I am with the sinners. Straight up, might as well face it. That is, to be aware of being a sinner and that being saved has nothing to do with how good we judge that we are, or can become. In the gospels: MAT 10, 9-13 MRK 3, 15-17 LUKE 5, 27-32 Matthew (also known as Levi) the tax collector was an outcast in his own community and he frequented with other outcasts (sinners). He knew that he did not live in the ways of God; neither do I.

But it is not something that you can gain overnight, it takes time and discipleship and, anyway, there will be the element of not having that completeness – we remain  imperfect – even if we spend all of our lives trying; if we ever judge ourselves to be what Christ asked us to be, then we have already failed because we do not have the God given right to judge ourselves or anyone else on earth. And that means anyone from any family, village, city, race, nation or religion.

Matthew felt that he was an outcast because he had done wrong in the eyes of other Jews and they judged him to be a sinner; I feel this way but I also am guilty of judging others. And Matthew did that too. The others – who judged him -were sinners too but they didn’t judge themselves that way, yet they judged Matthew and his crowd. At a behavioural level we judge people and let ourselves off the hook with our comparisons. Christ saw Matthew’s self-honesty.

Herein lies the truth then. It is in becoming knowledgeable that we are living without  God in our Spirit , we are aware of some of our flaws, so we can begin not to judge others. This truth is liberating to ourself and to others. To put it into practice though takes time and patience with oneself. Yet, herein is the path, the way.

There is absolutely no religion, including Christianity, that requires anyone to “defend” it. By forcing views or forcing arms we pretend it is our defence of something Holy, but it isn’t. All we have to do is live it out. Live it. Instead of telling everyone else what to “do”, we become our own best teacher and pupil and save everyone else from hearing our boring views of the world including our damning judgements.

By doing this, we become aware of our own block to God  and thereby are given a lifeline and a life time to heal the disconnections. That’s it. We do not need to turn into the Christ or even into a Saint, or into even an orthodox Holy person. We simply are required to look within, to try hard to be honest with ourselves and to allow the honesty and its truth to work within. There is no need to judge anyone else according to our behaviours and our opinions – upon whose prejudices indeed, do we base our opinions? Picking out the plank in our own eye, is preferable indeed to seeking to pick out the splinters in others eyes.  We have more than enough for a lifetime’s work in attending to ourselves.

So Saint Matthew gives all of us the hope of personal honesty, truth and the beginning of becoming non-judgemental. To judge is to sin and yet we do it all the time and make our excuses. But still, when we become aware of what we are doing , then we are becoming honest with ourselves. That is a great act of the beginning of healing and wholeness. Even though we may still fall a thousand times a day by finding ourselves judging again, but that we are aware that we do this, is part of the healing process. To be aware. To be honest with ourselves and not to pretend that we are good or Holier than thou or him or her.

In this then, I feel a unity with Saint Matthew; I can be a right mess; highly misguided; fallen; in denial; pretending to try to be “good” in my own judgement; defending my behaviour by comparing it with others. But still enabled to find my way, however many times I might make another right mess of it. Just being aware is an enlightenment. A small flicker of light that might now be enabled to grow.

So I’m with the sinners.  On fear of death?  No.  On accepting life as it is. Yes, and a right bloody mess I am too!

(© 2009 Eileen Baker)

I was, yet again, beside myself with fear. With fear of what to do and how to do it and, above all, how to get complete healing. Is it not a very deep and natural thing for a Mother to want her child to be cured and happy and strong and well? Yes it is. And all of my attempts hitherto had not succeeded then; all my endeavours, trials and praying and going to multiple practitioners of various disciplines – we had tried everything on earth, or so I thought. We were long not over this period but I did not know this at this time. I remember the sunny, clement day and looking out of the window at the trees and the countryside not caring that it was beautiful because my world was not.  There I was voicing these concerns whilst driving– as you do – speaking out loud to the heavens that for God’s sake, what to do next? Why was this thing coming back now? Why had it not gone? Feeling that fear which grips the very base of the stomach and that permeating angst of being thrown into helplessness with time running out was with me and I wrestled back and forth on the steering wheel and, using my motion to deliver the crescendo I was building up to I shouted out words to the effect of :”Look, here, please God help us and for goodness sakes why has it come back to my son? What more can I do? What is this thing that keeps striking at him? I know that I am not perfect and a sinner and all of that waffle but for goodness sakes he cannot take anymore. Let ME take on this burden, this illness because I AM STRONG ENOUGH TO FIGHT THIS SO GIVE IT TO ME!”. . And then I got a huge thwack on my right clavicle; like someone had struck me hard in answer to my question. Blimey, I bounced up straight and rigid. What the hell had I done here? What Mother wouldn’t take on the burden for her child? Was it a question with huge risk? Immediately I shouted out loud again something like “But I need Michael the Archangel to help me in this!”.
I startled myself at these strange words which emerged from my own mouth. Then stunned silence whilst concentrating on the road home and trying to understand my own words. To this day, I do not know why I called on that particular high Archangel, as I hadn’t really thought about angels as such, even if I am religious/spiritual in some ways.

