Love heals the past

Finding my voice, finding my walk, I feel the ground under me firmer than before. I feel the shifting balance of my footfall, a dance of centeredness – all the steps connected together into one motion – kinetic energy from the ground, up my stride, through my core and down to the other side. No longer step step step but one continuous wave.

I feel like I’m a grown-up now. Now after all these years of playing at adulthood, I feel the ability to take in the input and let it be folded into the wave of my motion – to respond not like a ping pong paddle but like a sling – pulling the energy in, cradling it, turning it, releasing it in a soaring arc, giving what needs to be given.

Is it possible that I could have been incomplete all this time, a being whose circuitry was not finished, the arc of whose power would always stop before its effect could be realized? Maybe it’s part of the completeness to also realize that no one was ever broken, not even me. In all the broken circumstances of human affairs, Life still has the power to complete its arc and establish its circuitry.

And so the world becomes whole. Each organism already moves in the way of all living. Like the delicate swirls of a smoke tendril folding in again and again on itself, making visible the air currents that always move in one continuous wave, so the Love that is Life connects us continually.

I wrote this in a rapid writing exercise in a writer’s group for the Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women. I started volunteering there more than a year ago, and from the start felt grateful to be allowed to be there. I had not earned the right, through heartbreak or family legacy, to be among the homeless – not faced the gritty issues of bleak survival head-on, not come to the place where making a choice between untenable things was a daily demand. I was allowed to be there and let my comprehension of humanity expand, and to see that, contrary to the tales told on the surface of society, grace is everywhere.

Now I no longer feel like an intruder. Not just because of the many issues of the Newsletter that we’ve put out together, but also because I, too, have been on a journey, and I find many of the landmarks to be the same. In the group where I wrote about finding my voice, another woman shared an account of healing – an unmistakable testament to the law of Love. Through her courage and her trust in God, she found reconciliation with her past, which entailed the embrace of the person she is and forgiveness towards the forces that shaped her. Part of her healing was in her writing, because she was using her own voice, for herself – not needing for the right person to be able to receive her message; just telling it because it was true. In that act of truthfulness, her voice turned out to speak for others at the table. It wasn’t that she tried to do so, it’s just that that is the way telling the truth works.

When I wrote about how love heals the past, I wrote it for me, not in any attempt to be universal. Yet the others at the table found resonance with what I wrote. No one was ever broken, only human affairs are broken. Life still establishes its circuitry. Grace is everywhere.