There is a distance between us.
Between what I believe
and what another believes.
Between being loved
and being known.
I have come to call it
the gap.
But the longer I sit with it,
the more I understand
that the gap is larger
than either of these.
The gap appears wherever two realities meet.
It lives between expectation and acceptance.
Between fear and love.
Between the child who longs to be seen
and the adult who is learning to see.
While reflecting on this,
I found myself returning to the prayer
often associated with Saint Francis:
”Grant that I may not so much to seek
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.”
I had always heard these words
as an invitation to humility.
Today, I hear something different.
Perhaps Francis was inviting us into the gap.
Not asking us to deny on longing to be understood, but inviting us to discover what becomes possible when that longing no longer determines who we are.
The gap is not where love disappears.
It is where love is transformed.
It is where I stop insisting that another cross over into my reality before I can remain present.
Not because boundaries no longer matter.
But because I have discovered a place spacious enough to hold both truth and compassion.
Perhaps peace is not found after the gap has been crossed.
Perhaps peace is discovered within it.
The gap, then, is not empty.
It is sacred.
It is the quiet place where understanding is born, where compassion deepens, and where love no longer depends on agreement.
Maybe, just maybe, that is what Francis was praying for all along.
Not that the world become easier.
But that we become spacious enough to stand within the distance between us and remain an instrument of peace.
— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya