A blessing

The extended version of the blessing I read to Chelsea and Jesse on their wedding day

I didnt write it, I got it from Jarrod from Peace Tree Community here in Perth.

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A letter to encourage:

I really hear your heart. I wan’t to encourage you to dare to feel. Joanna Macy says “The heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe.”

This goes to the heart of the Christian faith, the cross....

It invites us to
Dare to feel in a world gone numb.

The depression, a sign of our sensitivity. The numbness, a self defence that fears our capacity to hold. Yet the depression and numbness when offered back to the Spirit, can deepen our compassion.

I believe our inaction is not because people don’t care, but people find it so hard to trust themselves to really feel. We fear opening ourselves to the pain of global warming and what it means for the world’s poorest of poor. We fear being overwhelmed by the reality of our military spending so we can’t be open to reimaging solving the world’s problems with the money. We can only be filled with joy to the depth that we are prepared to feel our grief.

Jesus invites us into a strange new world “where blessed are those that morn... Read More” in a culture that says you’re blessed if you avoid grief. We are trained in avoid tears in info-tainment. We are educated in shunning sorrow in shopping. We run from grief because it means facing our own powerlessness. Yet this is the strange irony of the cross. We run from the pain that would transform us.

Yet Jesus invites us to stop running from the pain that would transform and travel through it. We enter into the darkness trusting that the Love that raised Jesus from the dead will illuminate the darkness. We travel trusting that in our tears spilt over the state of ourselves and our world, trusting that we share in the grief that is our God’s.

This is the journey and strange joy of the prophets and people like Chelsea and Jesse, entering into the divine ache of a new world unless we act on it. Not out of desperation, depression but joy.

Resurrection means that everything, everything can and will be transformed.

And the joy in our tears is the evidence that it has started…

Dare to feel in a world gone numb.
Dare to feel in a world gone numb.
Dare to feel in a world gone numb.
Because Love has won in the resurrection.

So fearlessly dare to feel in a world gone numb.