While reflecting on what it means to "love our enemy," it suddenly occurred to me, that, maybe in reality, there are no enemies.
I wondered, "Could we eliminate our enemies by realizing that in truth there are no enemies?" Do they only exist as a figment of our fear, born in our separated, fortressed imagination? Is our perception of them as enemies only a misguided idea based on an incomplete and fractured perception of ourselves? Are they only imagined as enemies out of a perception of ourselves as weak? Has their emerging anger terrorized us, and in our weakness, we have deemed them enemy?
But, is our weakness real or only a perception? Is our flawed fear of impotence, projecting as fear of them, based on the erroneous belief in their overwhelming strength and power because we think we're not strong or worthy enough to hold our own ground? Is it all just a mind game? And, none of it is true because we are all innately imbued with the power of creation within us. The dissonance comes when neither of us - them or us - realize who we are as co creators of life itself.
So, an enemy ceases to be an enemy as soon as we love (honor, value ourselves) and them, and make them a friend. When we listen to their story, hear their pain, their need for love with compassion and understanding, we walk with them in their pain, journey alongside them in their story. When we hear and understand their perspective, molded by their interpretation of what has happened to them, leading them to erroneously perceive themselves as victim or victor, we become a kind of companion to them.
By walking with them in their brokenness and their struggle, a divine compassion is drawn from within us bonding us to them, first as a companion and then, hopefully, even as friends. Then, they become neighbors, and brothers and sisters, all of whom we will grow to love in greater levels of truth, mutuality, and intimacy.
The idea of someone being an enemy has more to do with our sense of "us versus them," a kind of duality, a barrier we set up as defense.
Our enemy isn't an enemy to everyone - not to his or her spouse, friends, neighbors, other like-minded people, their children, their parents. Our enemy is only an enemy to us, and that may be more a reflection of our relationship to them which is primarily a reflection of our relationship to ourselves.
Maybe, more simply, someone is our enemy because they push a button in us, stir an unrecovered painful memory. If that memory or button weren't there, all their pushing in the world wouldn't - because it couldn't - push it. And, they could never be anything other than a friend, a companion on this journey in life.
I think that anyone we determine and name as our enemy is merely an outward expression of an inner presence. I wondered if our relationship with ourselves is shadowy and conflicted, stemming from a fractured sense of self, then wouldn't our relationship with them be a kind of anti-sacrament? But, if our inner presence is the presence of the Beloved, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Light, then all outward expressions would be manifestations of that divine love-light, which embraces all people, equally in love, connecting us all in that divine love-light. That very idea just blew me away in its incredible ability to mend the many huge broken divides everywhere in our world.
If that were the case, then, there would be no more enemies, either because we wouldn't perceive them as such or because we would be attracting into our lives magnetically those who reflect what is already in us, which would be the divine love-light.
It seems that if we first uncover our buried pains contributing to our brokenness and fear, love and heal ourselves, we would be able to love others. I guessed, if we face our own insufficient sense of personal identity and innate divinely-bestowed power, we might be able to heal our prejudice, hurts and brokenness. Then, as we practice this heightened kind of unconditional love and acceptance of ourselves and each other, courageously opening our hearts, quieting our minds, listening with our ears, hearts and minds, enemies might suddenly not be people in armor but people in love.
But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! Matthew 5:44
But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Luke 6:27
And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins. Mark 11:25 A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. John 13:34
Sounds like marching orders. He certainly spoke these words. They're in three of the gospels, and similar versions are in the Gospel of Thomas and Paul's writings. How do we interpret this?
What does it mean to love?
I think it is comprised of both the masculine and feminine principles. It is gentle as a dove and wise as a serpent. It's a passionate, persevering, enlightened willing determination to not be brought down to their level of fear, terror, and hatred. It is a strong, intentional transmission of love, combined with a strong courage not to hate them, despite how terrible they are.
Maybe we need to stand up with a sure determination to love ourselves, and each other. Then, as we build up higher and stronger, increasingly radiant in the power of God's love, we can send that powerful love out to wrap "our enemies, those who persecute us." God's awesome power to heal, to create, to give life, can transform them. I believe this and it seems Jesus did also. Gandhi proved it can work. Our love has to be powerful and intentional, proactive and assertive. We cannot afford for one more minute to react to their terror. Maybe we've done that in the past, but we cannot react and allow ourselves to be lured to their level of hatred.
