One of my main interests in therapy is helping clients to reckon with the identity shattering trauma of religious wounding and spiritual abuse. So many people traverse life with open sores even decades after exiting a Christian community. I came across a poem originating in my own healing journey from my journal this morning:
The crows do not descend
Until triangles of flesh are exposed
Breaking the seams of our battered garments
And when they wound, they do not linger
Like a more faithful wounding
But in windy cycles they peck
Soaring to the safety of grander ovals
Than the tight, terrestrial circling of friends
Appearing in order to disappear to reappear
Neither arriving nor departing
Were you to yield and claw
that beating oblation from your breast
in the finality of love or hate, they could not want it,
for it is indigestibly heavy and incomprehensibly large
So let them eat around it