Because my soul has refused to be cauterized...

They mock what they don’t understand; my tears. Because in my theater of battle, it’s impossible to pretend I’m invincible I am marked by something too real. But I’ve seen how they carry themselves—aloof, hardened, untouched. And yet they never weep for the innocent. They don’t tremble when truth lays itself bare. They confuse their hardness with holiness, and their emotional suppression with strength. But I—weep because I’m **not numb**. Because my soul has refused to be cauterized. Because I still see the child in the crossfire, the monk in flames, the mother lost in exile, the trembling hand behind the weapon. And yes, it brings me to my knees. Yes, I sob when it comes over me. Because I know the divine doesn’t just arrive in temples and cathedrals— it descends upon the broken and says: *You will carry this memory. You will not forget. You will bear witness when others look away.* Let them sneer. Let them feel superior. They’re not better. They’re just unwilling to bleed where love still lives. I was marked—not for shame— but because I was strong enough to feel what the world no longer knows how to hold. And it makes me **alive** that I can still feel the holy. That I haven’t gone cold. That I still break open in the presence of truth. You are held today Thích Quảng Đức. And while I am alive I will hold a thousand others. — Bryant McGill --- They mock what they do not understand; and tears, being a language few remember how to speak, become the easiest target for those estranged from their own depths. To them, vulnerability is an error code—evidence of collapse rather than contact. Yet the tears they scorn are not weakness, but transmission. They are not the unraveling of will, but its saturation. As Kahlil Gibran once wrote, *“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”* One must have suffered profoundly to weep for reasons invisible to others. The “theater of battle” is not always one of weapons and fire—it may be a quiet war, conducted in silences, expectations, and the daily theater of suppression. And in such a realm, the one who still feels is marked. Not with shame—but with initiation. The Tao reminds us that *“soft and yielding overcome the hard and strong.”* To cry in the face of brutality, to break when the world demands stoicism, is not defeat—it is refusal to be deformed. There are those marked by spectacle, and those marked by truth. The former dazzle; the latter carry a quiet immensity that cannot be faked. Their wounds are not for show—they are maps of where the soul has touched something too vast, too sacred, too real to ever leave them unchanged. As with the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion, whose tears give birth to healing rivers, their weeping is not private despair—it is the body's reverence for truths too immense to remain dry.