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.
Isaiah 9:2
The people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
Matthew 4:16
An awakening is bursting across the planet. It is birthing the long-awaited Golden Age. It is with absolute certainty that I write this to you this morning. This great birthing into the power and light of this global awakening is reflected in a million different expressions, and is called many things. For me, it is our birth into the light of Christ. The bride, who is the feminine and spiritual aspect of the divine, has heard our pain and is here now. We have collectively freed her from her long imprisonment by an abusive and unbalanced patriarchy. She is waking us up and together we are giving birth to a new earth. When human beings finally find their enslavement unbearable, and rise up out of it, they attain a strong level of self-empowerment. That's the psychological language. The spiritual, which is far more powerful and true, is "The people living in darkness have seen a great light."
Nothing can push a butterfly back into its cocoon. You can't put a hatched chick back into its newly cracked-open egg. We are like liberated butterflies and newborn chicks. An enlightened person cannot go back into the dark. Once you are awake, you can't go back to sleep. We are being born into our realized, enlightened state. Once you have broken out of the prison of abuse or unconsciousness, you begin the road to healing and wholeness and nothing is the same.
It's as if all our marbles, once tossed all over the living room floor by a mean playmate, are magnetically being drawn together into a single container. That is you. That's you when you feel your personal self-hood and your personal power. You feel invincible. It is the ultimate elation. That newly felt power launches you on a trajectory into the light. The love you feel propels you.
What if we all came together joined in that experience, awareness and global awakening? Could we radiate this powerful love across the planet and heal our world?
I believe we are already doing this in so many ways, from climate control to an outreach to the poor and hungry around the world, prison reform, a loud international cry for an end to the oppression of women and children everywhere and in every way, the end to cruelty to animals, environmental remediation, a rise in organic farming, a call to end genetically modified agriculture and the use of pesticides, compassion for the immigrant and refugee, a more conscious choice for healthy food, fair trading, and overall a tidal wave of conscious consumption.
The awakening is flickering through the waning dark clouds of a receding age. It is shining waves of conscious compassion, shifting the planet into a more compassionate realm, a more feminine one that sees the earth as our mysteriously fertile, miraculous, and sacred home.
Patriarchy, as we have known it, is on its death bed. The raw power of control, expressed outwardly as a judgmental god, is the unbalanced masculine principle which has viewed life in every manifestation as an object for its use, and abuse. It killed almost everything in its rage against life.
It is slowly giving way to the inner light of a feminine expression of unconditional love, and allowing. It is the Christ presence and the realm about which he taught us. The balancing of life is occurring, and that is the compassionate awakening.
Today, we are finally proclaiming "freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and setting the oppressed free. (Luke 4:18) and feeding the hungry, healing the sick, the aged, those who have been trapped in almost anyway, languishing in an inner darkness, an interior prison. This was Jesus' mission statement, and it was the long-awaited call down through the ages for his return. He is returning in our awakening, and spiritually drawing us up out of our dark interior oppression to the dawning of this new age.
I also feel that as each one of us gets free, up and out of our inner prisons, we need to help others get free also. I think love is the way, rather than lecture, persuasion, religion. By being present with a heart of compassion, listening and acceptance, we help birth our world into this awakened stage.
I am sure the antidote to fear is love. The power of a freed mind is the only vaccine against an epidemic of hatred and anger.
Those who are stuck in the darkness, who have not awakened, have been steeped too long in that oppressive state of fear and terror, the raw power of a masculine judgmental god. Their awakening is overdue. They are late to the awakening, and have died in a sense. Life itself is only experienced in a state of freedom, in an awakened state. They need to be reborn. I certainly hope their awakening is imminent. Who knows when one finally awakens from the darkness of power and control?
Awakening from the lower stages of oppression is an evolutionary stage we move through. It is an adolescence, a natural stage in our maturation process. It is what causes the ready-to-hatch chick to start pecking his way out of his egg shell. What if he couldn't get out? I wonder if that's what's going on with the terrorists, and all other oppressed peoples trapped in poverty, prejudice or whatever limits their freedom of voice, self determination, and suppresses their creativity, joy and spontaneity?
The world has finally reached that stage where in unison, all those who have been oppressed, are breaking out of their coffins of pain. The awakening process is birthing them into a new stage of their lives.
