Shards: Agony as Serving

Shirley Sullivan

Copyright Tom Prescott 2006

The moment between sleep and waking is an act of sacred service.  Act is not only allied with its Latin derivatives (agere:  do, drive, conduct, lead), but with the Greek agein, from which comes, among others, the word:  agony.  It is curious that a Western mindset allies itself intransigently on one side of a derivation (e.g. service as doing).  Curious that the word intransigent itself is derived from the same Latin root:  agere. When the mind is still in the dream state and just beginning to re-orient itself to the demands of waking reality, it hovers on the edge of a knowing that is still free from cognition.  In that place idea, image, memory speak with the language of the heart, that center which transforms substance into radiating light, as Robert Sardello says.  That language is a sacred doing, free from this-reality strictures, not easily spoken or heard, not lightly learned.

Into this dawn light an image intrudes:  a movie image in which a young girl is raped by her teacher.  The scene is not overly graphic; one watches through a half window in which only faces are visible:  his—bestial, huge, obsessed; hers—terrified, fierce, then, ultimately, dissolved in surrender.  But in this moment between sleep and waking, an unbearable shattering is occurring.  It is act as agony and moves from celluloid image, to memory, to the bones of Earth itself where Mater/Mother is being forced to receive a violence that is all the more agonizing because it is a parody of eros, of the most longed-for, holy union.

Jewish mysticism tells the story of the Shekhina, partner to Jahweh from the beginning.  In their union is the genesis of all creation.  In one telling of this tale, she is the container and he the flame.  When he grows large, she expands, to shield the created world from his searing blaze.  When he dies down to an ember, she shelters him from extinction.  One day, in this telling, the flame grows so huge, so insistent, so monstrous in its power that she is blown apart, splintered.  Her shards fly to the ends of the world.

When I first heard this story I was pierced with what seemed an ancient memory of the shattering.  It was as if my heart were exploding and pieces of it blasted in every direction.  I knelt and picked up a broken stone, as if to embark on the path of wandering to re-collect this brokenness into a whole.  Such is the mitzvah laid upon us. How is it possible that the experiencing of the shattering is an act of sacred service?  In the ironic depth at which soul is pierced and broken there is a knowing that wholeness exists.  The remembering of this wholeness is sacred service.  Here what is broken is becoming whole, the shattered pieces are reconfiguring, over and over, into a solid, strong vessel.  The breaking and the re-working are in essence the same.  One does not come into being without the other.  Experiencing this, between sleep and waking, when the rational mind is still at rest, is sacred service.

The moment at which the shattering is re-experienced is an agony.  Our deep assumptions demand that we see wholeness as perfection, that freedom from pain is the goal of the journey.  How is it that the experience of the breaking is the moment through which sacred service is born into the world?  Mark Gafni, in The Mystery of Love, says:  “Only when we can hold the emptiness does it become filled with the divine voice.” (29) In the agony of re-membering what is broken, we serve that voice.  In the grieving for each image:  the young girl in the movie;  one’s personal history;  stories received in confidence from another;  and in the shattered creating vessel, the healing waters break out into the world, baptizing emptiness with flowing light.

Gafni says:  “the exile of the Shechina is the exile of the erotic into the sexual.” (50)  In the movie image, both the teacher and the girl are flung into exile through his act.  In the words of the myth:  when the flame grows monstrous and shatters the container, it is no longer protected from the outside.  “…a flame unbounded is no flame at all.  Now there is no more flame which will synthesize, and no more container to give birth—until, that is, the shards of the container are found and put together again.”  (I am indebted to Rudy Marcus, with the Guild for Psychological Studies, for this retelling of the myth).

Sacred service asks us to hold this agonizing exile until we can somehow move it to our hearts, where it can experience the transforming of “illuminated darkness.”  The state of exile, of separation from the whole, is one aspect of the experience.  In a way, it is this with which we are most familiar, in our waking lives.  So often we see ourselves as falling short of, or separated from, or not good enough to be or do.  This way of thinking elevates the object and minimizes our role as actors in the drama of creation.  Insidiously, it also inflates us negatively, handing us the cloak of the victim and allowing us to stand separate from the world in our inability to live from the great strength of our own selfhood.  Sacred service asks us to bring our exiled selves into relationship with the actor, even the stripped, flayed, agonizing actor, within us.  Somehow, we are to use our conscious will in the service of something beyond victimhood.  It is only natural to mistake this demand for a judging voice that sees exile and agony as “bad.”

Another tradition from the Kabbalah relates the story a bit differently:  “In the Kabbalistic myth, the great sin that caused what is called ‘the shattering of the vessels’ was the sin of separation.  Each divine force—sefira—held itself apart, autonomous and independent, free of any dependency on the other sefirot.  The result was that each independent sefira was unable to hold its light and ultimately shattered, causing great cosmic disarray.  The tikkun—the fixing of the shattering—occurs when every point of existence is in connection as part of the quilt of being.” (Gafni p. 38)    

As I ponder these two tellings of the myth, they seem to move from the first to the second, as if we, too, were evolving from being parts of the Great Whole, through the shattering, to a place where each piece has come to a place of self-recognition, but not yet to that longed-for new wholeness.  If we move beyond victimhood into autonomy, the dangers of arrogance lie waiting at the door.  We long for interdependence, yet stand defiantly alone, hoping that our shaking hands can hold and shield adimming light without help from our sisters and brothers.  What music exists in the cosmos that can call us back into a whole?

 Perhaps this story calls us to see ourselves as both shard and collector-quilter.  Perhaps it is the sharp edge in us, the non-configuring shape, the memory of our place in the vessel’s wall—and also the spark of yearning and the fire of the creating moment, for these are also alive in us—that give us strength to work on Gafni’s “quilt of being. Sacred Service makes quilters of us all, as we remember each shard and bring it to the altar of our hearts, gathering, piecing, stitching, with reverence, in the on-going creative act. 

Shirley Sullivan has degrees in music, education, and theology. A former classical singer, she lives in Denver, were she writes and occasionally publishes poetry, leads with the Guild for Sacred Studies, and delights in her grandchildren. Now and then she is a trail cook in the Rocky Mountain back country.