On reaching home I went straight into my study and went through a file where I keep some cards and letters received over the years and I pulled out a beautiful icon postcard upon which is Michael the Archangel. A very beautiful and ancient icon in which Michael is depicted as a very strong, hard, rugged, grim but beautiful character whose eyes show clear strain, whose chin is set, whos being comes over as so powerful but beleagured. I looked at this picture for a long time; I checked the date written on the back; the postcard had been sent to me as far back as 1992. I realised that I hadn’t looked at this card for perhaps many years. But now it sat in my hands with great significance given the events in the car. And then I recalled buying miniature pictures of a depiction of the Archangel (amongst others) whilst being in Mount St. Bernard Abbey for a day during the previous year – those small prayer cards with a chain – which I’d picked up really without applied thinking but it had occurred to me then that that huge, powerful being as he is portrayed in those cards was something to be quite frightened of, dressed up as a warrior, a very aggressive stance with his huge sword – quite threatening really. Now, after the events of this day and staring at my postcard of him, I sent one of those small prayer cards to my son – who probably thought I was going loopy – without explanation except that he should keep it with him.

I knew that I was being thrown a line, an indication of what it was I was asking and doing; right or wrong it really didn’t matter because I had put my life on the line for this and that is how it felt. I remember thinking that if I now had the illness because I’d asked for it, then so be it, let’s get on with it.

I was in a strange dimension being aware of things around me but it was as if they were not quite there. It is a spaced out not-part-of-this-picture-and-if-it-is-a-film-well-I-do-not-want-to-be-in this feeling, I never asked for this feeling of desperation. But it was also a crystal sharp focus on the present.

Here was a help line and I was going to use it, come hell or high water, carrying this icon with me wherever I went, along with other prayer cards, feeling that I had asked for help and it looked like I was going to get it; emboldened with my daring, but shaking at my roots with the potential consequences. Even I knew that the answer might not be what I “wanted”. This idea of “want” and “need” that we often confuse in the hopes that well everything should just go back to “normal” right now. So I had to begin to come to terms with the fact that if you ask the angels to come in and help you, then you had better be prepared for the way forward. They are not there to bring you precisely what you want all dressed up with ribbons on, they are there to aid you in your universal life search, so it requires a gearing up of the core of the being. “Be careful what you ask for” is an old saying and I was patently aware of this right now. Being a verbose person who always has something to say, by nature, I was now completely silent and for some considerable time.

Mont Saint Michel is on the north Brittany/ Normandy border and about four hours’ drive from where we live and I did go soon afterwards with my husband – who became aware of my desire that he and I should go and didn’t even question it – and it was a true pilgrimage – even if he perhaps thought that I was going round the bend and going along with me in the way that someone might give in to a quaint but harmless lunatic – because here was a woman who might do herself some injury if left alone – it was all part of a true, desperate, daring but humble search for help. And no, I didn’t see it as an end in itself as a conditionality of my going that then my son should be healed; I knew it was part of a much longer journey and conditionality had to be thrown away, which was probably my biggest fear. I mean promising to be good for the rest of one’s life if we get this or that.. . . is at least part of us all but it was certainly part of me and I knew that I could never promise that. But this does make me think of Oscar Wilde’s words: “we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars”. At least if I know that I am in the gutter, then that is looking upwards and outwards for help, beyond me. If I know that I cannot promise to be good for ever more then I might as well face it, especially right now as it was no time for pretence.

