
As if in dialogue with my inner musings, the daily
meditation that I receive in my morning email from Richard Rohr (Center for
Contemplation and Action) gave me some more verbal tools for the inner
wrestling:
Jesus says, “There’s
only one sign I’m going to give you: the sign of the prophet Jonah” (see Luke
11:29; Matthew 12:39, 16:4). Sooner or later, life is going to lead us into the belly of the beast, into a place we
can’t fix, control, explain, or understand. That’s where transformation most
easily happens—because only there are we in the hands of God—and not
self-managing. Suffering is the only
thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego. The separate and
sufficient self has to be led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns to
call upon the Deeper Resource of who it truly is (but does not recognize yet):
the God Self, the True Self, the Christ Self, the Buddha Self—use whatever
words you want. It is who we fundamentally are in God and who God is dwelling
in us. Once we are transplanted to this solid place, we are largely
indestructible! But then we must learn to rest there, and not just make occasional
forays into momentary union. That is the work of our whole lifetime.
Whew!! Maybe that thought
expands the picture too much and too quickly!
Just getting my head around the notion that we may be in the “belly of
the beast” - or in the “refiner’s fire” (to use a different metaphor from
Malachi 3:2), part of a grand process of cleansing and redemption that will
take us to a deeper level of “humanity aware of its divinity” is a bit mind
altering to say the least.

This is how Etty describes the indestructible nature of the True Self in the midst of all the horrors of the Westerbork transit camp, a staging ground for the deportation of Dutch Jews during the Holocaust:
This morning, while I
stood at the tub with a colleague, I said with great emotion something like
this: “The realms of the soul and the spirit are so spacious and unending that
this little bit of physical discomfort and suffering doesn’t really matter all
that much. I do not feel I have been robbed of my freedom; essentially no one
can do me any harm at all.” [1]
Another
mind bending take on the transformational possibilities of immense
suffering.
Each
week as I return home from Shabbat services on Friday and Saturday and then
from Sunday morning worship, I feel gratitude for the communities in which I
find grounding and strength for living through the coming week and healing for
my spirit of the spiritual wounds encountered in the prior week. The morning meditations from Richard Rohr are
another resource for each day. Buddhist
reflections on simplicity and loving kindness from Christina Feldman are an
ongoing source of inspiration.

Now,
if I could only stand back far enough to be able to see and know whether the
vast social, political, ecological, economic and spiritual suffering on this
planet is indeed working a collective transformational process that
“destabilizes the imperial ego” of
systems and politicians in the service of the human spirit. I am impatient for some reassurance that this
is so. But maybe witnessing and
acknowledging my own process will have
to be enough for now.
Vicky Hanjian
[1] Etty Hillesum, Letter (June 29, 1943).
See An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943 and Letters from
Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company:
1996), 287-288 cited in Richard Rohr’s Daily
Meditation from the Center For Action and Contemplation, October 21, 2018
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