As I sat on the hill side this evening a very common theme of my life over the past few years dominated my thoughts while there. Conflict...and what it takes to negotiate such things in order to find our way through it into new spaces where harmony begins to unfold instead of deeper levels of animosity?
It just seems that it is all around us. I sat for a couple hours this morning on the patio talking with a friend about life and finding freedom and living free of all the crap that this world is constantly trying to drag us into...the stuff that makes living free and at peace impossible. I get the sense that until we are free of such things we will never find the relational peace and harmony we all long for.
My friend is so overwhelmed by his internal conflict which seems to be the product of fear and it keeps being stirred by others around him and his attachment to cable news and politics and the economic chaos in the world and our nation. He always feels better after we have spent some time together but the pull of the ridiculous voices of the world rather quickly begin to descend upon him again after we part. We have to want harmony bad enough to break free of the things that give rise to the conflict. And even if we can find freedom from all of that... we are left with love and in love there are no rules that can be enforced...it's something that can only be freely given one to another.
4 comments:
I find myself in a painful conflict with a relative, and despite my efforts to move toward him, he throws me a stiff arm each time. It began with him not liking my quoting The Shack, and spiraled down over other points of theology that he finds paramount, and I find debatable at best, although I refuse to be drawn into a debate. He has now declared that it is impossible to love one another because we don't agree, and that he will not meet to talk with me for any reason, although I've asked. I"ve felt stymied, but have just concluded that I must reply that even if we can't love one another, that I will still choose to freely give my love to him and demonstrate my love for him in whatever ways may be still left to me.
Thanks for stimulating my thoughts on this, Kent!
It's so difficult, isn't it. Because what we see when we are in the spaces of seeing clearly, when we just *know* that "this is it", can be so quickly shrouded by the clamorous voices of cable news stations pushing our fear buttons that what we knew on the mountain we can begin to doubt down on the ground. After all, look around, this is where everyone is living, right? That, that was just pipedreams, fairytales, things you were telling yourself when you were feeling good.
See, it's good to have people like you who have porches, Kent. Maybe all life is about is to keep gently reminding ourselves yet again, for the 400 millionth time, that the mountaintop is more real than the cable news fearmongering will ever be.
Bones - sorry to hear that your relative can't see a way forward to be with each other in your differences. I guess in his mindset, you are such a total threat, having thrown off convention and heading for hellfire as you are reading The Shack, etc :)
I really have so much sympathy for you dudes in the States. I keep saying it over again - you really are in the thick of it. Extricating yourselves from religious obligation is 1000 times harder for you than it is for me living in a far more secular country with no relatives telling me such things. I do not know how I would go in such a situation, how free I would be.
Sue, the stuckness and rigidity caused by certainty and absolutism in this nation makes relationship with people who see things differently a dicey proposition.
Post a Comment