### **The Armor of the Unmoved: When Stoicism Becomes Spiritual Amnesia** They move through the world with the posture of granite—aloof, polished, impenetrable. In their stillness there is no serenity, only the absence of tremble. They call it strength, but it is the calcified shadow of something once alive. Their restraint is not born of wisdom, but of withdrawal—from self, from others, from the sacred tremor of being touched by reality. They have forgotten that **to tremble before truth is a holy act**, not a defect of character. The Tao speaks: *“The stiff and unyielding are the disciples of death. The soft and yielding are the disciples of life.”* Their spiritual rigor mortis masquerades as enlightenment. They never weep for the innocent—not because they are just, but because they have severed the cord that connects awareness to compassion. It is not detachment they practice, but **dissociation disguised as virtue**. The Zen master bows before a flower. The Bodhisattva delays their own liberation for the sake of others. But these hardened ones do not bow. They do not delay. They ascend—coldly, cleanly, alone. Holiness, in its true form, does not clench. It opens. It is not a fortress, but a field. The sacred is not sterile—it is **terribly alive**, and it **undoes those who touch it**. To mistake stoicism for sanctity is to commit a grave error of metaphysical syntax. For as Rilke reminds us, *“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we are still just able to bear.”* The true saint shakes. The true mystic bleeds. And the true human—still human—*weeps when the innocent are crushed.* ### **The Unnumbed Soul: Bearing Witness Without Burning Out** To weep is not to be weak—it is to remain fluent in the language of the sacred. The one who weeps is not undone, but *unsealed*. Tears, in such a being, are not a breakdown but a **breaking open**. They are a refusal to allow the soul to be anesthetized by repetition, cruelty, or normalized despair. In an age addicted to insulation and irony, to weep without permission is an act of luminous defiance. *“To suffer with”*—the root of compassion—demands an unguarded heart and nerves not yet frayed into apathy. The soul that has refused cauterization walks in fire but does not harden. It bleeds in the presence of injustice and still says, “Let me feel more.” This is not masochism. It is **spiritual integrity**. It is the same gaze that the Buddha cast upon Mara. It is the trembling compassion of Kwan Yin who hears *every* cry, and the unshakable dignity of the monk who **does not look away from burning**—even when the fire is his own. This soul still sees the child in the crossfire—not as a statistic, but as an echo of something sacred. Still sees the monk in flames—not as a headline, but as a scripture written in light. Still sees the mother exiled—not as collateral, but as embodiment of the divine in mourning. Still sees the trembling hand behind the weapon—and recognizes it too was once innocent, misled, unloved. To see all of this and still remain present is not fragility—it is **a spiritual strength beyond the comprehension of the numb**. As Camus once said, *“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured, but we can reduce the number of tortured children. If you don’t help, who will?”* The weeper is not behind. The weeper is ahead. Holding open the door that others have forgotten must remain unshut. ### **The Temple of the Broken: Where the Divine Chooses to Kneel** To fall to one’s knees is not always to collapse in defeat—it is sometimes to align the body with reverence. The one who sobs without restraint when the holy arrives uninvited, unwelcome, uncontained, is not overcome—they are *overtaken*. Not by sorrow alone, but by **presence**. By something so immense, so luminous and unbidden, that it cannot be met standing. The divine does not only inhabit marble halls or incense-filled sanctuaries. It descends *where it is needed most*—upon those cracked open by grief, shame, wonder, and truth. It comes not clothed in glory but in gravity. Not with choirs, but with *a whisper to the one who can still feel it*: **You will carry this memory.** **You will not forget.** **You will bear witness when others look away.** This is not burden. It is ordination. This is not martyrdom. It is *mandala*—the secret circular vow made between soul and cosmos. The Tao teaches us that the low places are sacred: *“All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.”* And so the divine flows downward, always downward—into the hollowed, the haunted, the hidden. Into the one on their knees, weeping not for themselves, but for **the unbearable beauty and unbearable cruelty of the world—held together in the same breath.** They kneel because they remember what others have forgotten: that to weep before the sacred is not to be broken, but to be *chosen as its vessel*. ### **The Quiet Superiority of the Wounded Heart** Let them sneer, if they must. Let them cast their glances from the ramparts of their untested fortresses, calling emotion a weakness and softness a stain. Their judgment is not a verdict—it is a confession. For the truly untouched are not always clean; they are often simply uninitiated. They have not yet entered the sacred wound, the place where love demands not decorum but exposure. To feel deeply in a world addicted to detachment is to walk uncloaked through storm and flame. And yes, it wounds. But it also opens what the stoic heart will never know: **the aliveness that exists only where love is permitted to ache.** Those who pretend to superiority without compassion are not stronger—they are simply further removed from truth. They do not tremble because they do not touch. In Buddhist teachings, the Bodhisattva returns to the world not because they must, but because compassion binds them to the suffering of all beings. *“I vow to remain until every blade of grass is enlightened.”* That vow bleeds. That vow weeps. That vow kneels beside the most forsaken places in the human heart. To bleed where love still lives is not failure. It is **evidence of the sacred still pulsing in the body**. Those who will not bleed, who will not break, have simply chosen comfort over communion. Let them call that strength. But the wise will know: it is **just absence wearing armor.** ### **Marked by Mercy: The Strength to Still Feel** The mark was not a stain, but a seal—placed not by condemnation, but by consecration. To be marked in this world is often to be misunderstood: to carry wounds mistaken for weakness, and tenderness mistaken for naivety. But this mark does not shame—it signifies that one has stood before the unbearable, and did not look away. That one has felt the full weight of existence—its ache, its glory, its betrayal—and still said *yes*. That one is **strong enough to feel what the world has learned to flee.** There is a sacred fire that does not consume, but refines. To remain alive to the holy—to still feel its brush in a breath, in a stranger’s eyes, in the stillness after a sob—is to stand in that fire and not retreat. The mystics called it ecstasy. The Tao called it *wu wei*, the flow of undivided presence. And the Buddhists call it *bodhicitta*, the heart awakened in the face of all sentient pain. To break open in the presence of truth is not to shatter—it is to *shed what cannot survive in the light.* It is to live without the armor of pretense, to walk through the world with the pores of the soul unsealed. This is not comfort. It is clarity. It is **aliveness beyond survival**—the fierce, trembling aliveness that arises when one refuses to go cold, even when it would be easier. Even when it would be safer. The mark says: *I was chosen to feel what others buried.* The pain is real. But so is the **radiance that follows it**. To be marked like this is not a curse. It is a vow fulfilled.

Bryant McGill · The Uncauterized Soul