CCpart2ch10

29 July
westbound on the New York Thruway

I can say without a trace of doubt or ambiguity that this was the best time I’ve ever
spent with my family. The whole family: both parents, my sister, her fiancée and his
parents, my 88-year-old grandmother and her new husband and travel partner Charlie,
my two aunts from my mother’s side (no cousins, though my aunt brought one cousin’s
three young daughters) and even some new family friends I hadn’t met. They were all
at my mom’s house on Saturday to celebrate my sister’s graduation from veterinary
school this past spring. (Yes, my kid sister is now Doctor Cara) This type of event
would have had me wanting to run off to the woods and hide for most of my life, but
this time I loved everyone’s company. How exciting! How awesome to see people
who used to seem like ghosts, and see that they are people of flesh and spirit and soul
who are aching to be loved as we all are, and to know that you have been given the
power to do just that! I mean, I thought I had serious problems with my extended family –I’m not going to specify, only because
they may read this and I don’t want them to know, besides it doesn’t matter anymore. Where are these problems now? God has
crushed my enemies –enemies that I thought were other people, but were really parts of myself that didn’t belong in I AM’s
joyous creation. What was it that King David said, that God will make a footstool of his enemies? HA! Did you think he meant
other people too??? As if God would crush one of I AM’s children just to make another one happy! How liberating to learn what
those enemies really are!

Dear reader: maybe you too have suffered from strained or oppressive relationships within your family (and your “family” is a lot
larger than you may think), and maybe this just seems like your lot in life and all you can do is cope and deal with it. And that’s
true: there’s nothing you can do. But have hope! God can change this for you! All you have to do as an individual is be
willing to let God (aka. non-dual reality) search out the places in your identity where you have created enemies by
putting yourself in opposition to someone or something that is just another aspect of God.

(We also create an enemy by attaching too many “good” feelings to what we posit as its opposite, ie. attachment to companionship
makes an enemy of solitude.)

God will faithfully crush that part of you that has grown like a tumor onto your identity. It may be an enemy that you hold very
closely because it is dear to your psyche –doesn’t matter. God is very precise. Nothing that is truly you will be touched, only the
malignant tumors of the soul that we call our enemies. You may need God’s “radiation treatment” (focus there on the root word,
which is the same as “radiant” –light)                                                                     more than once, maybe every day, until you
accept that the state of being                                                                               enemy-free is your natural state, and
there is nothing left within you                                                                           that wants to be attached, to friends or
enemies, and there will be                                                                                  no limit to your peace.

As I write this I am aware that I have                                                                     not reached that place. I have not let God’s
non-dual reality into all the hidden                                                                           compartments where I keep the
attachments, both positive and negative,                                                                  that define who I think I am. As I said a
couple chapters ago, I still have needs                                                                     that bind me to my limited identity; I still
crave female attention, the gentle touch of a woman on my mind and body: this makes an enemy out of being alone. I prefer the
comfort of steady income from this job to the financial turmoil and shortcomings we experienced before: this makes an enemy out
of being poor. I feel much more “right with God” when I am writing things like the Chronicles and P&K than when I am biding
my time thinking about “mundane” things like work or my next meal or how to get the wireless internet receiver properly installed
on the new laptop: this can potentially make an enemy of all the simple workaday tasks that sustain my life and help me fulfill
whatever responsibilities I have in this life toward God, including writing perhaps. But what if I suffer a massive brain injury
tomorrow, and I survive but I can never write at the level I expect of myself again: would I be any less a child of God? See,
enemies can be very subtle. I suspect that most are not as overt as the deep-seated grudges and strong addictions that we tend to
recognize.

(This last example, the one about writing, brings up an interesting aside. I said earlier that God would not touch anything that is
truly yours in this clensing process, which means approximately “any qualities or characteristics you will need to walk the narrow
path of self-sacrifice in this life.” An extension of this idea could be –I’m not saying it is definitely, but it could be—that certain
cravings are God-given, and they will never be removed as long as you live because God equipped you with them to facilitate the
new revelation you were born to carry. For instance, I consider Aubray to be a born artist, and I don’t think she will ever lose the
hankering to express God’s love through the visual arts. Her medium and mode of operation may change with circumstances, ie.
changes in vision, life situation etc, but I suspect that hankering is hard-wired into her consciousness, and even if for some reason
she prayed and prayed to have it taken from her, God would leave it be. Correspondingly, the means to exercise this hankering,
change as they may, will always be provided for her as well, provided she is resourceful and adaptable enough to receive them,
such as when she began drawing with oil pastels because she could see the brighter, more vivid colors better on paper with her
diminishing vision.

