Word on the street…

I don't think I ever really engaged with street art until I hiked the Camino de Santiago. Even then, maybe it was simply because most of the art that I walked past, directly related to my lived-out situation.

Art, striking us when it meets us where we are? When it has something to say to our current circumstances?

This week, downtown Silverton: KNOW THINE MADNESS.

While it would be interesting to hear why that person posted that message, even without such a conversation, it made me think. And remember.

I went back to the Chaplaincy work that I did {during seminary} at the Oregon State Hospital. There were five students working our way through CPE {Clinical Pastoral Education}. Yes, our work was face-to-face with the patients at the Hospital, but the core of what we did was internal and introspective because, what we hear and how we hear another person has everything to do with our own journey and our own spirit. Likewise, the ways we respond to others, is utterly dependent upon how we connect with them or recoil from them.

One of my fellow sojourners had had an awful childhood, due to circumstances as well as the life choices of the adults around her. Along the way, she has pushed all her unexplored grief, loss, anger and angst at being abandoned inward. On this particular day, she had an experience that dredged up those long buried but unresolved issues.

As the group session progressed, the entirety of her body bore her anger, including clenched jaw and fists and a vibrating body. Our instructor was asking questions and noticing her verbal and nonverbal responses in an attempt to help her to honestly address her story and her emotional response to that story. Everyone in the room saw and felt her rage but she would not look at it or admit to it. She refused to know her madness.

However, even though she would not, everyone around her was absolutely clear as to where she was. We had information about her that she could nor or would not face. In the end, she handed away her power.

To know our madness is to know self. When we know our own rumblings then we also have options and choices. Wherever you are this day… However you are… Know thine madness.

Pastor Leah