Recently a dear friend had become seriously ill and she asked me to come and pray for her. In preparation for our time together I stumbled across this beautiful blessing / poem by the wonderful John O’Donohue. As I was reading it to her, it struck me how the words flowing from O’Donohue’s soul were so appropriate for our nation right now. It seems to me that as a country we are suffering from a deep and festering soul sickness. It matters not to me what side of the political line you may be on, I think it is clear we are all hurting. You know the issues. Fear, anger, and shaming are rampant.
So if you are sick, you love someone who is sick, or you agree with me that our culture is not well … may the following prayer bring you comfort as it did for my friend and myself. And may it even sow the seeds of healing.
A Blessing for a Friend on the Arrival of Illness
by John O’Donohue
Now is the time of dark invitation
Beyond a frontier that you did not expect.
Abruptly your old life seems distant.
You barely noticed how each day opened
A path through fields never questioned
Yet expected deep down to hold treasure.
Now your time on earth becomes full of threat.
Before your eyes your future shrinks.
You lived absorbed in the day-to-day,
So continuous with everything around you,
That you could forget you were separate.
Now this dark companion has come between you.
Distances have opened in your eyes.
You feel that against your will
A stranger has married your heart.
Nothing before has made you
Feel so isolated and lost.
When the reverberations of shock subside in you,
May grace come to restore you to balance.
May it shape a new space in your heart
To embrace this illness as a teacher
Who has come to open your life to new worlds.
May you find in yourself
A courageous hospitality
Towards what is difficult,
Painful and unknown.
May you use this illness
As a lantern to illuminate
The new qualities that will emerge in you.
May your fragile harvesting of this slow light
Help you release whatever has become false in you.
May you trust this light to clear a path
Through all the fog of old unease and anxiety
Until you feel a rising within you, a tranquility
Profound enough to call the storm to stillness.
May you find the wisdom to listen to your illness,
Ask it why it came. Why it chose your friendship.
Where it wants to take you. What it wants you to know.
What quality of space it wants to create in you.
What you need to learn to become more fully yourself,
That your presence may shine in the world.
May you keep faith with your body,
Learning to see it as a holy sanctuary
Which can bring this night wound gradually
Towards the healing and freedom of dawn.
May you be granted the courage and vision
To work through passivity and self-pity,
To see the beauty you can harvest
From the riches of this dark invitation.
May you learn to receive it graciously,
And promise to learn swiftly
That it may leave you newborn
Willing to dedicate your time to birth.