Through the dialogue of Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger extrapolates this idea beautifully as Zooey teaches Franny –and
inadvertently, himself—to see acting as a God-given craving and therefore a call to duty. [Salinger elsewhere attributed his
philosophy to the Vedanta, specifically to the concept of jnana yoga, the worship of God through the detached performance of
God-given tasks.]

I mention this just so you don’t think I’m saying that the soul cleansed of cravings and enemies will sit, nebulous and inert, doing
nothing. Quite the contrary, the most beautiful, life-enhancing, dynamic action is done by those who can focus most
intently on the tasks God leaves them to do because everything else has been stripped away. This is what I heard so
clearly in Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road:” Christ symbolically extends His hand and says, “Don’t wait! Come with me and
we’ll find your open road! Let everything else fall away –you don’t need it anymore. Don’t get caught up in education, business,
politics or law, unless I lead you into those fields. Yes, we will travel together forever as friends, out of mutual love. What do
you say, Camerado –will you take my hand?” Who would not rather have this hand, if they knew it were real and extended
to them, than the vain and fleeting assurances of the ego?)

But I’m rambling a little. I want to get back to the idea of finding peace within your family. I don’t deny that there are many
kinds of brutality, physical and psychological, that plague many families in our world. But there is a good reason, a divine reason
in fact, why Jesus told us to forgive these sins 490 times a day if necessary: your forgiveness releases you from bondage to
enemies within you. A willingness to forgive is the most essential part of the “opening up” process that allows God to search out
our enemies; it enables God to work the changes of heart that bring the actual peace of forgiveness. Jesus’ “seventy times seven”
acts per day are your preparation for God’s one sweeping change.

This is the biggest difference between conventional morality and the fine art of “Godsmanship” that Jesus taught. In theory
morality is all about self-control, or at least the submission of self to God, but in practice, conventional morality becomes the
heavy-handed control of other people’s behavior, forced submission of other selves to God. But read the Sermon on the Mount
again: Jesus did not teach this kind of morality. Everything he taught was a preparation to find the heart of God within
the individual, to make external morality obsolete.
When people learn that they have more to gain by turning the other
cheek than by seeking revenge for an injury, there
is no need for a list of “thou shalt nots” regulating our external
behavior in settling disputes –and this is just one example among
many. I agree that Jesus came to fulfill the Law, not abolish
it, but he sought to fulfill it by revealing where it is written
in the hearts of humankind, not by creating or coercing per-
fect external obedience. Read the Gospels and count how many
times Jesus regarded the letter of the Law as obsolete, or sub-
ordinate to the heart of God –for this He was killed as a common
criminal, a transgressor of the Law, yet today his would-be
followers assert that he led a sinless life. Well, which is right?
If you believe the latter, it is absurd to likewise assert that the thrust of Christianity –the Way of Christ—is the
observation of external Laws, be they Biblical or secular. In fact, I would make the bold declaration that Jesus was the
supreme exemplar of the advice given to the Peasant by the King: “Seek to neither fulfill nor defy the Old Law; let it
pass like yesterday’s clouds.”

There is another reason why Jesus taught that forgiveness is the greatest source of strength. He knew what we tend to forget:
the only thing that can be injured by earthly events is the ego. No one can touch the spirit. The ego hurts, and the soul
may feel lost or obscured because of it, but your spirit is always with God; it transcends anything that can happen to your earthly
person. When we forgive an injury or a grievance, we are saying, “My ego is down, but the spirit soars! And where do You think
I’d rather spend my day, God?”

Plus, lest we forget, forgiveness gives us a chance to rain down love on people who are probably in great need of it. Most
people eventually recognize this in the context of their family, meaning blood relatives. But as I said before, your family is much
larger than you may think. Right now, for instance, I know there are people all over the world who would like to kill me –and you
too, if you are an American—simply because they regard the society in which I live as The Great Satan. What is my best
response to that? Should I hate them? Should I want to kill them too? They are my brothers! And they suffer from a madness
that tells them it would please God for them to shed my blood! The same madness that has been with us since Abel killed a lamb
for God –how I can empathize with these lost men! They don’t know that what they are plotting is fratricide.

But I would rather die at the hands of a madman than perpetuate his madness. What do I have to lose in loving everyone,
even those who hate me? My life, this vapor that appeases and fades away? I truly believe (and this is using a great deal of
symbolic imagery so don’t take it too literally) that if a car pulled up next to my truck today and exploded, taking me and the car
driver with it, the Spirit would be released from my body and experience the fullness of God –what I am not able to do now—and
I would meet the driver of the car and embrace him, and if there are any semblance of words available to us, he will say something
like, “Man, what was I thinking?!” And the true nature of our brotherhood would be revealed.

Friends, don’t wait until you die to experience this! Forgive all! Forgive all! Forgive all! --HC Van Wert, Ohio

© 2004 by Hermit Crab
a Fish Out Of Water production

N ext --Chapter 11