Sunday, October 17, 2010

Bringing together that which has been broken.

Reconciliation hails of it's arrival in my life.
My family has never been one of intimate relations. We do not warm each others tea let alone hearts. I am struggling with being engaged in authentic relationship with a group of people that are generally unavailable. That being touched upon, I would rather talk from a perspective that I can do something about. Forgiveness and reconciliation are long words and long concepts. I have been en route of forgiveness for transgressions of common parenting horrors and some not so common for a long time. I care about how I relate to the people in my life and do not readily accept discord. The thing about forgiveness is that there may be levels of discord, and yetI may choose to maintain intimate awareness and care of myself and the relationship at hand. This intimate attention relieves my sense that there is discord, and eventually consumes it altogether. Forgiveness takes a rolling forward, folding dough into dough kind of attitude. It is a state of awareness that needs constant care, and therefore is easily set aside for a while and can take a long time. And so be it. Take the time needed to roll it out.
Even when you are conscious about attending to forgiveness, it can take on so many faces and effect so many threads in ones life that its not always apparent you are attending to it. Oh, Mystery!

For school, my class is reading The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal. It's a story about a man that is asked to forgive the actions of a Nazi soldier as he is on his death bed. Simon himself awaits death at any moment, as he is a prisoner at a concentration camp. The forgiveness that I address earlier in this post is of personal origin. I asked myself and the God of my heart what I would need to move forward in my relationships where there were transgressions. I was then delivered into a process in which no eminent danger awaited me, nor was a specific person asking me to address their transgressions. I am grappling with what it means to forgive in a political sense, for actions that were not done unto you. I think there are almost easy answers for this sort of questioning. "Give it up to God!" being one of them. The thing I am compelled to state is that we are, in my world view, the body of all higher Spirit. In this sense, "give it up to the body!" I believe if we collectively take responsibility for communal transgressions against a group or a person or even a concept, we relieve the grief left behind. Even if we ourselves are not responsible in a direct way for the collective suffering. I do not believe however that fear or guilt function in a sustainable way to contribute to the prevention of heinous crimes. I sense that there is a fine line distinguishing active awareness and possession of suffering. Pain and Joy are part of this life.
There are in my opinion forces that feed off of fear. This is a complicated thing for me to say. I am not attempting to take the responsibility off of the shoulders of those individuals that have personally taken pleasure in destroying life. Nor am I trying to Name that force. It is in my understanding that this world is only one in passing. Passing moments and the moment of passing. We are in a free will zone. Pain and crimes against others exist. I believe that because so many forms of consciousness want so many different things, pain will continue to exist. We have the freedom to want different things, and we have the choice to include or accept others as they mosey along their paths. We are then given a choice to align with a group or concept to be sustained individually that either contributes to pain or Joy. Such a choice we have to participate in a great reconciliation.
More to come soon and often. This is a cornerstone topic that once applied grows in multiple directions.
Thank you for walking with me still.

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