The will to survive and thrive in life is an incredibly beautiful and powerful drive. It is the power of life itself, of God within and among us. However, it may be awhile before they move beyond the anger and grief of having been oppressed for so long. Once they do, the light will shine into their lives and the awakening will truly feel like joy. They will taste the sweet water from the living streams of true life and then everything they ever heard about the spiritual life will finally make sense.
By offering a united presence of love, collectively, as a strong, and effective response to terror, we are bathing the planet with a highly dynamic and powerful counter-force to ISIL's anti-life, anti-Christ force. We are now standing tall and strong in our awakened state of knowing that we are love and will not allow anything to dissuade our Being Love.
As we hold that vision, as a lamp within and before us, I hope we will remember and affirm this to each other. By sending our love out into the world, intentionally, we magnify its power. As we are reaching critical mass, which I think we have already hit, that love is now escalating into a magnificent global force that is changing the world.
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. John 14:27KJV
When I ended Saturday's piece with Jesus' call for forgiveness, I felt an uncomfortable inner cringe. We obviously cannot just up and forgive ISIL for the bloodbath in Paris. What does Jesus mean? Could He mean that as all of us become strong and empowered, whole and healthy, lifted up and out of our own internalized anger and enslavement (and we are all enslaved by many things) we could gain the inner strength, similar to theirs, which would make our ability to love more powerful than their pain and anger, and more invincible, and an antidote to their pain-fed pseudo-invincibility? And, since that's the ultimate goal for humankind, there's a promise inherent in this situation, and that's this is not the end. It is a terribly painful stage. How do we midwife this planet's birth, into a new planet? Forgiveness is born out of an inner state of love which creates such a powerful all pervasive peace that it chooses not to be bound down by unforgiveness. Consequently, forgiveness becomes a powerful intention, a choice to see and understand by comprehending the bigger picture and realizing this is a frightening stage in the development of the human race, and specifically the maturing process of oppressed people. Forgiveness is a wise decision not to react but to choose love in response to another's reaction to the oppression of imperialism, racism, elitism, and religious persecution.
Theirs' is an uncritical reaction. It is a state of out of control anger so strong that it overwhelms any sanity or wisdom. It is the scapegoated Black teen who bolts out of the house, hungry and angry, and robs a 7-eleven, and then takes the fall from a magistrate of the white imperial court that has caused the whole system which has oppressed his people to an intolerable point. An Arab friend once said we ordinary American people don't understand the whole picture of what has happened historically in the Arabian context. I asked him to explain it to me, and he shook his head and declined, saying, I wouldn't understand.
So, there is another outcome we can hope for. I realize ISIL wants an Armageddon. And, sometimes I think the right wing Christian fundamentalists do too. I want a Golden Age. I want us to realize this is a stage - as terrible and dark and horrific as it is - and see that it's not the end of the story. It is not the end, despite what the media and religious fanatics say, it is only the birth pains that precedes the whole world's birth into the Golden Age, a new Genesis. If creator of the Universe, the great Parent of life itself, and more specifically a Parent who loves us, knows us, and is urging us to grow up, then our God always knew we would go through this terrible collective, global adolescence of rebellion against abusive, evil, control. It is an important, yet volatile stage, and one which our God has called us to do for more than 5000 years. If that's the case, which I think it is, then there is another stage to get to, the stage of reconciliation, of whole planet empowerment, of ultimate creative aliveness that will plant the flowers on the graves of all who have been lost in this huge global uprising. If it exists, the golden age promised in the Book of Revelation, that New Jerusalem, and if that's part of our global development, that would mean that we will get to that stage. It is part of the plan. So, whether or not the suicide bombers want to end life on the planet because in some strange way that would eliminate their anger, it is not the end. It may feel like it. It may feel like we can't come against this terrible consolidated power raging through the Middle East and Europe and taunting our U.S. shores, but we can.
I feel that we have to get to that place of pure peace and light and then stand tall and strong together in it. We have to grow up, become enlightened, empowered by the ultimate love of the universe, and stand up and allow that power, that awesome creative power, to flood the planet and flood these very angry men.