Amazed by its magnificence alone, the story around the building of this huge Church to Michael the Archangel, on a huge rock in the midst of extremely contrary currents just off that wild, northern coastline which is the Channel is both miraculous and novel. More than that, it is extremely funny as in humourous. It is this in a nutshell: in the eighth century the Bishop of Avranches (that region edged on La Manche/ Channel) had a dream in which the Archangel came to him and said that He wanted the Bishop to build a Church to him on that rock out there in those waters. The Bishop was very startled by this request – it being a quest of impossible not to mention impassable requirements – I mean akin to the joke that goes around relating to the favourite Anglo-saxon word and our appreciation of its earthy humour in what Michealangelo (the painter) might have said upon the request to paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel in Rome: “You want what on the f***ing celing!?”. So I could imagine the Bishop’s response, which was along the lines of, “..eoh my God, no way! That cannot be done” and the Archangel bonked him on the head and created a hole in his skull! He really did, or as the story goes, he poked his finger into the skull of the bishop and, to this day, the skull along with the said hole, is on that rugged island in its museum below the actual structure of the huge and imposing Church. This story I did not know until we made arrangements to go and I had looked up on the internet the background and it made me laugh out loud. I’d got thwacked on the clavicle and here I was reading about a Holy Bishop who’d got a hole in the head! So, I thought, blimey, I got away lightly.   And I laughed and laughed out loud in the midst of my agony and pain – raw humour is within misery and hopelessness and the “black” humour of life which serves to lift us somewhat. I suppose any onlooker might have said “Pity that poor woman, for she is clearly off her trolley”. And I didn’t care how it looked either so it was a new way forward for me and an insight akin to comradeship with madness.

So there we were. True pilgrims in search of the way forward in and amongst my state of navel gazing and considering the whys and wherefores, as we do (why me, why him, what did we do to deserve this type of thing, what about bad karma etc.) and a thought, amongst others, came to me. It was this: Listen here woman, if a policeman had just come to your house and told you that your son was dead, how would you cope with that then? At least right now I had very real opportunity to be a part of helping this situation, however hard it seemed, to become positive whatever its eventual outcome even if it were death. And for those who have ever received that news I felt a deep and ongoing sympathy for their plight; never would I not feel another’s pain in that kind of situation again. I would have true pity, not token acknowledgement.

Even today, seeing that huge monument, let alone its sophistication – I mean this is a whole village complete with hotels and cafes and shops – wrapped around this huge, unyielding rock in the midst of currents going every which way – it occurred to me that this is an architecturally impossible thing actually. But there it is. And it has stood the test of time, for sure. Winding up its path towards the towering Church above is heady enough and then we came to the huge Church and went in. There were many tourists around and we went to the front of the Church to the altar and I noticed, to the left, that there was a small notice tied to the stairwell bars that a Mass would shortly be celebrated in the crypt below. In fact, a Nun was standing there just taking the notice down and I went to her and asked if we could attend Mass down there. She was a very beautiful and kind young lady who beamed at me and told us to go down the stairs; my husband followed on in the manner that an indulgent but wary Guardian might, not even daring to question my impetuous behaviour. So down we went and there, in this tiny crypt beneath the main Church area we came across not more than about fifteen people including the Priest and his monks and nuns ready to celebrate Mass. It was cramped and we were all sitting close together; there was no music so we sang without accompaniment and went through the most powerful Mass in my entire life; I thought that the whole Church was going to be ripped off that rock and shot into heaven whilst sinners like myself who had no place in that most beautiful and sacred area were picked off and thrown down into the fire and brimstone below. To this day, the memory of that Mass fills me with awe, fear and tears but also with a deep conviction and overwhelming beauty of acceptance and healing. I looked over at my husband and saw his tears. “Here I am then”, I said to the Archangel, “I have come”. I decided against saying :”you know why I am here” because I thought that I might get a hole in the head so I just gave up the whole mess of our lives in one big blobby picture because it would take a lifetime to speak it out and words were beyond me.

I am as self-preserving as the next person and even in my temporary holy (or holier than thou) state of being, the notion of giving everything away and keeping nothing for myself is still not part of my state. But at least I don’t create any illusion about this to myself anymore. It occurred to me that everything offered from God is given without a price tag; it is given without conditionality. The profundity of this realisation left me depleted and empty because I realised that I had absolutely nothing of value to offer from myself; the only thing that God wants is the very core of your being and your brokenness. He wants those parts that the way of man or the way of the world has no use for.  Those parts where Heineken cannot reach!

