Thursday, March 24, 2011

Love?

I read this a few weeks ago from Annalee Skarin's book, Celestial Song of Creation:

     "It has been said that love is blind.  Love is so exalted it does not even behold the scars and blemishes and ugliness which human sight gazes upon.  Love looks deeper than the surface.  It's healing tenderness penetrates all exteriors to enfold the very heart of substance and of people and conditions and things.  Love is not blind, love is only endowed with a deeper vision.  Love looks beyond the visible into the innermost depths of a man's soul and finds there its resting place.
     "Man was created to be the bearer and the receptacle of love even as a light globe was fashioned to be the container and dispenser of light." 

I am on fire.  Angry.  So heads up.  If you don't wish to experience my version of wrath, then I suggest you move along to some other site for your pleasure. 

It is a hard, hard thing to remain quiet when someone literally stands over me with a branding iron of judgment, and thinks that humiliation is just the ticket to get what they want from me.  

It is a supreme challenge to hold back the lightning bolt I have in my hand, and to not unleash the fury that rises up in me when someone decides they wish to take control of something I have already been giving freely.  When, in essence, they have just proclaimed that I am now their slave, and should do their bidding, an assignment to ensure I'm doing it right, and if I'm good then I get a star on my report card.  But wait, before they make that dictation, and for it to even have any success, they need to make sure I feel like I'm nothin'.  And if they know me well they know right where to hit, or so they believe.  The very fact they would even strike below the belt speaks volumes about the quality of their character...not mine.  

Everything in me desires to rise up, and say, "Fuck you."  Trust me, its a rare thing that I say those words to a person's face.  Those who know me are aware that if I've just added "you" to the mix, then all is not well within my kingdom.  I think they'd rather see me blue, crying, anything else than experience that level of fury in me.  Or so I've been told.  Which is why I don't allow it to unleash toward anyone in particular.  I'll go throw rocks at a mountain, or tip tables, before I'll let that fire in me cause harm to another person.  Because believe me, I'm very much aware of how much spiritual daggers can harm someone.  It's not the words.  It's not even physical movement.  It's what lies behind those words and the striking hand that does the harm. 

Yet there are times...

I used to be one of those people who sought another person's weakness so that I could use it against them if I felt I wanted, or needed to.  That's before love came into my life, and heart, and I walked through a fire more hot than anything of this world.  That fire had me going to my knees begging forgiveness with a contrite spirit.  Because here is what I saw in me...I saw you.  I saw the pain I caused you.  Our greatest resistance and fear isn't facing the harm that was done to us.  Our greatest fear, and resistance is facing the harm we think we did to another.  Our saving grace is the fact that we didn't know.  We were ignorant.

What we didn't know is that by holding onto our hurts, what other people did to harm us, nursing them, was the very thing that caused us to behave like assholes.  Victims victimize.  So forgiveness is huge, and extremely necessary in our path to love.  Not so the other person can get away with whatever they did to harm us, but so that we won't turn around and do the very same thing to another.  Once we have crossed that line, the need to be right about our pain, and how it got there, takes on a life of its own, and will continue to live until we find forgiveness within us.  When we do that we see that holding onto our hurt was the very thing that caused us to harm another.  The act of holding on to our hurt caused the harm.  First in ourselves, then toward another. 

Now if I see weakness in another, instead of attacking it, or using it for my own gain, I move to cover it.  I move beyond it, and go deeper to the heart.  I move to heal if that person will allow it.  If they refuse then I have to let them go their way.  The very last thing I will seek to do, consciously, is to bring them any more shame, or pain than they already feel.  I would move to lift their chin, to square their shoulders, give them a hand up, lighten their burdens, give them words of encouragement if I have it in me to do so.  I have it in me to do so.  I don't give a shit what they think they did, or even what they in actuality did.  It's not for me to judge.  I am not their judge.  So it fires me right up to see someone attempt to use what they deem as weak in another, or in me, to gain control of them so they will do their bidding.  I have a serious, serious problem with that. 

I've been wondering for years why it is I feel I can't move in certain areas of my life.   Why it feels like I'm walking through quicksand.  I found out yesterday evening through a voice I felt nothing but love for.  Being in that love I was wide open for the bite to go straight for the jugular.  I've been branded.  I may as well be walking around with a Scarlet A ( Accused ) on my breast.  I wondered why I experienced such a dark hopelessness when certain things were mirrored to me.  For as long as I can remember I have lived under the branding iron of a judgment cast down on me.  I didn't know its purpose was to keep me in my place so others could relieve their guilt by standing aloof doing nothing.  I wondered why anytime I went to move beyond it, to step forward into a new way of being, the fist would show up to knock me right out of the air.

If it weren't for the facts I wouldn't have seen it.  Big mistake conjuring words that had nothing to do with the facts.  "People who live in glass houses..."  I don't have to justify myself to anyone but God. 

The rest can kiss my ass while I tip my hat as I walk out the door.

-----

No comments: