Honey From A Corpse

In Jewish sacred writings, a group of men were given a riddle by a warrior: “Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.”

The men couldn’t figure it out.

Finally, the warrior who posed the riddle gave them a clue: “What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?”

The warrior had been on a journey when a young lion roared after him. Being agile, the warrior grabbed it with his bare hands and tore it apart. Some time later, journeying back the same route, he stopped to see the lion’s carcass. In its rib cage was a swarm of bees, and he was able to scrape out honey to sustain himself on the journey.

In my life some of the worst things that have happened, which seemed like they were tearing me apart, have ended up as honey. They changed me. I’m not talking about making a few adjustments. I’m talking about coming to understand my entire being differently.

There come into our lives times when we feel as if we are imploding. It’s as though our sense of identity is collapsing. For some of us the year 2006 was such a moment.

This experience of imploding is described by a father, who worked as an executioner, in the movie Monster’s Ball. “I got to a place where I just couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t escape myself,” he said.

Do you know that place where you just can’t breathe? That place where you want to escape yourself but you can’t?

T. S. Eliot knew about this collapse of identity. “In order to possess what you do not possess,” he wrote, “you must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.”

“The way in which you are not.” This isn’t altering a few things in our lives—it isn’t merely tinkering with aspects of who we are. This is change beyond all attempts to reform, reprogram, revise, restructure, or revamp our lives. It’s dissolution—coming to the end of everything we’ve imagined ourselves to be, the end of everything we’ve considered important to our identity.

At such times, life exposes us to the possibility of a different identity, a different purpose, different goals, a different reason for getting up each morning. Jesus called it “losing yourself to find yourself.”

We are introduced to a “self” we’ve always been but haven’t been aware of. This self is grounded in an infinite Presence at our center.

D. H. Lawrence asks in Phoenix, “Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing, dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.”

In Monsters’ Ball, when the executioner’s son turns a gun on himself, the father’s sense of himself goes into a tailspin. Everything he has believed about being a disciplinarian, having his son walk in his shoes, being tough, setting high standards—

everything he has ever stood for—is shattered. He quits his job, quits his whole lifestyle. He is the lion torn apart.

Deprived of his son, this father finally faces up to the reality that he’s been a mere ghost of a person all his life. He realizes that just as he bullied his son, he too was bullied by his own father. Each of them passed on to the other patterns of behavior that denied them an experience of their real selves—the self of divine Presence.

T. S. Eliot captures what’s going on at such a time. “Into another intensity,” he writes, “for a further union, a deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”

For many of us, 2007 will be a year of endings that can birth new beginnings. We’ll face situations that appear to tear us apart. But by embracing such times, we allow them to do their transforming work, ridding us of an identity that simply isn’t who we really are. Then, the sweetness can come forth in our lives.

How do you actually embrace such times? A simple process developed by Michael Brown leads us step-by-step to a full embracing of the whole of our experience. The Process shows us how the thing that terrifies us because it feels like it’s tearing us apart can become a source of sweetness in our lives.

“Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.” When a situation takes your breath away, when it wears your soul thin, when you feel yourself imploding and there’s no way to escape yourself, your dissolution can become the means of your remaking. The carcass can become a source of honey.