And so my pilgrimage to that great monument and to that great Archangel ended; it had a pronounced effect on everything I did after that in the ongoing search and endurance as comes with family illness. My journey goes on;   my life and my behaviour have not undergone the blinding light, stricken down, throw off all my possessions and run to help the poor in Africa-type change. I am still learning and still seeking; it is a journey of huge magnitude and taking small steps is the way forward. I remain a person with a huge number of faults; with the selfishness, the opinionated stance on life and considering what everyone else should “do” to make things better. But the difference is that I know it. And knowing is awareness. Not having to change immediately in one fell swoop because it is impossible anyway as we know from our endeavours to “become better and stop doing this or that, er next week”. Just being aware that we are with many faults and with many limitations and recognising our behaviour, following our own reasoning to nowhere and knowing that underneath our polished exterior which we present to the world, we are imperfect and we could better stop telling everyone else what to do and look to ourselves. Quietly and without even announcing it to anyone else; just becoming aware of oneself, one’s intent, one’s jealousy, envy, hatred and narrowness. To face this truth is to take off our own mask to ourselves. The saving grace is that you can do it in private. Leave the outside world alone and witness for yourself what happens without you having to pretend to the world that you are a good and generous and wonderful person. Be quiet.

I can honestly say that it had never occurred to me in my life before that day, a being so high and glorious – if he did indeed even exist – would come into my life upon my request. Upon my shouted and very direct request as it was, but he did. And that is something that still fills me with fear but mainly with awe. We are dealing with the unknown, the unbelievable and the beyond worldly comprehension, powerful and Holy things here and if I have any word of warning at all, it is to say go and ask and be deeply humble and truthful in yourself in the asking, do not pretend. But you do NOT have to be a good person, whatever that is, to do it.

Michael the Archangel is shown to us as a great and powerful fighter, complete with sword and requisite aggressive stance; against whom the power of Hell cannot compete. If there is a question that I have asked and pondered ever since it is this: how can such a violent depiction be commensurate with Christ and meekness and mildness? And the answer, I believe, is this: taking on the ills of the world and all its vileness is indeed, a huge fight and there is a very real war in the heavens and beyond going on in ways that we cannot begin to visualise. This war is not one that we can relate to creating war on earth in the way that we do, with tanks and missiles and bombs and suicide bombers. This war is against the very things that we are doing on earth to create such misery, want and pure hell in killing and stealing and controlling. Power on earth is owned by whoever has the politics and trade to determine our own national or personal interests; and we give them the power by being who we are. The Holy War of heaven, depicted by Michael, is against these things. But its policy of action is through each and everyone of us in ways not of this world; through bringing awareness of what it is that we are actually doing. Christ’s meekness and mildness should not be confused with being a pushover; the most powerful thing that ever happened on this earth was Christ allowing himself to be the ultimate sacrifice to the folly of man. This is allowing the power and strength of heaven to overcome that which we live by. Whatever is happening in the heavens and around us – unseen – but felt often when we go out and seek it (or through being bonked on the head or punched across the clavicle), is to allow each of us, in our individuality, to understand the truth of the world around us. We each are creating the badness and the madness, it is not “someone else”. I have witnessed much in the crises that I have been through and that angels will deliver to us when we ask for their intervention. These interventions take us into sorrowful realms, not “nice” ones. Herein lies what their effects are upon us. They fight to release us from our illusions about ourselves. The Holy War of Heaven is to overcome this hell on earth by enabling us to lay down our arms and begin seeing the “others” as ourselves.

The way I am creates the wars and want on earth. What I give out goes into the local, national and world psyche and these effects give power to war mongering, shaping national and international politics. So the best thing that I can do on earth is to stop blaming everyone else including the terrorists, the immigrants and the politicians. All I have to do is to endeavour to sort out myself. I do not have to support a cause for one warring party against another, giving them the ability to keep on killing with “justifiable” intent. Taking sides and having opinions on the “others” gives the world the divisions, this allocation of who is right and who is wrong that fuels the wars. I am learning.

And, if I don’t want a hole in the head, I had better learn fast.

(© 2009 Eileen Baker)

Perhaps the Power of the Not Quite There Yet (towards Eckhart Toll’s “The Power of Now” that is) will do – for now?

Sometimes we feel and know that we are behaving in a way that is not true. Then we feel guilty so perhaps our conscience is telling us this and that is at least a power in itself.  Not perfect and not in “the now”, but a start maybe.

We cannot seem to overcome our behavioural ‘norms’ because it is too embarrassing to do something completely spontaneous, without prejudice and yet with a feeling of knowing it is the right thing. That is why we feel guilty.

Throughout a lifetime of going and being part of ‘our’ groups we become institutionalised or programmed and why not? It helps. It helps us to ‘function’ but it doesn’t help us to grow.

