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| "A Beggar Girl" by Sargent (c. 1877) |
When my husband died nearly two years ago it was as if in a thunderstruck moment I realised that the cosmos was not as I thought it to be – it was so much darker and more painful than I had imagined. I saw that the Gods had not kept me free from misfortune, and that my approach to worship had been absurd. I dismantled my beautiful shrine and even destroyed one of the statues in a state of bitterness and blank despair. But I did not stop believing in the Gods, nor did I hate them. Rather, I saw that on a very fundamental level *I* had got it wrong and that I needed a wiser and more realistic approach to the divine. Answers to difficult questions can never be finite – because the universe and the questions keep changing – but what I see now is that I was more of a spiritual beggar than a spiritual seeker.
