“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This old saying echoed around my childhood and most likely yours. And it’s a bold faced lie. Of the painful words I can still remember, cast in stone ages ago, the scars remain. I read them in my body like braille.
In my work with children, I’m aware of the great power that rests within a word or gesture. Fragile creatures we are, and one of the only species that need such a long runway in order to fly alone. Our families of origin can be beautiful gardens in which to grow or harmful to our flowering. “Friends are family of our own choosing” is a mantra chanted by those who crave the healing within a widening tribe of love. There is also risk when the heart opens… that pulsating gossamer channel exposed. With great love, often comes great suffering. It’s the price we pay for giving away our hearts.
The young rabbi’s last days have been told and retold, explained in every imaginable way.* Don’t miss its humanity. This story is about opening an access point in the heart, not about salvation from sin. He raised up a new family—one that mirrored his own—a tribe of belonging at whose table everyone was welcome. They were hungry and young—running towards, not away—finding the others. Soldiers of love, vigilantes of peace, brothers and sisters in arms they were.
Fierce hearts were their weapons as they fought so that everyone would have a role, each given authority at the point of their gift, their particular grace. Learning from each other and from the one who grew up building things in his father’s workshop. With roughhewn hands and a heart like a hammer, he knew how to build something that could last. And yet he knows what happens when one follows that red thread all the way through the needle’s eye. Through a narrow gate he must pass in order to birth a movement that no army could conquer, threading through his very flesh.
They could break his body. That was over in a few hours. What hurt more was the breaking of his heart. Denial and betrayal are wounds that rarely heal. In the end, most of his compatriots left him. The women remained. They always do. The emptiness he felt, the forsakenness. All because of love. From the moment he emerged from the crucible of his desert, to the long walk up his hill of death, he took from that inner fountain and poured it all out in love’s name.
He hangs in the balance of great love and great suffering and stays there until the healing comes. His tears are food for the ancestors, as the Mayans say, for us and for those yet to come. The oil of his anointing was what he smelled as he took his last breath, exhaling peace.
–Jim Marsh, Jr.