What if someone comes over to us (a stranger) and offers a welcome, or wants a welcome? What if they are someone not like us, what if they are different to our ‘norms’ and they are the type of person to whom we feel a dislike, a prejudice? Do we discreetly snub or just ignore them? Or what if a stranger is not acknowledged and we feel that they are not our type of person so we won’t bother. Well, they are not like me, so it’s ok. But there is the guilt.

Over the years this gets compounded and, despite our inner knowing of disharmony – for no other reason than being confirmed in our behaviour and adhering to our ‘norms’ – we carry on. But there is the inner guilt.

Thinking of what people might think of us is the key dark hole. We stay there because at least we are accepted in this with others who think the same. Thinking and thoughts can control us and they do.

We will often not do something overtly different to our set of norms because we are too frightened to leave them aside. It is frightening to be exposed. To be left without our protection.

So thoughts rule us. The personal thoughts of what ‘our’ people are thinking about us can govern us and keep us within the boundaries.

These boundaries are our prejudices. We might argue that they are not ‘prejudices’ that they are ways of living and functioning and getting us through life and along our way.

But our true nature is nothing to do with our race, our nationality, our family, our friends, our politics with a small and a capital ‘p’ and our thoughts are from our ego and they are dangerous. That is why we carry guilt. Because we know our true nature deep down. It might be so deep that we do not recognise it for what it is so we just feel uncomfortable and carry on.

What is our true nature then?

Our true nature is to be free of all boundaries and restrictions and prejudices. This is the essence of life.

I cannot make this mean anything of sense without declaring a fundamental understanding of what life is – at least in as far as I can make sense of it, not in the comprehensive sense of knowing the whole universe and the ultimate meaning of life. But in order for me to make sense of what it is exactly that Christ was teaching and what other religions and/or spiritual directions tell us, I realise that we are one being, but that we must reincarnate on this earth and live out different lives, like an actor on a stage. And if life is but a stage (as Shakespeare famously said) then we can also say that a stage is life. In this way we take with us our prejudices and play out our lives but with the underlying divine direction to learn to rid ourselves of these, to let go. But our conscious mind or our ego doesn’t know that. It is a bit like being thrown a huge puzzle to put together but with lots of pieces missing. Or like the Irish joke that goes like this: When I asked the Irish man how to get from here to there, the Irish man replied that, if I wanted to go there, I had better not start from here then!

The thing is that we have to start from here. We have nowhere else to start from. But that joke is not as silly as it seems as it holds a deep truth.<!–more–>

Often, I have pondered the words of The Lord’s Prayer. Actually, it is a lifetime’s work to understand it. It is related to why we are here (again). It is not a set of words put together for ‘worship’, it is a key set of words put together for enabling us to grow and to understand why we are here; it is about asking for help in our current predicament – our life – whilst we are travelling this incarnation; this is the journey. I am not speaking about ‘the meaning of life’; I haven’t got a clue and I haven’t got much of a clue about ‘the meaning of this life or my life but as the universe is a huge place and there are billions of unexplained things going on and I have got just my one person, I reckon that if I start with ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ then, huge as it is, it is not as huge as trying to figure out the unfigurable. And perhaps it is as good a start as any.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be Thy Name,

Thy Kingdom Come,

Thy Will be done on earth,

As it is in heaven.

God is in heaven, so we can reach him only by praying or meditating (praying is contacting the God outside of us and meditating is contacting the God within us – wonderfully explained in the book “The Magic Road” published by The Seekers), by looking into ourselves and by contacting him for help from our deepest being, our soul. We can speak to him from our soul, not from our ego. This is because our soul has no barrier to him. Our ego does. Our ego uses logic and barriers whilst our soul uses knowing and love (that is why we feel guilty when we act from our ego and our soul is made unhappy).

We direct him to send his kingdom. We do not ask him to. We tell him to.

We direct him that we want his Will to be done on the earth, just like it is in heaven. Which implies that at the moment his Will is not being done here in its entirety, unlike in heaven where it is being done.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We direct him to give us what we need to progress through this life, day by day. Which implies that we need to be aware of the present, of the now, to understand the lesson or the food for thought as well as having the material food we need.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

This is one of the most puzzling lines of the prayer. If you read it in the way that we are asking God to forgive us in exactly the same way that we forgive others, we might realise that this ‘forgiveness’ is a bit baffling. We rarely forgive, that is why. Which means that if we rarely forgive then we ask God rarely to forgive us. That is what we are asking. But why would we ask that? Why wouldn’t we ask to be forgiven anyway, even though we might not forgive?

