Cultivating Spiritual Resilience in Challenging Times

Embracing the Lessons of Adversity

A short while after the fire in our temple, I wrote this:

I am contemplating the message of the temple fire — what it might reveal to us. I do not have an insight. Only that, in the aftermath of the fire, there is the experience of “not as before.” As in the wake of Covid, we are recognizing that the river of life does not flow backward — there is no “restoring” to a former state, only evolving to what is next. What remains the same? The Truth. The commitment and the vision that underlies the ever-changing form.

Resilience doesn’t depend on having answers; it arises from the vision of truth within us.

Then, a poem emerged: When Someone Sets Your Temple on Fire

(The temple in the poem can be this temple, our temple, or it can be whatever we hold sacred — collectively, the earth as our temple; individually, the temple could be our body, our work, marriage, friendship, something, or someone we care deeply about.)

When someone sets your temple on fire

You must let what is burned speak to you.

Stand in what was lost, what remains,

and what is now open to moonlight.

Don’t move. Don’t rush to rebuild.

Open the eye of your soul and the ear of your heart.

Listen: a holy place always has something to say to you,

In the charred hush, you will learn how to mend your life.

Others will want you to do something,

Begin again, go back, start over, rebuild.

There will be a time for that,

But it is not now.

(The “others” may literally be other people, but often those others are the inner voices that judge, assess, and shout, “Do something!”)

Wait for this:

In the deep silence of the soul’s fire

In the heat of not knowing, there is a still point.

Through it, you will see a vista of the land

opening for the purple wild hollyhock,

The rare flower that only blooms after a fire.

This morning, Venus has wings,

Swans fly over the rooftops.

Their call beckons you to water,

Go with them. Go with them now.