The Shaping of the Hollowness of Me

Mother Wisdom Speaks

by Christine Lore Webber

Some of you I will hollow out.

I will make you a cave.

I will make you so deep the stars will shine in your darkness.
You will be a bowl.
You will be the cup in the rock collecting rain.

I will hollow you out with knives.

I will not do this to make you clean.
I will not do this to make you pure.
You are clean already.
You are pure already.

I will do this because the world needs the hollowness of you.

I will do this for the space that you will be.
I will do this because you must be large.
A bowl.
People will eat from you and their hunger
will not weaken them unto death.
A cup to catch the sacred rain.

 My daughter, do not cry.

Do not be afraid.
Nothing you need will be lost.
I am shaping you.
I am making you ready.

Light will glow in your hollowing.

You will be filled with light.
Your bones will shine.
The round, open center of you will be radiant.

I will call you Brilliant One.

I will call you Daughter Who Is Wide.
I will call you Transformed.

 

As I travel through the tangled experience of deep grief, I’ve been trying to find the words to describe how it feels to be healing and transforming. Even as I talk to others about the experience, the words sound so trite and hollow, the words that mean nothing when the grief is still raw, the words that at one time seemed they could not be true.

Society has long attempted to marginalize and set apart the darkness of spiritual life. Grief, despair, anger, and fear are the antithesis of a good spiritual life, experiences to overcome and conquer. There is great irony within the postmodern experience that the aspects of religion we judge as harmful are also the places within our souls we hide and deny. So often we talk of a death denying culture, but really, it is a darkness denying culture. Sterilize, deodorize, and bleach out the parts we don’t want to acknowledge. Yet, no matter how much detergent we apply, it cannot eliminate the fundamental life experience. Every time I’ve peered deep into the looking glass to understand the source of my dark emotions, the same area appears. A shadow of darkness that is a subconscious certainty I am nothing, I am useless, worthless, unloveable, and unredeemable, a certainty that I deserve all the suffering in my life. There was a time that I considered this shadow to be a remnant of learned behavior and definitions of self I blamed on misogynistic harmful religion. But the thing is, this inherent sense of suffering is not unique to one religion. It is not even unique to one philosophy or culture. Across the globe and throughout time, humanity describes these same feelings of worthlessness and a sense that suffering is inevitable, deserved, even destined. I no longer am certain these are learned ideas.

Within the realm of progressive postmodern thought, so many want to skip ahead to the joy and peace and rainbows. In fact, progressive social activists will ridicule those who embrace theologies that try to explain suffering, claiming that to explain the origin of suffering, intentionally or not, causes harm. For us, suffering is something to deal with, cope with, handle and manage. The resulting emotions of grief, despair, anger and fear are byproducts of an unhealthy spirit, of not “handling” the suffering well.

This just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. It does not make sense to cut off and deny a good portion, even half, of my own human experience as pointless. What are the options, though? On one hand, I cannot really say anymore that suffering is pointless or meaningless. However, when I try to say there is a reason for my suffering and attempt to explain it, I fall flat on my face.

Ultimately, there is a mystery in the spaces of meaning making. There is a limitation to our ability to communicate and reason through the human experience. I want to pull it apart, observe and describe this space, but it so often eludes me. The attempts by others often bring me comfort, however. For over a decade the poem shared above has aided me and reflects how I desire to see the space of suffering and meaning.