We are just two weeks away from the release of Love and Suffering, and I’m continuing my weekly blog posts that expand upon themes in the book. Even though the book is more than 250 pages, there is still so much more that I wanted to include. In fact, during the editing process, I shaved off 15,000 words to make the content easier to read. Fortunately, there’s no word limit on blog posts, so my website is a good place to put things that didn’t quite make the final cut.
This week, I wanted to share the entire poem by Clarissa Pinkola Estés that I put as the epigraph to Chapter 3. Entitled “A Prayer,” this poem perfectly encapsulates many of the themes I write about in the book.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ claim to fame was her incredible 1992 work, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. But one of her lesser-known works is The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die. In this book, she tells the story of her Uncle Zovar, a concentration camp survivor, and his struggle to release himself from the horrors of camp life.
Like Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning based on his concentration camp experience, Estés writes that everything can be taken from a person, except for their spirit. In every situation, we have the freedom to choose our attitude. Sometimes, the darkest of times is necessary for us to realize the truth of the undying light within us all.
In “A Prayer,” she writes,
Refuse to fall down
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
toward heaven
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.
Every time I read this poem, shivers run down my spine. It exemplifies the spiritual path not as following one’s bliss, but by discovering the freedom to choose our own attitude even in the “middle of misery.” Because our greatest freedom is that no one can keep us from lifting our hearts towards heaven, no king or ruler or external circumstances can ever extinguish the eternal flame of the heart.
The final three lines are powerful and exemplify the essence of spiritual awakening. We must abandon the false self in favor of the real one, we must discover what is real amongst the unreal, we must get in touch with a higher order of wisdom within us. While the duality of the egoic mind labels all suffering as bad, nondual spiritual wisdom sees the love amidst suffering and sees the suffering in love.
As I work with more and more clients in my therapy practice, I continue to see the redemptive art of religious awakening. So many of my clients fell down and down and down into a world of drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. Many could not refuse to stay down and fell even further. But the rope that led them out of the abyss was religious practice. For many, it was discovering Jesus, for others it was something else, for everyone it was getting in touch with something larger than the small egoic self, the one who says “nothing good came of this.”
What do you think of when you read the poem? Let me know in the comments.
(Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash).
