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The Holy Afflicted
I have one foot
stuck in sadness
while the other foot
is in the doorway to happiness…
…don’t try to pull me
one way or the other,
because one can’t
exist without the other.
~ Jessica Joselyn, fragment of a poem
*
As people are learning all over again in the modern world, when people who will not acknowledge their own woundedness are given power, they will make new wounds and possibly wound everyone because of their need to deny their own woundedness.
The word heal means to cure and specifically to make whole. It turns out that being a whole person means we have to accept our vulnerable parts, and that we have to accept and learn to face our original inner wounds. For in this old, mythological understanding, the fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person…
The wounded healer is ever wounded, and ever able to find ways of healing. It’s an archetypal condition. The point has never been to become perfect, or perfectly healed, or completely whole. The point has always been to become holy. That is to say, complete with our vulnerabilities and…
