…that’s how the light gets in.
-L. Cohen
Trauma has a stickiness and a gravity that becomes a deep identity trap, not by conscious decision but by default in a secular capitalist society that not only doesn’t provide the tools to move through and beyond it, but indeed commodifies it.
This secular life does not teach gratitude, nor patience, practices essential to processing and displacing despair and self-entitlement – most especially during and in the aftermath of trauma, and essential to fostering a salving sense of interconnectedness with the rest of creation. It fails to offer a framework or scaffolding for transcendent striving, but rather hijacks our fitrah-instilled inclination toward such striving into unquenchable material aspiration in order to feed and fuel the capitalist machinery (infinite wants, finite supply fallacy.. etc). This creates within individuals and communities gaping, abysmal consumptive holes that we continuously, voraciously seek to satiate with everything except Allah. Of course there is no satiation apart from Allah, so the voids only deepen, our hearts sickening, our wounds festering in the dark until they fuse with and overtake our very sense of self.
Acculturated and immersed in this context, it is not easy to recondition ourselves to an orientation of gratitude toward, trust in, and reliance upon Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. But even ahead of reaching this station, when we even just begin to try, we find that there is so much power in the striving. We are not (and will no longer be) diminished by something called trauma that happened to us, but instead made ever stronger, ever richer by the beautiful struggle we persist upon for His sake.
I said: What about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
-Jalaluddin Rumi
Alhamdhulilah for the cracks that let the Light in, and for Everything.