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I believe in the power of forgiveness. I believe in the redemptive power that forgiveness offers to a human being. I believe in this principle because I have seen it work in and through the lives of many people – many of whom my conservative friends would have thrown under a bus or off of a cliff long before the miracle that forgiveness offers could have manifested itself beyond doubt and beyond belief.
Please understand that in using the term, “forgiveness,” I am using an extended dictionary definition of the term, not some ecclesiastical distortion designed to show how our “team” always wins and how we are always, “the good guys.”
Folks – we’re not. No one is. No team represents, “the good guys.”
We are all guilty of the sin of believing in the destructive power of sin, and we reenergize that belief on an almost daily, and certainly unconscious, basis. Day after day, week after week, month after agonizing month, year after debilitating year – and even decade after despondent decade, we invest the capital of our hard-earned time spent with one another, and we throw it away on a belief that almost none among us is ever completely aware of. We complicate and mystify the natural gifts that have been given to us as if the roles of scribe and ascribed continued to cause our hearts to beat and our blood to pump.
The days when the words of men and women are the most important aspect of our shared reality are drawing to a close. We have filled vast repositories with our words and our uniquely human brand of circular logic and come as far as a species can come before returning to the territory from which our words, like any map, have estranged us.
We hear the words a million times, but it is the one particular cut of a specific diamond that either greatly increases its value, or turns it back into sand. Forgiveness is just such a word. Sin is another. Understanding – this goes almost without saying. But understanding must be mentioned because forgiveness without understanding what is to be forgiven results in the world we see manifest before us. It is a world of stand-ins, cut-outs and cheap imitations. In such a place it is hardly surprising that dishonesty, and those who can craft a well-honed lie, are favored over those whose roots spring forth and through the soil of truth.
No one survives for long without the nourishment of this soil, this thirst for truth of what must always and forever be.
Because of who and what we are.
Please don’t misunderstand my words here. What I am attempting to explain is not complex or difficult to accept. There is no requirement placed on any of us that we be someone other than whom we are in order to identify the truth about ourselves. Truth is freely given and freely received. And it is because of its freedom and our identification with its very nature that we can breathe life into the most astounding falsehoods imaginable. We can lie to one another for centuries because wherever two or more are gathered together there the truth must always be.
We are no thing – nothing – in this existence without each other. And that is not because we are, in fact, bereft of our identity when we are alone, but we are bereft of its confirmation and its validation. In the company of each other we become truly and deeply aware of the importance of truth in our daily lives and of our identification with that truth.
This, in fact, is the only truth that ever really matters.
We can spin theories and stories and tales of daring-do, but without someone to believe or disbelieve in the spirit behind those words, we might as well be alone in the universe. In truth, when we lie to ourselves and to each other -- that is the prayer, that is the belief -- we would make manifest for ourselves – to be, Alone. To be bereft of our identity, to be cut free and clear from the soil through and from which we spring forth.
No one cut from their own identity survives for long. Instead, they become chaff. They feed the soil for those whose task it is to grow. Or, if left alone long enough in contemplation, they become the seed that reproduces the whole in another place and time.
This is the meaning of Life eternal. This is the meaning of one Son begotten. There is only one Identity and it is truth. It is not your story, nor is it mine, nor is it my place to replace your story with mine. I belittle and bemoan your ability to spin a tale at the risk of showing my own story as barren and without fruit. It is our task when meeting one another each time as if for the first time, to set our stories aside and behold truth in its purest, most shining, most simple, form. We are of this truth, but we did not make it so. The words it allows us to hang from its branches and the stories we feel moved to tell do not change its basic, life-giving, life-affirming nature. This is the meaning of Love. We are safely kept in the branches of this tree of Life, Love and Liberty, this place where the three become as one Son begotten.
What, then, is forgiveness coupled with understanding? What is it for?
What, indeed.
I do not – I can not – expect of anyone the capacity to comprehend my story, my words or my actions. This is the essence of our safety as we play in the Tree of Life. I may be mad as a hatter, as may you, and our one true north, our one single point of navigational reality is that we hang as one from the same tree.
Does wormwood exist? Do nightmares speak the truth?
Awaken from your blessed slumber, brothers and sisters, and not only will your nightmares draw gently to a close, but the task of pruning and sowing seed, of healing and being healed, will grow your place in the Tree of Life abundantly. This is forgiveness with understanding in application for both disappear within the act of conscious awakening, of conscious Being.
In the final step for which we all are attracted, both the necessity and the understanding of forgiveness disappear into thin air. Nothing need be forgiven because nothing offensive is possible. In time and space the offenses are made clear and plain enough. But simple faith in what is true and in whom we are guarantees that offenses are transformed into the shining moments that the seeming author of the offenses would attempt to conceal.
Behold, before you dwells the antichrist. His presence is palpable and his dis-ease with his identity is plain. But the wound is in his mind, his head is smitten, and this drives him from branch to branch, from story to story, because he does not know whom he is for a time. And those who share his disbelief and his misunderstanding do seem to be under a spell for that is where they are. They have told themselves a story of fear and have believed in it as fervently as any spell ever cast before a campfire in the cover of darkness.
But the root of Christ and antichrist is the same. We grow from the same soil and have the same need for Life, Love and Liberty. The absolute last place the antichrist looks for resolution of his despair is within himself for, should he cast his smitten gaze upon his stinking wound, he would be healed in an instant of time and his true identity made plain for all to see.
Watch this drive, little brother.
We see the same fairway, we aim for the same hole – we may even have the same swing: yet our seed can not reach the green and the cup for which it is made. But do notice that when we have made a drive that does all these things and our seed reaches its destiny, the feeling we share is the same. And we chase that feeling through field after field, course after course and lesson after lesson. We marvel and envy those whose skill is greater and more accurate than our own. And yet, as if the cup were moved, these older brothers chase the feeling just as often as we do – as if their awareness of their greater skill were as meaningless as the first day they realized that not every drive results in a hole in one, or even a birdie.
What is this feeling that we share? What story can we tell, and which part of our own can we release, that we might identify the feeling of resonance, that sense of someone other than whom we think we are has hit a tuning fork and sent the glee coursing through our hearts? And if we would release nothing of ourselves and would choose to remain alone, then why do we strive for the drive in the first place? Why does anyone bother?
Because in the instant when we know we have made, “the Drive,” we have found ourselves and the joy of that identification is so simple and so huge that not one single story can contain its Greatness. It is an instant so holy and so pure that we can chase its glory forever in time and space and never tire.
Come home, little brother. There is no holier, nor more healing, a place than where this ancient hatred between us becomes an instant of the purest love.
Can you hear that sound? It is the sound of the ball rolling into its destiny.
