Everything is inflamed, everything hurts

Now more than ever, we have to discern: Are we transforming or transmitting pain? Liminal dispatch, 08.27.20

As writer and teacher Richard Rohr says, pain can be transformed, or it can be transmitted. And if it isn’t the first, it will absolutely be the second.

This is the tough part: those are the only two options, friends.

When we refuse to acknowledge the terror, sorrow, grief, wound, or trauma, our own or others’ — when we ridicule it or deny it or lie about it or manipulate it — everything just gets amplified and transmitted. Over and over and over.

Do you feel it? I do.

You cannot suffocate or punish pain out of existence. Stifled or unattended sorrow is just magnified, mutated sorrow. Inflammation is the way we know there is damage, sickness, infection; it is the way we know where to turn our serious attention and honesty and care.

I am not in any way equating the trauma inflicted by something like white supremacy to the trauma that gives rise to it… but I think it’s important to acknowledge that we are terrible at addressing both types. And everything we’re seeing right now is a massive overflow of pain — old, old, dirty, generational, long-ignored, long-silenced, long-numbed, long-denied pain.