4 Elul
Separation and Longing: part three, third paragraph
Below is the third excerpt from Saki Santorelli's magnificent book, Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine (the entire excerpt is below today's message):
We were very rushed, running around the stone and narrow pathways of the old city of Jerusalem. No time to pause, certainly no time to shop. The participants on our congregational trip to Israel were trying to keep up with our guide. Somebody pulled me aside and said, can you take me to buy a shofar? Of course, I said. I motioned to the guide to wait a moment and the group made a sudden detour to a small shop owned by a longtime friend of Ezra's, a hiking buddy who is now close to eighty years old (and yes they still hike many kilometers Shabbat morning). The shop was so small that we barely fit and found ourselves passing around the shofars that were kept in large baskets on the floor of the shop. One was black, one brown with red swirls, a few very short, many long and dignified. And the moment was exquisite! There we were, in the shadow of the destroyed Temple, just below the mountain where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac and where God told him to sacrifice the ram instead - the ram's horn, the shofar, blown for generations - picking out shofars to bring home.
How perfect our longing to connect, to feel the vibrations of antiquity, to participate in the great awakening of the holiday, to stand tall as part of the generations who know, to hear that eerie sound is everything. It sings of our brokenness, it sings of our prayers, it sings of our longing for connection, and the longest blast of all sings of our yearning, the anticipation and hope of wholeness.
Rumi's opening section of the Mathnawi, "The Song of the Reed," begins: "Oh hear the reed flute, how it does complain and how it tells of separation's pain..."
Rumi tells us that the pain of separation, the longing of the reed pulled from its source, is both a lament and a fiery, triumphant call to return - a remembering of our fundamental inseparability. Yet our experience of separation is unavoidable and holds within it the metamorphic energies of transformation. It is our willingness to make contact with the experience of separation that allows us to touch and reckon with the full force of our longing for connection. It is the intensity of this longing -literally our willingness to live intimately with the discomfort and anguish of separation -that is the threshold and pathway leading through separation to joining.
--Saki Santorelli
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The excerpt in its entirety:
We human beings live inside such a tight cocoon. Because we are not so different, I know whether you say so or not, that you and I live most of our lives in this stifling, unsatisfying, airtight encampment. We have named this self-woven world "I." "Me." "Mine." Frantically running out of the mystery of who we or what we are behind all the extras of title, status, and role, we have reified and made special this cocoon world, making it small and solid, calling it "self." In our time this process has reach its zenith. We are in a dark enclosure. Can any of us say with absolute honesty and certainty that we are content with this state of affairs?
Tragically, while we continue weaving this secure blindness, our world has reached it nadir. Separation is the way of the world. This is true for all of us. From this mistaken identity spring greed, strident individuality, and the destruction of planetary community. I cannot easily assign meaning to any of this. Rather, I have come to feel the truth of the situation while gradually learning to take responsibility for it. We are at a cusp, a turning point in history. We can go on living in this hard darkness, pretending that it does not exist, feeling helpless, cynical because we know it does, or we can begin to peer into the darkness, allowing the eyes to adjust, seeing with gradual clarity that which is before us.
Rumi's opening section of the Mathnawi, "The Song of the Reed," begins: "Oh hear the reed flute, how it does complain and how it tells of separation's pain..."
Rumi tells us that the pain of separation, the longing of the reed pulled from its source, is both a lament and a fiery, triumphant call to return - a remembering of our fundamental inseparability. Yet our experience of separation is unavoidable and holds within it the metamorphic energies of transformation. It is our willingness to make contact with the experience of separation that allows us to touch and reckon with the full force of our longing for connection. It is the intensity of this longing -literally our willingness to live intimately with the discomfort and anguish of separation -that is the threshold and pathway leading through separation to joining.
Saki Santorelli , Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine