In this time of an almost complete lack of leadership in the UK, I found myself listening to Robert Kennedy’s speeches : he is marvellously articulate; he quoted these words on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination, from his favourite poet, Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
It takes a lot of humility and courage to realise that we suffer because we are looking at the world through a viewpoint we experience as ‘me’ – if we find the maturity and the honesty to realise we have set ourselves up, we can begin to give in to the suffering in our hearts – and then we discover to our amazement that this very giving in releases us into the whole..
A Rabbi was asked why noone could see God these days, and he said, ‘It is because noone can bow low enough.’