I only know one thing for sure. This is not the end. Humanity's God who loves us beyond our ability to love ourselves or each other is asking us to trust, to wait, to love, to believe, even to know God's love and infinite mercy, and with that full knowing, rise up and walk with His power.When we react, we feed the fire. When we watch and wait, listen with our hearts open, and learn to see our face in the face of our enemy, and love ourselves despite what we see by forgiving ourselves, we can authentically love them.
Then, maybe, hopefully, one-by-one we can begin to mitigate this great and terrible outpouring of pain and together give birth to a time of peace, thriving in the light of God's perfect love.
Religion, as we know it, may be a sham. But, before you lunge or laugh at that statement, let me explain. To begin, the canonical teachings of Jesus, on which the Christian religion thinks it's based, are not the whole picture. Since no one can appreciate anything that's unfocused, let's focus it and then live it, if we're going to live it at all. And, I truly believe fervently we need Christ more today than at any other time in the world's history. Fortunately, He's here just as much as our need is for Him. I know that's a wake up to anyone who has been reading Tiger Lilies, but Tiger Lilies has never advocated religion per se. It has rather called for universal enlightenment, some of which is found in most religions and is in all human beings as an a priori condition. Enlightenment requires a sound and liberated mind to begin with. So, I have offered thoughts on what has enslaved us and thoughts on how to break free of that inner enslavement. Human enlightenment seems to always have been an illusive dance between shadow and light, cast from within another dimension, another reality, while at the same time calling for compassion as our guide - a compassion for ourselves, individually, and collectively. If compassion is a religion, then it may be a reflection of a deep and powerful truth, far more powerful than any religion could ever be. It doesn't steal your soul. Rather, it opens the door of your heart to eternity, something religion offers but too often doesn't deliver. Tiger Lilies is based on what I believe are the real teachings of Jesus. For the mainstream that may sound heretical, but there is sufficient sound evidence that the Gnostic Christian teachings and writings offer the world a very different, and important, understanding of what Jesus really taught. So, I've maintained what I have come to believe are the authentic teachings of Jesus as the Son of God. Adding to that understanding, is one that He is a fully realized Son of God, and fully enlightened, as the Buddha was. While he stands apart from us, He is also always drawing us closer to him, opening the path to truth, enlightenment, total immersion in the Oneness of universal eternality. He does not need our worship. He does not need our sacrifice, nor does God. He wants us to take possession of our own minds and lives. He wants us to honor ourselves, and when we are ready, to open our minds and allow our hearts to breathe in the Holy Spirit which is the substance of creation itself. Nothing is more powerful or life-giving. When we worship in the old way, we give our power away, including our self determination, our psychological underpinning, our own owned interpretation of life itself. We become subordinated. Many of the saints of antiquity, who followed the old religion, died giving their power away to a God who did not require it. Jesus always wanted us to take back our power from the false power brokers. It was everything he hoped we'd understand. He knew the way and wanted to show us how to become whole, strengthened by that wholeness, and empowered by a personal integrity. Rather than the rigidity of an old religious moralistic legalism that demanded subservience to a religious law, just because disobedience meant punishment, He called us to an individualistic integrity stemming from a self determination built on knowing and honoring yourself that can only come at that point of authentic freedom from outside controls. It's something like, "Know yourself, honor yourself; know your boundaries, honor your boundaries; love yourself, love each other." When you are whole, you are strong; when you are strong, you can love; when you can love, you can forgive and heal yourself and the whole world. When the whole world is moving as one, it will dance with God in a way that I can't even imagine, but truly and earnestly hope for. But, there is a single, mind-blowing thought I want to leave with you here. Christianity as we know it has led to a ritualistic practice based on the wrong idea that Jesus was "the lamb of God," a sacrificial victim placed on the cross to absorb and absolve us of our punishment for our sins. This terrible idea comes from another terrible idea, which is that we are born sinners. What a sad state of affairs. Why would God create sinners? So, Christianity is a victim-based ideology. The more pain, the more gain. The more you suffer, the more you liken yourself to Jesus, it suggests. Martyrdom was and still is the cornerstone of the faith. However you want to define martyrdom, it is based on the idea that you give yourself away to a more noble cause and in the giving of yourself away you gain eternal life, regardless of the pain. So, during the Middle Ages, you went to be burned at the stake. In the Roman era, you were ripped apart by lions or tortured