Choosing - whether or not totally conscious of my own part of that action - to take the jaunt into time with beings alien to my own personality, I now recognize that I not only sank into that quicksand, but stayed just enough above the ooze to remain alive. Not thriving, but existing.
My belief systems took such a frenetic strike that the blitzkrieg of assault to my spirit-hood had me "give up the ship"...but only for awhile. I will express that the short number of years seems like a lifetime as I "become aware" that I have awakened. Years ago I watched the movie, "Jacob's Ladder," and the feel has been much the same. In the movie the protagonist apparently skips threads and slips into an alternate reality. Personally, I think the creators of that motion picture took a more readily acceptable route for the public when they laid the experiences of that artificially formed state-of-being at the door of drug and chemicals. For me, my own "twinkling" of alternatives has been quite simply from within.
Over the last few weeks, I realized that not only have I felt no one-on-one connection to my sense and definition of God, but that I wanted to know this once more. Emmet Fox writes of "taking a vacation from yourself." It's as easy and yet, painstakingly difficult as blinking one's eye and then during that moment choosing to "see differently." I won't attempt to comprehend the mind and spirit's workings from a therapeutic standpoint, but I do recognize that I have grasped a fresh view of living. The appraisal of this significance is that I took on my own closet full of "identities" in the casting of this role.
Was there experiential value to all of this? I can explicitly respond, "yes." That need which permeated my presentation of myself to temper communications has melted. Fear exists as a perception of knowledge and no longer as the driving force for survival of my spirit. For the first time in many years, I told "God and the Universe" that I didn't know what I believed, but WANTED to hold a firm conviction of goodness and the contact with an energy flow that reinforced this tenet.
A couple of days ago - with this prayer in the ethos - I rose early and ambled into the bathroom. The cabinet shelf had fallen leaving the orderly set-up of items in disarray. My immediate thought was wondering if we'd had a small earthquake. As I worked to replace the bottles and boxes, it became apparent that the shelf was too long to fit properly. I felt myself perplexed, but balanced the feeling with the idea that the wood might have swollen, so I took it to the garage and sawed off enough to make it fit inside the cabinet door. The adjacent side also has a wooden platform made the same way and it remained upright, holding towels. As I looked at that setup, I wondered....could that shelf actually fit in the first side? AND, it did! So, I swapped them. All the while, I felt the most peculiar sense of "out of space and time" shift.
Could all this be explained within some framework of ordinary reason? Maybe, but to me, it was AN ANSWER to my earnest request. To underscore my newfound CHOICE to BELIEVE in goodness, I found two good films in the "spirituality" section of Netflix. "Rust" dealing with the way Faith can slip during times of conflicting moments of dissonance and "Breaking Man" which handled the relationship issues of another minister and his loss of "self" and a resulting divorce.
As the pastor in "Breaking Man" takes time alone to rekindle his knowledge of who he is and his mutually interwoven ideological concepts, he recognizes that "you have to be who you were created to be." So, too, does the priest in "Rust" as he returns home to regroup. Seeing an old friend, the man says, "so what happened. Did you wake up one day and say, Lord this dance is over? Wow. That's going to be one messy divorce."
I don't feel that I am alone in the discovery that the me-of-today isn't the same as yesterday and that I even miss that past arena of non-tinged operating field. Trauma has altered my thoughts on my place in the scheme of living. But, I also know viscerally that it's OK. I am not the same, I am actually more in the wave of cognition. My life has a sense of Grace now. I can be the totality of who I am without censoring that wholeness. And I am also keenly aware that I will again laugh heartily and even cry, but the import of continuity plays gently against the backdrop of this particular lifetime. Gabriel Marquez expresses it so well in Love in the Time of Cholera: "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
"Now, there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, 'love your enemies.'
It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power
there that eventually transforms individuals... There is something about love
that builds up and is creative..." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
