The Healing Presence of Compassion

Wednesday Wisdom. The Healing Presence of Compassion. 

For the past few weeks, I have been writing about my journey of healing as I mourn the loss of my mother, and face a new interior and exterior landscape, one without my physical parents.

Gazing at my story with compassion has shifted the way I feel and see my life and my family life. During this past week, I continued to pray with this desire for deeper healing. I had a moment in prayer when I looked al the chaos and complexity of my large family and compassion poured out of my heart and onto all of us. As Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, “Compassion is a verb.”

Yes, the healing presence of compassion poured on all of us like fresh rain from a bursting cloud, falling down on everyone: my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, and me. It felt merciful, loving, and so healing.

My prayer for all of us is that compassion can be born in our hearts: for ourselves, for those with whom we have shared the journey of love and pain, and for all those seeking to heal. I would like to share this poetic vignette I wrote.

***

Cleaning Out the Closet of My Soul, by Colette Lafia

I. There are no shadows in my bedroom tonight, only darkness, only the memory of my mother who died a few months ago. The blackout curtains are covering the windows and sealing me in. The darkness is too heavy. I light a candle, curl up on my left side between the wrinkled sheets, and stare into the flickering light. Now, what I knew had ended decades ago, felt definitive, and the dreams for another life that I was still carrying around were over. The black stamp of the night bore the final words: expired.

Somewhere in my heart the fields were getting ready to be plowed. What was over was over. And as I turned to my right side, with my back against the candle light, I heard an invitation well up from within me: Give it to me. Give it all to me. The prayer dripped over my tongue, as I began handing them over. One by one. Here’s my fantasy; here’s my tattered heart; here’s my long list, and my bucket full of disappointment.

Take it. Take it. Take it. Ripped jeans; broken nails; pages in a girl’s diary. I was cleaning out the closest of my soul, packed with worn-out mismatched underwear and socks; shoes that made my feet ache, and unhemmed pants. My tears poured through the house, out into the streets, and down to the ocean as I cleaned out this closet; as I said, God, take it all. I want to be free.

***

II. One night, four months ago, we sat, a fifty-five year old daughter and a ninety-two year old mother, on the edge of her bed, in her quiet house, in the desert town of Palm Springs. My mother and I sharing our lives, intimately like two friends now. She talked about the poison of criticism, both self-criticism and the criticism she heard and felt from others, from her mother, from her husband, from her sons, and how it seeped into her soul and nearly destroyed her. Always hearing the demand for more. Be more.

“I went to bed crying so many nights,” she told me. I listened, understanding her more as a woman, as a sister on the path, and not only as my mother.

Self criticism was out to kill me, too, I thought. Please God, help me to give it away. Help me not define myself by this black poison that only breaks the hearts of all those waiting to be loved by me, like this girl once, like this woman now.

Compassion broke through with the golden morning light behind the curtain. My prayer was to let this emptying out, this letting go, be healing and compassionate.

 

 

Pause and Reflect: 

• What is seeking your compassion in your life?
• How are you being called to heal?
• Look at your life with the Divine, and let compassion pour from your heart.