As powerfully as I have ever felt isolated, alone and misunderstood, imprisoned by my need to belong somehow – I feel just as powerfully free of all that in this moment. I feel an equal and opposite amount of FREEDOM right now.
I belong to no man. No program or philosophy owns me. I don’t HAVE to do anything. I love Brenda and live with her because I choose to. I do the work I do because I choose it. I live where I live because I choose to. I don’t owe anybody. I don’t feel compelled to BELONG anywhere at this moment. I am truly unconcerned with how anyone else sees me. The most comforting, complete, integrated, peaceful (shalom) concept I am capable of conjuring right now, is one of me all alone with the Father. This image might once have created terror and pain. Now it brings a sense of freedom.
All the choices I listed above are sourced in this one universal choice: to surrender to the impulse and the deep, mysterious AWARENESS that God is exactly who HE has said that He is. To accept the idea that the capacity He has given me to separate the truth from the distortions can be trusted. It can’t be measured, it can’t be bottled or observed, and it won’t always agree with the observations of others…and that is just fine. It’s not supposed to. Truth’s purpose is not to unite humanity or create oneness, or justify anyone or anything. Truth is God, and His “purpose”, as far as I know, is simply to be. He is the only noun in the universe and I am an adjective. Adjectives NEED a noun…need a purpose. Nouns just are.
I know what I know, and I am responsible only for that. I choose to believe that, and act upon it. When I do – God is there waiting. Peace is there waiting. Love is waiting for me….the cross stands in the center of that place, and I cannot deny it. A long string of memories flood back when I see the cross there at the center. Memories of excuse making, of placing reason and knowledge at the center of my life above all else…to the exclusion of instinct, intuition and awareness. None of those things (knowledge, instinct, intuition or awareness) belongs at the center…all of those things are given to me to DISCERN what IS at the center: the cross.
When reason was alone at the center, everything became less than self. I stood atop a burning heap of garbage that was reality. Everything confused, jumbled and distorted, no single thing discernable from the mess of everything else, and so all I could do was climb on top of the observable, repeatable mess and declare that because nothing stood out as true (except my own existence) then I was the only true thing. I had the freedom to make all the same choices I make now…but I didn’t. I stood still – choosing *nothing* because only *nothing* could be true.
The reality is (like Mitch says) I don’t know much. That which I do know – I really KNOW very little of. I have accepted as truth what others have taught me. I don’t KNOW that the world is round. I don’t KNOW that O.J. did it. I don’t KNOW that EVERBODY has the same evil, selfish thoughts that I do. Yet I act upon this information like it is knowledge all the time…without a second thought. So does everyone else. Yet when it comes time for CHOOSING…we put all of that stuff aside and trot reason out of the barn like it’s the only horse that can make it around the track. There is so much more to life than “knowing”.
Right now, I feel a sense that who I am is complete – not ULTIMATE – by any means…but complete. For a moment there – I was glorifying God in a completeness that I have rarely felt: simply by being.