Monday, June 13, 2016

Supernatural Strength

Grief is such a difficult thing to overcome: it wraps around us like some constricting creature, causing us to do crazy things, to reduce to our basic instinct.  It’s impossible without the movement of the Spirit to make sense of anything this world throws at us. The violence and hatred, senseless death (as if any would make sense, but especially the ones we could prevent). So much sorrow. I pray for an understanding which would allow peace to settle on every heart and soul in the world—a peace that comes from a right place, from THE right place. That hatred would disappear as a result.

That’s a pretty big dream, though. Hate won’t disappear altogether until humans take the brave step to look—and enter— deep down inside and confront where hate comes from: stop it in its tracks from within and without. Stop making rash judgements, and look and act with the love of the Creator, who gives us grace and free will in equal measure. Until we use these gifts in a way which opens up relationship and causes good to spread in the world, what is to become of us?These gifts, these tools we’re given, would help us to stop fear from burning through us like wildfire. Stop ignorance from feeding that fire.. The Spirit which moves us in a better direction is a different kind of fire, in the same way controlled burns are counterbalance.

Our hands become an extension of God’s love if we let them. We can choose hate and fear and let it rule our thoughts and considerations, and make a ruin of our world if we let them. Or we can choose a path and not get in our own way. We can believe there is a spark of good left in each individual, and we can each do our part to bring any good into this world filled with injustice. Where can change of heart—in the metanoia sense—begin if not with each of us? (To echo the Jewish sentiment, from Hillel, “If I am not for myself who is for me? And being for my own self, what am ‘I'? And if not now, when?”). We are in the world, not of it, and need reminding that there’s something supernatural about each of us, and we can catch glimpses of it if we’re not busy obsessing over the inconsequential.  When the consequential becomes the distraction, this is mightily hard, but still a must: being in this world, but not of it, we must hold fast and do right and bear each other up.  We must push away the collective violence and create such a change in so doing that heaven and earth could collide more clearly for us. We must push away the multitude of false selves and deception to see, to envision the real, beyond our ego and desire and shadows.