This last week I’ve been facilitating with others for groups of humanitarian aid workers struggling to process their time in the violence of north Congo. Very humbling and revealing work, so hard just to listen and stay with the tragedies.
One woman who had worked in north Congo for two years and witnessed massacres and survived assaults, spoke in a very quiet voice about the hidden God who appears at the margins of history.
She said:
‘My God is unknowable but he comes into the unspeakable where there are no words that can make sense of all-powerful evil. He is not concerned with the comfortable of this world. This God is a God of non-peoples and non-memories, a God who stands together with those of us written out of history and whose lives make no sense because we have been silenced by the immensity of death and horror. God speaks only a great compassionate silence to us now. Silence meets silence.’
Afterwards I went and sat out in the garden at home and thought about the immensity of compassion needed in this broken world and how the reality of the Divine, this God-for-Others, smashes through many of my images and petty concerns and self-centredness, the tunnel of neurosis. That I need to reach deeper and risk more.
And it is the Dark Moon in Aries this weekend: as Pluto begins a journey through Capricorn, the true beginning of the strological year and a time to look at what is truly valuable for us in this lifetime. The lasting and durable qualities we desire in relationship, in life choices, in work. And, curiously, the Sabian symbol speaks of someone ‘able to live successfully in two worlds at the same time.’
This resonates for me. Autumn, more than spring, is the thinning season when the worlds blow through one another and death is just a fine gossamer veil, barely concealing the Otherness and void. I watch leaves tumble and birds with their avian iridescence, sit on and dream in the garden in the mild sunlight, waiting for the chill of night, Hekate’s hour. Letting the Unknowing blow through me.
Hey what you said about Pluto making us realize what is truly valuable in our live times-I seem to be going through it right now. Scary, when you think about it how much of our lives is ruled by the heavens.
Finding our real meanings and what is valuable, when you get family, pets and friends out of the equation it’s very hard work.
Eii.
Take care Mary.,