He Refused to Pass It On

Yesterday was Good Friday, and a good friend of mine sent me a meditation from Richard Rohr that has stayed with me. He writes about how Jesus refused to pass his pain on to others, and that line has been sitting in me, so I recorded this reflection.

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There was a time in my life when I thought I was going to figure it all out. I believed that if I worked hard enough, understood the right things, and believed the right way, everything would eventually make sense. But life never became clean. It stayed complex, and in many ways, it stayed confusing.

Somewhere along the way, something began to shift. I stopped looking for answers and started looking for presence, not because I gave up, but because I began to see that answers were not actually healing anything.

What I needed was not a system that explained life. What I needed was a way to be with life without turning against it, and without turning against myself.

Because when I look honestly at my own life, and at the world around me, so much of what we call suffering is actually pain being passed along. Hurt people hurting people, fear creating more fear, and shame reinforcing shame. It moves through families, through relationships, through religion and culture.

We take what was done to us and, without even realizing it, we hand it to someone else, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, and sometimes only inside our own bodies.

What I am beginning to see is that this is a cycle. This is the crucifixion that keeps happening, not just once, but over and over again. So what if salvation is not about escaping that? What if it is about interrupting it?

What if the invitation is this simple, and this difficult. What if we can feel what we have been given without passing it on, and stay present to our pain without turning it into blame or control.

To stop the violence not just out in the world, but within us, in the way we speak to ourselves, in the way we reject parts of who we are, and in the way we brace against life.

I am not saying this is easy. In fact, it may be one of the hardest things we will ever do, because everything in us wants relief, and the quickest relief is often to discharge that pain somewhere else.

But what I am beginning to notice, slowly, in my own body, is that when I stay, when I breathe, when I do not run, and when I do not turn it outward, something begins to soften.

And underneath the pain, there is something else, something alive, something whole, something that was never actually broken.

And maybe that is what it means to come home, not to fix ourselves, not to figure it all out, but to stop leaving, to stop passing the wound, and to become a place where the cycle ends and something new can begin.

Happy Easter

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If you would like to read the meditation by Richard Rohr you can find it here:
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/jesus-forgives/