in other unimaginable ways - that's until ISIL came up with some new ways. And, that brings me to another terrible idea. ISIL terrorists are gaining recruits based on the same ideology, as wrong now as it ever was. The terror inflicted on the world recently in Paris, is an outrageous mirror to us of what we always believed ourselves, only packaged differently. Why else would someone blow himself up in a suicide vest? As we react to ISIL's terrorism, let's look at how we've terrorized our own minds for these past 1600 years, as Christians. You can say, "Oh that was a long time ago. We don't put people up to burn anymore. We don't kill in the name of religion anymore." Are you sure about that? As long as the over-riding ideology of the faith, which I maintain is an error made by the Church Fathers around AD 325, and cast in stone in the Nicene Creed, is based on a complete misunderstanding of what Jesus' death (crucifixion) was about, then we are upholding a victim-based, heroic belief in martyrdom which is identical to the idea that is fueling ISIL. We are looking our own false religion right in the face of every radical Muslim terrorist. Again, I'm not saying authentic Christianity is false. I'm saying this pivotal belief, which also keeps the mainstream away from a full communion with the divine, is based on a huge error, an error so big and so malignant that it has created an inflamed planet theologically and ideologically. So, back to Jesus. His last words to us were, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I think that's where I begin and where I leave off. "Father, forgive us all - Christians and Muslims - because we didn't know what we were doing." But, now we do. Where do we go from here? (Continued tomorrow)
There are many kinds of
poverty. But the worst deprivation is the lack of a childhood. It is even worse
than financial poverty. It is the lack of an inner autonomy, an integrated and creative interiority, stemming from the sheer absence of adult love and guidance in the early formative years of a child's life.
Even if a child is languishing as a refugee in poverty, blighted by the most heinous terrorist regime ever known to the modern world, if that child feels loved by his parents, if he survives physically, that child has a good chance of success later in life. He may be deprived of other things, but with the love, acceptance and support of his parents, he will develop the inner skills to thrive. He will grow up with an intact "self," and his childhood will naturally develop into adulthood.
But, a child who is neglected or abused will not. He will remain trapped, imprisoned in whatever life stage he was in when he encountered traumatic abuse. Part of his inner self is frozen, paralyzed in that time and place. Psychologists can almost pinpoint when a person encountered abuse because a part of that person's self is stuck in that stage of development. Maybe that's what "adult child of an alcoholic" means, even though that's not what it was meant to mean.
Children learn to survive by doing whatever it takes to keep their parents happy. It may mean anything, even picking up glass shattered all over the kitchen at 2 am because one of their drunken parents had exploded in rage at the other. Clearly, that's shocking and ridiculous to subject a child to cleaning up shattered glass because the drunken raging parent threw all the glasses on the shelf at that other parent. Yes, it's shocking. But, the child accepts it as normal because it wasn't the first time and it won't be the last.
The child learns to listen to the parents talking in the driveway at night as they return home from another party. The child listens for any signs of anger in their voices. When he is sure there isn't going to be another big fight, he can slip off to sleep. But, even then, he can not be sure. Sometimes he's fooled if he's not careful, and the angry parent might not sound like he's angry with the other parent, but might just appear at his bedroom door, horrifically casting a long shadow on the bedroom wall by the bright hall light in the doorway. Then, throwing on the overhead light, staggers in raging at the child. He might demand the child get up and clean his room, or sweep the kitchen, or do homework. It's always unpredictable. Whatever it is, the child does it to avoid a beating or raging.
This is hard to believe it ever happens. It is pure insanity, but the child learns to accept that insanity - even though he doesn't know it's insanity - and does whatever he can to avoid it ever happening again. But, it does. Somewhere in his little heart he wishes his parent loved him, but for now just avoiding the inevitable seems to be his main goal in life. He doesn't know he's not being loved. He's just trying to survive the horrors of the night. Maybe someday it'll all make sense, but then maybe it never will.
It happens again and again and again. As the child grows, sometimes the abuse gets worse. Often the beatings are painful.Teachers notice, but don't ask, about the black eye or the deep finger nail scratch across the child's face or the poor attention in school. As the child withdraws from any social interaction, fearing abuse from the teacher on whom he has projected his fear of authority (which later he'll project onto future employers) or the bullies at school, he finds his only peace is in being alone. But, there's still the awareness, always there, that he has to go home after school. Life becomes survival, just survival, nothing more.
