06 Nov Speaking to Broken Hearts
November 6, 2024
“Part of the goal of a healer is to bear the unbearable pain…” Jeffery Yuen 88th generation Daoist priest
Dear Friend,
This morning, many hearts the world over the world are broken, aching or stinging. Not everybody’s, but we all have hearts that are broken, stinging or cold sometime. Today, I’m speaking to broken hearts. To the feeling of pending death, doom, and calamity, whenever, wherever we may feel it. If we don’t all feel it today, we have all felt it at one time or another.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death—that moment when our hearts stop. Death is often felt as the ultimate ending and calamity. Witnessing how people meet calamity can show us the way and prepare our hearts for our own calamities.
Stories from India have always helped me make sense of these things, but in the last week or so a story from the Bible keeps coming to my heart. The last supper. Jesus knew what was ahead. Later that night he would ask, if it be Thy will, to let that cup pass. He knew. What he did then would be among his final actions in the world. Before he died, he gathered his disciples for a final meal—the last supper.
He gathered his disciples. He didn’t talk about justice. He didn’t talk about making things fair or setting things right. He asked his disciples to love each other as he loved them.
Becoming intensely vulnerable, he put aside his garments, wrapped a towel around his waist, poured water into a basin and he washed their feet. He washed their feet. He washed their feet and said, “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” He asked them to love each other.
He showed mercy.
When something breaks, it breaks open. Leonard Cohen, as we’ve heard so many times, sung that that breaking lets in the Light. It opens a passage. Through that passage we can be forced to see possibilities beyond the measurable.
Let us keep heart and care for each other.
Thank you for being here.
In Love,
cw