There is perhaps a moment in every life that something dark comes along. If we are not very careful to recognize its life-damaging potential before it grips us, it can hold us for the rest of our lives. We can become addicted to that wound and use it forever as an identity card. We can turn that wound into sorrow and forsakenness, a prison of crippled identity. It is difficult to be objective and gracious about your wounds, because they can hurt and weep for years. Yet wounds are not sent to make us small and frightened; they are sent to open us up and to help graciousness, compassion, and beauty root within us. Wounds offer us unique gifts, but they demand a severe apprenticeship before the door of blessing opens.
The Vulnerability and Mystery of the Body
All our knowing is tenuous and shadowed. Our bodies, too, are so fragile. An accident can suddenly visit a life and completely change one’s world. In one split second in a car crash, your whole world could be taken from you. You then have to enter the world of illness and pain and begin to learn how to reside there. Your body is your only home in the universe. When you become ill or injured, you have to become used to your body as a new dwelling. All of a sudden, it is strange, vulnerable, and injured. Up to now it worked with you and for you; now it hesitates, it must be encouraged, and often it just squats there unable to move or partake. There is a desperate poignancy in the presence of a sick body. A friend of mine who now has the companionship of illness and cannot be left alone says, “I have had to get used to living with this third thing that is always there now between me and everything.”
The body is such an intricate and complex place. The more you become aware of what a nuanced inner network it is, the more you wonder how it actually continues to function in secrecy and silence. The heart is the great warm centre of your life. All emotion and feeling lives here. Think of the faithfulness of your heart that has never once stopped. In every moment of work, relaxation, thought, pain, and sleep, it continues to keep your life flowing. Your heart reflects the movement of your experience. The heart is the place of great departure in the body. From here, all your blood flows out to every inner territory. The heart is also the place of great return, the place to where all the tired blood returns to be reinvigorated.
Though the body is splendid and mysterious, it is fragile, too. Joy and blessings, trouble and turbulence can reach us, because we are in these visible tents of clay. We live on an unseen threshold. The name of that threshold is fragility. Our courage breaks here “like a tree in a black wind,” as Yeats put it. Consequently, we need the shelter and blessing of prayer. Our language instinctively expresses this. The greeting “Hello” expresses surprise and delight that you have survived since the last meeting. “Good-bye” invokes a blessing around you until we meet again. These rituals of greeting and valediction are secretly meant to appease the deities and invoke blessing on us. Yeats adverts to this hidden seam of vulnerability when he says:
Come away o human child
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
No Wound Is Ever Silent
There is no one—regardless of how beautiful, sure, competent, or powerful—who is not damaged internally in some way. Each of us carries in our hearts the wound of mortality. We are particularly adept at covering our inner wounds, but no wound is ever silent. Behind the play of your image and the style you cut in the world, your wounds continue to call out for healing. These cuts at the core of your identity cannot be healed by the world or medicine, nor by the externals of religion or psychology. It is only by letting in the divine light to bathe these wounds that healing will come. The tender kindness of the Divine knows where the roots of our pain are concealed. The divine light knows how to heal their sore weeping. Every inner wound has its own particular voice. It calls from a time when we were wronged and damaged. It holds the memory of that breakage as pristine as its moment of occurrence. Deep inner wounds evade time. Their soreness is utterly pure. These wounds lose little of their acid with the natural transience of chronological time. If we dig into ourselves with the fragile instruments of analysis, we can destroy ourselves. Only the voice of deep prayer can carry the gentle poultice inwards to these severe crevices and draw out the toxins of hurt. To learn what went on at the time of such wounding can help us greatly; it will show us the causes, and the structure of the wound becomes clear. Real healing is, however, another matter. As with all great arrivals in the soul, it comes from a direction that we often could neither predict nor anticipate.
Celtic Recognition and Blessing of the Dark Side
The Celtic tradition recognizes that we need to invoke blessing on our suffering and pain. It is wrong to portray Celtic spirituality as a tradition of light, brightness, and goodness alone; this is soft spirituality. The Celtic tradition had a strong sense of the threat and terror of suffering. One of the lovely rituals was the visit to the Holy Well. These wells were openings in the earth-body of the Goddess. The land of Ireland was the body of the Goddess Ériú. Wisdom and cures were to be found in the Holy Wells. In our valley, there are three such wells. Two have cures for sore eyes. All kinds of personal things were left here as “thanks offerings” for the cure. Many of these wells are in the mountains. It is quite a poignant thing in a bleak, stolid landscape to find these little oases of tenderness bedecked with personal mementos, sacred places where people have come for centuries to the goddesses of the earth looking for healing. These wells were places where the water element was used to bless and heal. In the Irish tradition, there is a wonderful respect for holy water. People put little bottles of holy water in the walls of their farms to keep away evil and sickness. Some carry it in their cars to prevent accidents. Others sprinkle it at night for the holy souls and for absent friends and loved ones. There is a lovely sense of how the water element can bring protection. A huge percentage of the human body is water. Blessing with water is beautiful; it is as if the innocent water of the earth which has flown wild and free in rain and ocean comes to bless its embodied human sister.
The Celtic tradition had a great sense of how the powers of Nature could be stirred to bring pain and destruction. There are many such stories. For instance, a woman who had special powers could cause a storm at sea by stirring water violently in a vessel. Or a fisherman at sea could raise wind by whistling for it. There are also many stories of people who had charms to cure animals. They could diagnose intuitively what was wrong with the animal and then use the charm to bring the animal back to health. Certain people also had the charm to cure people. In the invisible network of suffering, it is amazing how some have the power to heal us, and others help us carry the burden.