Unfortunately, by the time the child has managed to get out of the house in his late teens, the inner damage is done. Fight or flight begins and becomes the child's way of dealing with any future stress resembling that of the parent. And, that is just the beginning of the horrors that child will encounter as he tries to "fix" what happened to him. On a deep inner level, that child will always try to please that unloving and unavailable parent, however he turns up in his current life.
And, he always shows up - in the behavior of a partner, an employer, almost anyone. His world is flooded with these kinds of people. The subconscious, in an effort to correct what happened, will continually send into his life people like that abusive parent to give the child (now an adult) a renewed opportunity to make it right. What he can't know is that he can't make it right.That parent was unable to love at all, was most likely psychopathic or narcissistic at best, and it wasn't the child's fault. The child doesn't know it wasn't his fault and will try and try and try until he kills himself trying. Unless he's lucky or blessed by grace.
He will attract into his life partners that have that same unavailable cruel behavior which will trigger in him an attempt to please to win that person's love. It's become an automatic response / reaction. It's the fractured part of the child's self that is stuck in childhood. Even if, and that's a big if, he comes to understand his behavior, he is most likely unable to change it. It is bonded deeply within his psyche.
That child's inner self was split by the inner frustration of not being able to make his parent happy and receive the parents love. He will often find himself in relationships with people who are abusive, but can't recognize the person's abuse because it feels familiar, strangely meant to be, almost like soul mates. And, when that relationship fails, the next one is the same only packaged differently. Each time each relationship fails the original parent's damage is driven deeper and becomes increasingly more life threatening.
Dr. Phil recently said these children usually grow up to develop a chronic disease, autoimmune illnesses, addictions, high divorce rates, poor academic outcomes, and ultimately die five years earlier than other people. Essentially, these children are on a fatal life trajectory. Their parents start killing their little one's souls, and then seal the damage by teaching that child not to love himself by selflessly serving others at their own cost. They teach the child he is unlovable, and never will be, and how to abuse himself and endure slavery and abuse. The child becomes a master at that and never learns to love himself. The frustration, the failure, the drive to please those who cannot be pleased is a severe downward continuum.
The child (who is now an adult) may become an addict, live on the streets, or try to be successful at a job or career but never find any positive response to his efforts. He earns a low wage and is unable to sustain a real relationship (only abusive ones) and eventually reaches a point that he feels so physically and emotionally drained that he doesn't have the strength left to go on.
Living itself feels like an impossible reach unless, by the grace of God, he is able to endure that final moment, that "dark night of the soul," that single moment when the inner torment is an unbearable agony he wants to be over. The depression, despair and pain has completely overcome him and he is completely out of resources. He can't manage. The anger has been internalized for so long creating an overwhelming, insurmountable depression. He can't breathe. He can't go on. He wants to, needs to, desperately has to, end it all.
If he's lucky, just when he would end it all, commit suicide, he might manage to counsel himself that this will pass, as it has before. And, if he can survive, endure it, just long enough until it passes, he'll get another day to try again. Maybe he can, maybe he can't. Maybe that child (now an adult) finds a wise and loving adult or friend in life who is there in that darkest of moments, when he absolutely would end his miserable life.
That all sounds like a scene presented by Dicken's future ghost. But, sadly, it's really too late at that point. Maybe the child (now an adult) can begin to heal. But, there are those moments of such overwhelming grief at the lost opportunities in life that he is so badly destabilized, he is unable to change his life. He looks back and knows he can never have those years back. He realizes how under equipped he is to work the kind of job he wants, or have the kind of life he wants. It's too late.
The words, ideas, thoughts, voices of all the abusers in his lifetime still whisper to him. He had unwittingly invited and allowed them all into his life at various stages in his blind effort to win the love of and please his unloving parent, who by now is most likely dead.
The horror of the all pervading life devastation is overwhelming. It's condemnation is so enormous. He can see all the dead on the battlefield of his inner mind. It looks like Gettysburg. How can he pretend it isn't what it is. He can not lie to himself. He can see clearly the endless, vast ruined inner landscape. Any denial he used previously to get through daily life is shattered, like that glass on his parent's kitchen floor.
He is in the grip of a terrible loneliness because he hadn't been able to trust anyone. This single effort to protect himself led to a life of isolation. He was unable to stand up for himself and fight and there was no where to go. He was stuck. His only resource was to hide.
