A few thoughts:
Beauty in brokenness.
I do think also of what I wrote you once, like an onion of grief, peeling back the layers one by one.
I’m sure self-discovery is part of it.
What are you on earth for, and what does it mean when that supposition is destroyed. What is left of you?
It’s a common question for a mzungu in Africa, who am I and why am I here. Not sure anyone ever fully answers it.
I read something today that will probably resonate with your experience, from an email by Richard Rohr’s team:
Author and Episcopal priest Barbara Taylor Brown invites us to consider the lessons that suffering has to teach us and reminds us that we can only learn when we are willing to stay put instead of turning away.
Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan says that painful emotions are like the Zen teacher who whacks his students with a flat board right between their shoulder blades when he sees them going to sleep during meditation. If we can learn to tolerate the whack — better yet, to let it wake us up — we may discover the power hidden in the heart of the pain. Though this teaching is central to several of the world’s great religions, it will never have broad appeal, since almost no one wants to go there. Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel [see Genesis 32:22–31] all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.
What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between “individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.”
While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote, “but by making the darkness conscious.” Reading this, I realize that in a whole lifetime spent with seekers of enlightenment, I have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment.
