Isaiah 42:1-9; Luke 18:31-42
Rabbi Yoshua ben Levi came upon Elijah the prophet while he was standing at the entrance of Rabbi Simeron ben Yohai’s cave… He asked Elijah, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replied, “Go and ask him yourself.”
“Where is he?”
“Sitting at the gates of the city.”
“How shall I know him?”
“He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed: if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’”
Henri Nouwen, a 20th century Dutch Catholic priest, professor and author, included this story from the Talmud, an ancient Jewish text, in his book The Wounded Healer, published in 1970. I read it a decade later, at the suggestion of a college friend, Ann Marie Marciarelli, with whom I had shared my first inklings of a call to ministry. Ann Marie was my residents hall advisor. She knew that, like many college freshmen, I was struggling with loneliness and uncertainty about who I was, where I fit in, and what I had to offer.
It was a good recommendation–a book that shaped my life. It helped me claim that, just maybe, the calling I thought I heard was real. It suggested that my struggles and uncertainties did not disqualify me from ministry but actually were essential to my calling. I wrote my very first sermon on the way Nouwen’s vision of “The Wounded Healer” gave me courage to take risks.
I thought about Nouwen’s book at our Lenten pizza and planning meeting in January. As we were talking about the challenge of letting go of things we have accumulated and clearing clutter out of our calendars, a member of our team pointed out that not everyone has too much stuff. Some people don’t have enough. And not everyone has too many things to do; some of us struggle to find meaningful ways to fill our days. It was a helpful reminder that we are all in different places in our lives.
Long after the pizza was gone, I found myself thinking about that comment. It offers insight into what may be behind the clutter that can fill our homes and calendars and minds. Sometimes we fill our days with too many things simply because there are so many great opportunities. Other times, our busy-ness may reflect an frantic need to fill any open space, to stave off a feeling of emptiness. We fill our minds with ideas and lists and worries so we don’t have to face our disappointment at a dream that has floundered. We fill our electronic devices with youtube videos so we don’t notice our loneliness.
Our wise Lenten planning team member pointed to an important aspect of our theme, “Making Space.” We can talk about de-cluttering strategies, priority scheduling and social media fasts until we are blue in the face. Unless, though, we acknowledge our human struggle with emptiness and loneliness and loss, we will just keep finding new ways to fill up any space we try to make.
The conversation led me back to Henri Nouwen’s book, The Wounded Healer. When I re-read it this week, it wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it from 37 years ago. Some of his depictions of what he called “modern man” seemed hopelessly dated; in other ways, his description of the dislocation and rootlessness he saw in the early 70’s seems relevant to the alienation I see in our culture today. Nouwen writes about what he calls “man’s predicament,” what I might call “the human condition.” Loneliness, he suggests, is a wound that is at the heart of being human.
I don’t know whether I agree with Nouwen’s assessment of the human condition; it doesn’t take into account the millions of people who are more concerned about getting enough food each day than they are about existential loneliness. Still, I am grateful for his insight into the impact of loneliness in our lives. Sometimes our loneliness is an expression of grief–a hole in our hearts left by the loss of someone we love. Sometimes it is the feeling that no one–not even the person closest to us–fully understands who we are–, and the fear that if they did, they would no longer love us. Loneliness may reflect physical isolation–from illness or disability, incarceration or lack of transportation–, or alienation–being surrounded by people whose values or interests seem foreign to us. Other times, that feeling of emptiness isn’t loneliness, but may be a struggle to find a sense of purpose. Whatever the source, there are times in our lives we experience what I envision as a sinkhole right in the center of our beings. The edges are jagged, and they hurt–physically, emotionally, spiritually. The pain seems to define our lives.
What inspired me in Nouwen’s book thirty-seven years ago, and still today, is his understanding of the sacred opportunity God offers us in the midst of our pain. We are tempted to try to fill up those gaping holes–to escape from our grief by quickly finding someone else to love, to hide our loneliness by counting our Facebook friends, to deny our emptiness by trying to make ourselves essential. We can’t, and we don’t have to.
Drawing upon scripture, and this intriguing passage from the Talmud, Nouwen points us toward God’s vision for human wholeness. The servant of God in Isaiah 42 is one who has known pain and who draws upon that knowledge to become a light to the nations. Jesus, in our reading from Luke, brings his awareness of his own impending suffering to the healing of a blind man. The messiah in our Talmud story is not a perfect being who condescends to help the poor wounded ones. Rather, he is one who shares our human woundedness and chooses to act not in spite of his wounds but because he knows what it is like to be in pain. This messiah is different from the multitude of wounded people at the gate only in her choice to unbind her wounds one at a time so she will be ready to help someone else.
God’s vision of human wholeness is not perfection. God’s promise of healing is not that God will fill up those gaping holes so we can pretend they were never there. Instead, God promises us a healing river of love, love that flows over those jagged edges, reshaping them over time in the same way water smooths the rocks on the banks of a river. God promises to bless us with new people to love, new creative energy, new moments of joy and beauty–not to fill those empty places but to ever so gently nudge them out of the center of our hearts. They are still there, still part of who we are, but they no longer have the same power to define us.
God promises to transform the gaping jagged hole in the center of our lives into something new –a reservoir to hold the waters of healing so we can offer them to a stranger. A well so we can tap into the deep spring that feeds the healing river. Over time, by the grace of God, the hole that feels like a bottomless pit is reshaped into a gentle space, or perhaps a spaciousness, within us. That gentle space can hold our memories–the bitter and the sweet ones–tenderly. That spaciousness allows us to draw upon our own experience of pain to honor another person’s hurt. It enables us to get past the limits of our own experience to listen deeply to someone else’s story–even and especially when it is very different from our own. It is a gentle space, and when we realize we don’t have to fill it, we can take time to write a card to a neighbor, accompany an immigrant, crochet an afghan, or stand beside someone claiming their truth for the first time in public. It is a space of compassion, a space in which our hearts can swell.
This is what God promises us–not filling up our empty places, but transforming them into spaces of compassion. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once; in fact, for most of us, it is a lifelong process. Even as the healing river smooths out those jagged edges, we occasionally get caught on a sharp point remaining. We cannot force the process; we cannot make our own healing happen. We can open ourselves to the river of healing God offers us.
“Making Space” is our Lenten theme, but “making” isn’t exactly the right word. The space inside us is already there. It is part of being human, part of living with the realities of grief and disappointment, loneliness and emptiness.
My invitation to you today is to acknowledge the sacred opportunity God offers in the midst of your times of grief and emptiness. Resist the temptation to try to fill up those gaping, jagged holes. Instead, dare to trust in God’s promise of healing. Open yourself to God’s healing river flowing through your life, slowly, gradually softening those painfully sharp edges. Allow new friendships, new beauty, new challenges to gently nudge that emptiness out of the center of your heart. Rejoice in the well of healing water God is creating in your life–a space of compassion. Amen.