But, the grace, the hope, is now he is closer to something else, something real. Strangely, he is closer to God in a way he doesn't see yet. It all was such a terrible shortcut. But, now, in this emptiness there is nothing standing between him and God. Either it had all been ripped away from him or he had nothing left to surrender. Finally, without any effort, on his part, perhaps driven only by the stark reality of his devastated life and his own grief and emptiness, he finds or awakens to that "great unknowing." There is something in that dark nothing that is all around him. It's almost tangible, palatable. There issomething there.
Then, there's a brief moment of awareness, a glimpse of something, something fresh, like a breeze lightly brushing his cheek. He feels something - maybe for the first time in his life. Inexplicably, he intuitively knows that something is love. He wants to hold it as you would hold, if you could, a delicate butterfly. Internally, he grasps for it, but it's gone. He's used to losing things he loves, but instead of grief, he feels a flickering, yet fleeting, joy.
It may be awhile before he feels that again. But, he is sustained somehow by it, even the memory of it, which he reflects on for hours, along lonely walks on the beach or the park. Life is starting to get a bit better, just a tiny bit, day by day. He knows it's going to be a long road away from what he's learned is his lifetime in "co-dependence," which he has discovered in every aspect of his life.
He is learning new coping strategies and behavior choices that are leading to empowerment how to love himself - just because he has to learn it, not because it feels right or good. It's a new path. It's the only hope to life. Somehow in all of this newness, he chooses life, or maybe life chose him. Maybe the real truth is, it was grace that allowed that person to call when they did - even the words out of the mouth of the abuser gave him the respite in that moment of need, just enough to lift the heavy mantle of the overwhelming depression enough for him to catch a breath and move out of its path. It seems God will use anyone and anything to help save a person.
"What's next?" they ask him. "What do you want in your life?" "What are your goals, your dreams?" Tears flow down his ruddy cheeks. He has no idea. He wants to feel the breeze of the butterfly again. That's all. He wants to feel that feeling again. That's all. Isn't that enough?
Yes. It's more than just enough. It is everything. In that delicate tiny embrace of the wind fluttering under the wings of the butterfly, is heaven. It is the first kiss of the Holy Spirit. It is a rebirth. It is birth into life, into what is real, the calm after the storm, the hope after the devastation of a lifetime.
Jesus replied, 'I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' . . . 'The wind blows wherever it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.'
John 3: 3, 8
Never again, will he feel glass under his cherubic little knees or under the palms of his coupled hands as he crawls in the glass to clean it up, the big pieces first, then the shattered ones.
Now, he can breathe in peace. Others who had not endured what he had, those seemingly so much better off in life than him, who chose their dreams, their illusive goals and agendas of power and greed, will not know what he now knows. He has found personal value and peace at last, the only real and enduring, heartening peace. On that, he will rebuild. On that, he will ascend into the arms of the great lover, the true divine parent who is always loving, always there, waiting for the inner child and the adult man to merge and look up, and look within, and realize how precious and beloved he is.
That place of realizing that he is precious and loved and that he can live a life of self love, is the opening at the mouth of the cave in which he's lived all his life. It is just the very beginning, the tip of a new life. Life will rush at him next, like a river that's been dammed for a lifetime. But for now, to just breathe freely, exhale all the anxiety and fear, and breathe in the knowledge that God is love and that He is loved, is enough.
There is more, so much more, awaiting him. The answers to what are his goals and dreams will come in time. But, for now, to just breathe and "be still and know" (Psalm 46:10), that God, who is in him and with him, holding him and loving him, healing him and leading him, onward onto the real path of life, is all he needs.
This reflection on peace is offered as an earnest heartfelt call for peace today, especially for the children who are refugees, strangers in a strange land. They need our love and our prayers, more than ever. In these days of war, we are all refugees from the terror that stalks us everywhere. We are all seeking a new world, a paradisio, in which we can create beautiful lives, a new home that honors life itself. It is that seeking that gives us hope for a better day - for us, our children, and our world. It is the most ancient human journey, that searching that has driven us for millennia. Today is no different, but where we are going is. We are going to become One, at last. I pray we are all lead by the divine light of love and that deeply profound and generative inner peace whose light we can all chose to live by, be guided by, enriched and healed by. I pray, and invite all of you to pray and live in love and peace. It is the Christian's good fight. It is all of humanity's shared global destiny. It is our holy peace, waged with love and prayer on our knees. It is our true essence to which we are all called.
