“There are people who go after your humanity…that tell you that the
light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it. It's an old tactic of
cruel people to kill kindness in the name of vitue.”
Tonight, my wife is weeping. It
has been so many years since familiar voices were heard. Even when
conversations are held there is a wall there. It really does not matter who
created it. Each on our side have fortified it in some way or another. We are
all imperfect but the thing we can do that, though we are flawed, when
genuinely practiced will be perfect.
What is that one thing?
It is to love. Why? Because
when it is genuine, it comes from one place and He is perfect.
Religion will always
supplant love in the life of a legalist. Its possessors spout their doctrine to
whitewash the sepulchers that hold their bones – devoid of life. Their walls remaining
impervious. What is this really? It is false virtue. It has the appearance of
life and even to some appears beautiful. However, the more it is lived out in
one’s life, the more void is created –eaten out from within and eventually
collapsing under its own weight. David spoke of evil as a luxuriant tree
seemingly prospering in the face of those who resist it but in the end –
eventually – it is rotted from the inside, cut down and burned. What is left is
scattered on the winds of history.
The false virtue is always
extreme in dysfunctional groups that focus on minutia that has no real
relevance to the Way. Even though one following such is pointed to the minutia continually to disarm them of the power to perform personal reasoning. This is accomplished through some
indirect and mis-applied virtue that is splattered on the psyche of the follower to
the point it appears what it is not - genuine virtue.
This is the most heinous of acts: Taking
the word of God and reducing it to control and not to free the bonds of God's children. In the end what is
produced does not look at all like heaven but shrinks to twilight and that
place where personal initiative becomes nothing more than reaction to improper
stimulus much like a caged animal responds to electric shock.
How do I know this? Because
when a person in the grips of false virtue is given a decision, they cannot
make it, they are frozen in the state of ‘I don’t know what to do’ …so they do
nothing.
They regress to a hope and prayer that the feint scratching from the other side of the
wall grows less frequent and more feint until the sound is only something that
they perceive in their minds alone. This is akin to the loss of a limb and
the phantom pain.
A relationship was once there but now it is reduced to only a
painful memory and one caught in such only seeks the repression so that
it no longer abides with them. They become less like what they were and formed
in the image of their focus: the one in whom they look to as an example. And it is not the Christ because if it was, there would be no wall, there would be no division only a bridge.
This is why
relationships outside the bubble of the dysfunctional religious groups are so
difficult.
Why did I write this?
Well there are at least two reasons:
First, it is for the
reader who has lost someone dear and feels the phantom pain. Friend, please
know that the pain you feel is on the other side of the wall as well. Although
self imposed repression is occurring, so is the pain, the memories and the
nagging doubt that something is wrong. How do I know this? I know this because
the God we serve is Love. What indwells us is the very Spirit of Love and that
cannot be repressed forever. False virtue can keep the body, mind and soul busy
and distracted but it cannot control the spirit.
Second, for the slight
and vaporous chance that the one on the other side of the wall will put down
the notion of being offended (because it is founded in false virtue) and let
themselves feel the phantom pain because it comes from a place that records
what really has been done...what has been eviscerated from them by those that
never had any one’s interest but their own. That once again they bend towards
the wall they have built and listen for the scratching on the other side that
brings the ultimate truth: they are still loved, they are forever caught in
bonds of affection. One day the real scratching will cease but in the mind, it
will never stop because it will be heard in the heart. It is the virtue of
love and tragically their judgement.
