They say every human being will pass through a deep period of suffering - that if you cannot claim that for yourself, you have simply not lived long enough. There is no doubt some suffer disproportionately more than others, and we have no understanding why. Losing someone through death cannot be undone - it does not pass - the reality does not change. I reflect on this painting my mother created of a mother's grief over the loss of her child. In the pattern of the stone wall it shows a mother's grief over the death of her son, Jesus. All life in our world will pass through death.
Painted by Carolyn Elliott during the Vietnam War
". . . Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows . . . " John 16:33
Ignorance Is Not Innocence - J. Elliott Jackson, written from a dream after mom's passing and originally published in Walk Into A Moment
I stood bent in dream
Fingertips to tongue
Pulling from my mouth, fibers like cotton
Discarding them to the blanketed field
Smothered
Silver-white in a coat-of-web
Still as snow
I can see the body dying
Decay that comes
To join the wearing out of life's mechanisms
Death
Is an ugly business
And evil thought and deed
Suffering so apparently growing
Power subverting greater ideas and causes
Turns me under like a wave _ flipped
Sand-stirred, churned in the break
Without surface or boundary
I want the world to stay delicate
To keep its memory safe
Sensing only the gentle and beautiful
We seek solace in discoveries of this age
Yet spirit
Is of permanence
Designed to bear eternity
Abiding in Alpha-Omega
Let it rise with the break of day
Let it rest in pooled depths of stream
Where cool raindrops gently tap
Let it dance in colored sparkles over rock
As sunbeams split in array
Through gray mist and dissipating cloud
Let it mend the holes and tears,
Reweave my loose and raveling threads
To fashion a useful fabric
Must I learn darker things?
May they not remain hidden from me?
"I have told you this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows . But take heart, because I have overcome the world" John 16:33