The lovely thing about thinking of ourselves as artists is it cuts us some slack against that persistent plague of self recrimination waged by an inner critic, who is too quick to condemn us, beat us into submission to the world's "norm," which is anything but normal.
If we each tuned in to our own center, listened to the heartbeat of God which is one with ours, the sheer levels of joy and freedom, wisdom and power would open our minds to levels of experience formerly unavailable to those who wander the barren plains alone, without comfort or counsel from the Holy Spirit, who lives within, wedded to the Great creator of life.
Artists have a reputation for being raw, real, outspoken and almost self indulgent with their art. They have "poet's license," unspoken permission to be true to their art at the expense of good manners. They are purveyors of an inner truth and prophetic in their art. Why is it OK for them to express their truth prophetically on canvases, films, books, dance, music and not we, ordinary, folks? That question answers itself. It is OK for us to express our deepest truth in our lives, which is our art.
Because authenticity is a kind of birth right for artists, they can get away with irascible behavior. If we all claimed to be artists, since the world is comprised all of artists, rather than warriors (which is outward directed holy war, rather than inward where it needs to be), we would all be on a fast track to authenticity, and I bet the human race would accelerate in its spiritual evolution almost over night.
We have, from the beginning of history, been heavy on projection rather than introspection. We project our inner world outwardly. And, while that's great if your inner world is fully enlightened, self realized, beautiful, radiant and whole, but when it's wounded, fragmented from years of individual and collective abuse, the outward projection pours too much blood on the battlefield and leads us to build walls (as in big houses with tons of stuff) against each other, because we're steeped in fear. That fear is a phantom from within, not a real threat from outside.
I think if we reflected on that and reached for it, the time would quickly come when Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jain's and the hundreds of other religions, would find that at their deepest, most inner core is the same "voice." We are all connected to God, to Allah, because we are all the same.
If we could see ourselves individually as artists, is it even remotely possible that we could see "our self" as a single human being, a single Self, that one face that emerges when we merge all 6.8 billion faces together and come up with a composite face. In that face, we see the child of God, who is an artist. As we grow up individually, raise our individual awareness and liberate ourselves from the controls on us, set by tradition, old religion, clan or tribal culture, styles, fads, materialism and capitalism, and reach for what is true, we will come together. We will find the common denominator that makes us human.
I think that when we put aside all that is foreign to us, and reach for what is common, we may all find ourselves at a kind of communal table, sipping wine (or grape juice) and sharing bread (or rice cakes) and hugging our children and participating in a great banquet of life, like a wedding party, simply celebrating the happy times, the good food, the great music, the dancing, the singing, the laughter. Listening to the stories of the old people and watching the children play and grow, holding our husband or wife, loving the animals, watching the radiant sunrise and amber sunset.
Life is so beautiful and when we step into what is common, the shared life as artists, who have that unique vision for life, for peace and for love, the whole world would change in a single heart beat.
I think the one obvious thing we all share is life together on this beautiful planet under the same sun. It is the Earth herself that we all share and as we war among ourselves, we are not only risking running ourselves into extinction, but we are killing her. By facing down what separates us, and clinging to what unites us, what we share in common rather than what we hold differently, we may be able to grasp a vision for our future together.
I wonder if we can share that vision? I wonder if we can face down our own inner "holy wars" to heal and evolve those parts of our collective (and individual) wounded psyches that react to others who are different? I wonder if we stopped fighting externally and rather, faced the demons within, would all wars stop? Would they? Is it possible? Can we look out into our own life canvases today, and ask ourselves where do we react? to whom do we react?
We all have so much work to do. We have many "holy wars" to engage in within ourselves. Holy war was never meant to be fought outwardly, if we are honest with ourselves. Among Sufis, holy war is an inward struggle to holiness. We must all give each other a break, enough of a break to stop, gather our thoughts, center more, speak more lovingly, speak more truth, go to those deepest plains of truth within, and come back out to the world and share what we find there, even if we have to paint it, sing it, dance it, write it.
(Please check out their website. It is a beautiful, elegant call for peace, love, if only for our children, who are suffering everywhere on the earth. It begs us all to wake up.)
