I think looking back on my 20’s I’d say to myself now on the edge of 30, “say what you mean as honestly and humbly as you can. Lean into curiosity and gentleness, when engaging others, specifically when you want to throw up a defensive barrier or speak with fire on your tongue. Be slow to speak and quick to listen. We are all doing the best that we can. It’s vitally important to learn what you care deeply about and actively pursue the cultivation of those precious elements of your experience in this life.”
I recently said to someone, “tell me something true, we’ll all be dead soon” it’s interesting I don’t really say that from a place of desperation around grasping this moment. Frantically trying to taste and try everything before it all goes dark. It’s more of a realization that life is precious and it does end (in this form). What we do here matters and being true is an incredible force towards liberation. All the freedom I’ve experienced in my life has come from being able to be true to the person who lives behind my eyes, in a gentle way. I think humans do all sorts of different things trying to “be true” but I think sometimes I’ve definitely not understood how to do it and that’s hard. I think it meant that I actively hurt people and bent the truth in the service of fear. I watched this movie about the life of Jonathan Larson who was a Broadway producer from the nineties who died at 35 from a brain aneurysm.
The music in the film is really moving and I think there’s just a lot of good things about the film and I would recommend it. Netflix is making good shit these days. Something that one of his friends asks him in the film is “you need to ask yourself right now, are you being led by fear or love?” I love that. I think there’s a lot of power in that thing of like trying to find “it”. For me, it’s learning how to lean into trusting vulnerability with a God who sees me and loves me.
I was talking to a friend last night and we were talking about the reality of death and of how it hits us. I think it is really interesting to think about if it insights panic or a softening? Is there a sense of relief and laying down the body and going into something else or is it anger or a mixture of emotions and thoughts and bodily sensations, (probably). She was drawing some correlations about the death process to the person of Jesus and how when he faced death it was from a place of acceptance. I mean, I think it’s only fair to say that Jesus was in full trust with his Father and had no intention of death having the last word. I also think that it’s pretty cool that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form. I do believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, btw. I think it makes the story really really really really beautiful and I love beautiful things. Also just the statement that he says where he’s creating the sacrament of communion and says “I won’t drink this again until we drink it together in my father’s kingdom”. I didn’t really ever get the human aspect of that. Like literal teeth and tongue and swallow.
Like he was saying that he would drink grape wine again with us. Somehow deeply comforting for me. Anyways back to the thing. So something that she said was how “in death he forgave and loved all that he saw and experienced.” that’s so powerful. Like really really powerful. The idea of seeing and forgiving, actively, the folks who were seeking to destroy him bodily and cause him humiliation and suffering (in an extreme sense) is powerful.
The violence ended with him. What I mean is the example of being willing to see it all and forgive what he saw and experienced. To choose to lay down his life and not have it be taken from him. He wasn’t a victim. I think this is part of why Jesus says things like take up your cross and follow me. It’s a conscious choice to practice the ways of Jesus. I don’t just assent to being a more merciful person and become more merciful magically. I experience the body and blood of Christ and I am caught up in that mercy. That experience of a God who stops the cycle of trauma with himself. To engage with the goodness and the kindness of this God and have it change me. Have it make me more myself. Washing away the reaction to *blank* and the subversion of *blank*. Clearer eyes. More peace in my heart. Becoming.
It’s okay to experience all the things. It’s okay to be terrified. There is gentleness and love beyond the walls of that prison. There is gentleness and love that will meet me in that prison. The thing about it though is that it doesn’t function in the same ways as fear. Love is willing, but it will not trespass on my dignity as a human. This is where the practice of being drawn into love with love is so wonderful. To be drawn out beyond the prison of reaction and violence and fear and into an expansiveness where I can say “tell me something true, we’ll all be dead soon” and gently smile at that. To ask myself if I’m being led by fear or love in this moment. To show up and connect. To allow the mercy of this beautiful God engage me and transform the heavy energies that are blocking me into a river flowing from deep within the well that has sprung up inside me. Until all the earth remembers what we’ve forgotten.
structures of home 