inner wounds

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Each of us carries in our hearts the wound of mortality.

We are particularly adept at covering our inner wounds, but no wound is ever silent. 
 Behind the play of your image and the style you cut in the world, 
your wounds continue to call out for healing.  These cuts at the core 
of your identity cannot be healed by the world or medicine,
 nor by the externals of religion or psychology.  It is only by letting in
 the divine light to bathe these wounds that healing will come...  

Every inner wound has its own particular voice.  It holds the memory
 of that breakage as pristine as its moment of occurrence.  Deep inner
 wounds evade time.  Their soreness is utterly pure.  These wounds lose little
 of their acid with the natural transience of chronological time.   
Only the voice of deep prayer can carry the gently poultice inwards to these
 severe crevices and draw out the toxins of hurt.  To learn what went on
 at the time of such wounding can help; it will show us the causes,
 and the structure of the wound becomes clear.  Real healing is, however, 
another matter.  As with all great arrivals in the soul, 
it comes from a direction that we often could
 neither predict nor anticipate.

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~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

art by picasso