[monday musings]

'Struggling with one’s own shadow self, facing interior conflicts and moral failures, undergoing rejections and abandonment, daily humiliations, experiencing any kind of abuse or your own clear limitations, even accepting that some people hate you: All of these are gateways into deeper consciousness and the flowering of the soul. These experiences give us a privileged window into the naked (read “undefendable”) now, because impossible contradictions are staring us in the face. Much-needed healing, forgiving what is, weeping over and accepting one’s interior poverty and contradictions are normally necessary to invite a person into the contemplative mind. (Watch Paul do this in a classic way from the depths of Romans 7:14 to the heights of his mystic poetry in most of Romans 8.)
In facing the contradictions that we ourselves are, we become living icons of both/and.
Once we can accept mercy, it is almost natural to hand it on to others.
You become a conduit of what you yourself have received.'

From The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 125-126

I long for the light.