the holy ground of sorrow

I am walking a labyrinth with a seashell pressed to my ear. I am sand flowing through an hourglass. I see my great grandmother in a burning village. I hear the Cossacks ride in and begin to shoot. She is folding an origami bird, a white dove that she casts upon the winds and water. It lands on my shoulder and nuzzles me.

Why have you come? I ask.

Because the world is on fire, she replies. The death eaters are on the march slaughtering all who are in their path. They will rob us of our souls if we let them.

I send the white dove back with a message: How can I help?

She catches the bird in one hand, folds the origami and tucks it into the pocket of her apron.

It’s time to enter the holy ground of sorrow, she says, where we allow grief to soften our hearts with our tears, allowing it to open us to the immense and volatile suffering we witness every day.

Do not turn away, child, she says, for your grief is your offering to a broken world.

What matters now is to ask what love needs from you today.

What matters is to remember that all life is precious.

What matters is to be willing to feel the yearning of another and share their grief.

What matters is to remember that in every war there are always two losers.

You are being called to put down your arms. The bullet aimed at the other. For tell me, she asks, who is the other? The dark eyed stranger starving for food and water, is she not your sister? And did her child not feed at your own breast?

It is time to draw the circle wide, wider, widest still, to include all of humanity, for who shall be excluded? Our enemies? Tell me child, who are your enemies? Who wounded you so deeply you cannot see their own wounds? What conflict is so fresh you cannot take your knife and trace a line in the sand back and back to a place where we all rose up from the same fertile ground and drank from the same clear stream.

Who is the other when we share the same mother, the same earth needing our care, the same sky we sleep under dreaming our shared dreams of peace.

Let grief become your sacred activism, the cry you let loose onto troubled waters,  wailing for the children shot down, the flaming orchards now begging for rain.

Let it become your sacred duty to grieve not in private, shutting off the flow of tears for fear of looking weak or vulnerable, for fear of dropping into a bottomless well, but rather grieve together, mothers weeping into each other’s arms, fathers picking through rubble searching for signs of life.

Who is right and who is wrong? This is no longer the question that needs asking. Rather, ask yourself what stops you from seeing the other as yourself, from stepping inside the widening circle of humanity and declaring yourself awake to the suffering of the world.

 Refuse to turn away. Refuse to make more enemies at this moment of transformation when there is the chance in the midst of bombs and bloodshed to cry out no more.

This is what we ask – to put down your ancient grievances with each other that wall us off to the truth of our one undivided being. In the midst of a global horror so like the ones before it and the ones before that, we have the chance to search inside ourselves and tame the one who sees only black and white, us and them,  who would destroy another to remain so sure of being right.

Can you do this? she asks across oceans, across time and space that collapse as she sends back the dove to nuzzle me once again. Can you soften enough to make peace? Can you open to your kindship with all of life before it is too late? Will you survive long enough to cross this bridge over raging waters onto a new shore where our children are safe and the old wounds, the old misdirections, are buried?

Holy holy holy she chants softly. This is what love asks of you. Now. Every day. Always.