This prayer has become for me not so much a plea for forgiveness in the heavenly courts but a vital practice drawing me into the dark wisdom of the divine feminine. Looking back on the past year from this perspective it seems quite possible to say that I have been unexpectedly ‘gifted’ with very painful ‘reasons’ needing forgiveness. So no wonder I have been gripped by the prayer.
Throughout this time I have had a sense of sacred midwifery taking place to carefully bring to term a merciful state of soul - a state of soul utterly inconceivable to my ego mind. And from where I am standing I know that nothing comes easy in difficult and dangerous pregnancies such as these – but Her urgings and wise remedies are so distinctly there.
Take care to guard your heart in the early days
tend the pain body that flies off leaving you
beside yourself as it gathers force out there.
Bring that poor thing home to your soft body.
Take care to watch the depth charge of thoughts
feeding shame and blame and fear to sicken
even abort what is just beginning to show.
Bring your hurt mind home to your soft body.
Take care to practice the slow exhale out
of the clean cool air you just breathed in.
Trust your soft body to rehearse forgivings
one forgoing, one dying and rising at a time.
Feed your soft body with fertility songs
remind your cells of unimaginable conceptions
of Sarah who laughed, Elizabeth who blessed
Mary who said yes, be it unto me and it is still.
And when the merciful water breaks
labour will still take as long as it needs
even a thousand thousand bearings down
and a hundred crowning moments.
But stay, stay in the body of hope, trust us!
In blood and mess forgiveness always streams
from between our thighs and from here
peace beyond understanding is born again.