What the Left Hand Knows

On Elijah, the Silenced Limb, and the Mysticism of Reclaiming What Was Always Yours

---

In the mythic theatre of Mount Carmel, Elijah calls fire from the sky.
He’s not gentle. He doesn’t whisper.
He stages a showdown against 450 prophets of Baal and wins (spectacularly).
The altar drenched in water, the heavens crackling with flame.
It’s the kind of scene we remember:
divine dominance, visible power, certainty.

But this is not the moment that transforms him.
It’s what happens after.

Fleeing into the wilderness, Elijah walks forty days and nights until he reaches Mount Horeb, the mountain of the Lord, the place where Moses once met fire in a bush.
Here, Elijah doesn’t call anything down.
He hides in a cave.
Exhausted, he listens.

“And behold, the Lord passed by:
and a great and powerful wind tore through the mountains…
but the Lord was not in the wind.
After the wind, an earthquake.
But the Lord was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake, fire.
But the Lord was not in the fire.
And after the fire,
a still small voice.”

It is in this fragile, almost-absence that God speaks.
Not in spectacle.
In subtlety.
Not at Carmel, where power is proven.
But at Horeb, where identity is disarmed.

---

This same journey (Carmel to Horeb) played out in me
on an ordinary morning this past January,
when I was asked by something wordless and wise
to begin again
with my left hand.

---

You see, I was a child who once reached for the world with my left,
until it was trained out of me.
My father, too, shared this strange lineage.
The nuns (believing themselves righteous gatekeepers of order)
beat it out of him, quite literally.
Left was wrong.
Left was weak.
Left was “other.”

So the right hand took over,
and the left grew silent,
not because it was less capable,
but because we were taught not to trust what came naturally.

It’s amazing, isn’t it?
How quickly comfort conforms to conditioning.
How something innate becomes alien.
How we can be persuaded to amputate half of our being just to fit in.

---

When the guidance came / soft and unmistakable /
“Use your left hand again.”
It wasn’t about muscles.
It was a message.

A Horeb moment.
Not a display. Not a miracle. Not fire.
But presence.
The re-membering of a part of me that never stopped waiting.

---

“I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.
Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”
– Gospel of Thomas, Logion 62

This logion, often misunderstood as a moral injunction,
is more likely a mystical one:

Let go of dominance.
Let both hands move in unity, without comparison or self-consciousness.
The left and right are not opposites.
They are partners in the dance of unknowing.

What if we lived this way?
Not just in gesture,
but in mind.
Not favoring the familiar,
but allowing what has been silenced to sing again.

---

Now, as I write this with both hands beginning to remember their harmony,
I see what Elijah saw:
that true revelation is not theatrical.
It doesn’t arrive in conquest.
It comes when we make space for what has long been banished.

The left hand still knows.
It always knew.

Not louder. Not better.
Just… there.
Waiting in the cave,
where the fire had already passed,
where the earthquakes had nothing left to shake,
where the only voice left
was the one that had never once stopped whispering:
Come home.