True forgiveness is to live your life in such a way that absolutely no grudge, prejudice or injustice affects the way that you feel at your deepest level and in the way that you behave towards people. That you feel constantly at one with everything around you – not because everything is good, but because everything is not good.

So how on earth do we get out of this one?

Chronologically speaking, there is no true differentiation between all of the great religions of the world. Buddhism was around long before Christ came to earth. What Buddhism teaches is to find awareness and that re-incarnations allow us to go through all of the lessons that we need in order to achieve this. When Christ came there was no contradiction, just a move forward because he actually provided a way out of continuous re-incarnations to achieve the ultimate with divine intervention. His sacrifice on earth was to take upon himself all of those guilts that we feel and enact out of human nature; living in Sin is living without God, that is all. His way was to give us heaven sent Grace to enable us to find our way forward beyond the constant karma and re-incarnation as Buddhism teaches by giving us a direct and unconditional foregiveness from God.

In a Buddhist depiction there is an analogy about receiving something (a package) from someone else that we do not want; perhaps it is hate or jealousy or anger. Buddhism teaches us to send this package back to its sender with love, so that we do not carry this and so that the sender will work out those issues his or her self. In Christ’s New way the story changes though: Christ teaches us to take the package upon ourselves and then let it go upwards to the Divine, to God. In this way, both parties are relieved of the burden and both experience foregiveness as the sin is taken away.

This does not contradict Buddhism, it merely takes us all on to a different way forward with the Christ himself intervening on our behalfs. He is giving us a way out and a way forward.

And lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from Evil.

Still pondering these! Well, I am only human you see and definitely not quite there.. .. .;

(© 2008 Eileen Baker)

Happily, I really do not think that it is necessary to feel inadequate or incapable when life’s material presence intervenes and drags us back down again; when we feel like we have totally missed the point so we might as well give up.

There are many saints who have grappled with the struggle between what I want and what God wants or what we think God wants. Those normal, everyday feelings when we feel anger, bitterness, jealousy, desire, selfishness (and witness these things from others and actually enjoy them) and plain can’t be bothered will keep intervening because it is normal and human. Our addictions to whatever substances, our cravings for certain circumstances for a bit of a jolly, a bit of respite are part of who we are. Whether ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in whoever’s perspective they are part of who we are. And most saints were not aware that they were saints, remember; this title was given many years after their death, after deep consideration of their lives by other people, many years beyond their life.

I really do find the company of people with acknowledged and embraced shortcomings and vices far more comfortable and even elevating than the company of people who seem to have no vices at all. The reason for this is that they are more likely to accept you as you are, with your vice or shortcoming. To be with someone who seems to have conquered all desire, all attachments to this world whilst you struggle on can be daunting. I am not saying it can’t be elevating and create aspirations but after a good read through a chapter of The Power of Now, I would still like to pour out some wine and have a cigarette to reflect on it. Well, I haven’t got very far with letting go then have I?

Probably not.

But I do believe that a very practical way of moving forward at all, is to live from where we are right now. We cannot possibly start from anywhere else can we? As the Irish man said to you when you asked the way from here to there: “well, if you want to go there, I wouldn’t start from here!”. But where else can we start from? Indeed, do we want to go anywhere at all?

Realisation over the years of times of grace, enlightenment, some visions, signs, dreams, ponderings and changing perspectives within the context of the very hard reality of every day life and how I fall short most times, including creating very difficult circumstances within that context, actually helps me just try to be content with who I am right now, in the present reality including what I think it is, which might, indeed, be wrong. But it is all I have. And I shall start from here even if I get stuck.

Like any multi-faceted stone, a diamond, some facets are highly polished and some are very rough and dull but they each make up the whole. We are like a diamond; there is a desire to live through the highly polished facets and appear to be all that way. But outsiders will see those other facets too, even if we refuse to and that is arrogance. I know all about arrogance, selfishness, cowardice, haughtiness, lack of compassion as I have them all in huge measure. That’s a lot to come to terms with but maybe whilst I am doing that, I will leave other people’s shortcomings alone. Perhaps by trying to address the huge plank in my own eye, I shall not endeavour to take out the splinter in someone else’s. And a diamond is for ever, remember.

It’s a start anyway. The power of being not quite there is quite substantial, in itself.

(© 2008 Eileen Baker)