Page 3 - A Qualified Acceptance of Sorrow

A QUALIFIED ACCEPTANCE OF SORROW

I suggest a qualified acceptance of sorrow because we mustn't accept the causes for much of the
world’s sorrow. It is a qualified acceptance, because many of us have been taught to reject sorrow; it is
counter-cultural to sit with ‘difficult’ emotions and befriend them.

If there have been, at times, a willful innocence, a desire to create something lovely out of sorrow, a
compulsion to imagine wholeness, these same early experiences have awakened an on-going desire for
justice. But perhaps below the desire for justice there lies a deeper longing for personal and global
transformation. Is to see and to name the beginning of change? In creating this text, I need to trust that,
in the particularity of one life, there is also a universality which creates a place of meeting* between the
reader / hearer and the writer / speaker.

Throughout this collection there is affirmation that we are complex beings. Here, too, a conviction that
we are the beloved of a non-binary Creator – and so, adapting the genitive form of Old and Middle
English “Goddes” I employ “Godde”. It seems a midway point between God and Goddess – allowing for,
one hopes, an openness to the Otherness of the divine.

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*see Martin Buber, I and Thou.