafni
published on marcgafni.com
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For me the way through the hardest of times of the last two years came from the book of Psalms. I tried meditation, taking refuge in the Buddha, as my colleague Genpo Roshi suggested. This was my path from May until July or August of 2006. I prayed. I had never been one for prayer. Mostly, because I loved to pray so much that when I would start I would so often fall into a kind of rapture that was hard for me to resist. So I denied myself―all too often―the gorgeous luxury of prayer. My feeling was that my life―in every waking and dreaming moment―was prayer. But at this time I began to pray again.

But more than anything, I read psalms. By myself, in my apartment at night before I went to sleep, and when I could not sleep. With Dalit. And by myself again. I would read with tears streaming down my face, my heart screaming at the pain, at the injustice and betrayal even as I yearned for wholeness and embrace. To embrace every living thing. To embrace those who hurt me. To re-read the scripts where I had hurt my friends or let my students and supporters down through my naivete, mis-judgement or ambition.

Who better then David understood Betrayal. Who better then David knew how to protest injustice even as he owned everything as being somehow a result of his own lack of wholeness. Who better then David knew how to reject the new age aphorisms of radical responsibility, rooted as they are in the denial of mystery and cleverly disguised hubris.
Who better then David knew how to reject the easy platitudes of victimology and to claim his part in contribution system which created the palaces of his pain.

David was my friend guiding me, confirming my own deepest held intuitions, holding me, giving me courage and audacity and gathering the torn shards of my shaterred heart.

God in the second person. King David, in the subtle passages of power and complexity, agony and ecstasy, that make up Psalms understood me. More then anyone else I felt connected, loved, and understood by the energy of King David.

He held me, gathered up my tears, and confirmed my very being.

It was in David that I found the paradox of anger, outrage, and political perception brought together with broken heart, radical responsibility, grace, and hope. Reading Tehillim psalms almost every night in torrents of tears kept me alive and sane.

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Slowly and gradually, the processes that I have engaged, the spiritual practices which guide my days, beautiful friends, and the gift of grace, have transmuted this pain. Slowly and gradually, I am emerging from a tunnel of such utter blackness and despair that I find it difficult to share or describe.

Slowly and gradually, what initially looked like radical darkness is beginning to show faint glimmerings of light. What initially seemed to be utter slavery now reveals slivers of liberation and freedom.

What was at first, for months on end, the most constricting and narrow of places is beginning to open, and I, once again but in a whole different way, begin to walk in the wide places.

My soul yearns for the wide places.

My life was for many years marked by victory after victory. The pleasure of accomplishment, loving, creativity, and manifestation were my chief joys.

Surging forward in imitation of the divine explosion of creativity was the nobility which I sought to incarnate in the service of the divine.

Then, in one fell swoop, my life was defeated. The only possible direction was inwards. A movement of radical contraction and recoil. Tzimtzum, in which all that I was holding needed to be let go.

I was defeated by life. Yes Yes Yes became No No No.

And in this defeat was the seed of new joy.

I have been defeated by life and feel reborn in the very ashes of defeat.

A man whose psychological work has been one of the touchstones on this journey, sent me a poem by Rilke sometime after I completed his “process.”

Rilke has walked me through, and I am grateful. I have become the witness.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat,
after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes,
drives on across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too,
and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows:
by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

posted by marc gafni

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