Quaker Pagan Reflections

So much of the pain in our spiritual lives, it seems to me, comes down to this: It is bitterly hurtful to have our spiritual gifts rejected or ignored by the communities we belong to. And yet, the price of bringing those gifts to those communities is being able to accept their guidance on where we are falling short, in error, or mistaken in how we use those gifts.  And that hurts, too--a desperate, sharp, shameful pain in the part of us that sees ourselves willfully rather than honestly, in ego and not in open-heartedness. And then, for a lot of us, giving guidance that holds the potential to inflict such pain is almost unthinkable.  We are compassionate; we love, and we don't want to be the instrument of one another's hurts.  (And then, too, we don't want to risk losing the love of those we need to guide.) And this turns out to inflict another kind of suffering: that of the lack of full and present receptivity and responsiveness to one another's gifts. It is