Discovering grace within: Remen excerpt #8

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: The shamans attribute illness to soul loss, a loss of a sense of awareness of the sacred in us and around us. Sacred experience is subjective and even intuitive experience. Growing up in this culture, many people have developed and cultivated a harder-edged notion of what is real. Few of us can easily talk about those things we cannot touch or express in numbers, no matter how commonplace the experience. And the experience of God is commonplace. God is in the ordinary, the minute particulars. When you come right down to it, all life is holy. What is most real may be those very things which cannot be expressed at all but only known.

The experience of immeasurable realities is far more important than we might imagine. The things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain our lives. Much recent medical research suggest that isolation makes us vulnerable to illness and that relationship furthers survival. Medical science has demonstrated that our simple caring for each other sustains us and enables us to better survive even such physical challenges as metastatic breast cancer. Community heals. Yet when it comes to healing relationship, who’s to say that communion isn’t as important as community.

A diagnosis of life-threatening illness casts us headlong into the subjective world. People who have sought healing everywhere else are often afraid to look within, afraid to find, at depth, someone insignificant or even unworthy. Yet this is rarely the case. The soul is our birthright. At depth, everyone is beautiful. Often it is the discovery of the ‘spot of grace’ that heralds the beginning of our deepest healing.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 261-62.