Rabble

                                                                 Rabble

A woman who did something truly terrible (that I heard about in the local news) called me for an appointment today. She was bereft, miserable and lost, crying to me in the way people cry when hope is almost gone.

I knew immediately that I would not be counseling her myself. 

I knew it deep in me. Besides the fact that I can't work with this population, and I knew I could not take a case like this in my current predicament, I knew it was not my purpose to be her therapist. 

My purpose was triage.

A friend of mine had recently told me that she knew this 50 year old woman really well; she told me what had happened........the whole notorious, sorted, aweful story that had lead my friend to sever all ties and turn her back on the mess. 

What she did was a terrible thing. Unforgiveable. Yet as we spoke and she cried, I felt only desperately sad for her. Really sad. Instead of the emotional distance that would have been a normal response to her admission, I felt only a deep desire to help her, to let her know that I care about her pain and want her to feel better.

I related to her feelings of isolation and abandonment. Everyone in her life had turned their backs: her friends, family, even her own child....all she has is her grief and her attorney.

I have not lost anyone, there is no comparison at all, and yet I seemed to identify with her loss; her sense of of the whole world turning upside down in only moments because of a terrible, ridiculously foolish impulse. I know I am not like her, I could and would never do what she did. It was the product of avarice, but as I talked to her and started trying to find ways to get her help, all I felt was empathy and sorrow for her. 

I felt strangely close to her.

Here was one stupid human crying out to another stupid human in a world full of stupid people....blundering through this life like proverbial bulls in a china shop.

Fucking up, hurting themselves....hurting others. Burning down the house.

Yet, I just felt a strong pull to care for her and try to ease her burden.

So I prayed for her and I found her a therapist.

Unlike everyone else in her world right now, oddly I didn't feel the impulse to judge her. Which is totally NOT like me.

I am terribly judgemental

Everyday

Sometimes in direct, snarky ways and sometimes in soft, covert ways.

Subterranian and underground judgements.\

Judgy and on my high horse is my usual stance with people like this.

I make fun of people in my head who do stupid things.

I feel superior, or at least smug.....

But not right now.

It is as if this nasty habit had been pruned off of me, and the new growth underneath; 

The new green leaves

Are more tender, more bright, more soft.

Less stubbly.

As I write this, I am thinking about what Source has in mind with is pruning of me? I have absolutely had the feeling that something has been happening here in my time of solitude and reflection. In my time of longing for God. 

I am thinking about new growth that is coming (I believe it is) and how it might change the trajectory of my life. How when I help people like this who feel sorrow raining down on them (sorrow of their own making, albeit), I can be the one who does not turn away.

The lepers, the untouchables, the foulest ones among us.

The troublemakers.

Those who hurt the innocents.

I feel sure that Source will reveal what this means for me as time goes on, but for now I want to speak to this page this new feeling in me.

I want to say that we are all equally awful and equally whole and good.

What trouble one of us knits....is the thread of us all.

And when one of us feels the soothing touch of Source,

We all feel it.

Here we all sit, in prisons of our own making

And yet we all have the keys to our own dark cells.

And we can share these keys sometimes....

Or at least pass a cup of water back and forth between the bars.

Our Divinity never abandons us

Our compassion is our connector

The thing that awakens us to this fact is making the choice

Every day

And when it is not easy to do it...

To make the choice to Love.

Even when those we encounter are the unloveable

The refuse

The lost causes

That woman today was just like me in the respect that, regardless of how dirty her hands were by her own actions, she still wants to be loved and healed, and she still feels the anguish of the twisted turn of life's knife.

And Source said....."Love her" and I obeyed..... and this makes me grateful.

I am awake enough, thanks to my own pain,

Indeed thanks to my own pruning.....

Awake enough in my own Soul to be brave 

and just Love.

All this life is

All living is about is 

the machinations of us humans mucking around and sometimes stubbing our toes.

Poking each other in the eyes

But Source decrees that all this matters not.

Somewhere,

In all of us,

Forever clean and untarnished

Is our Source-selves.

Our forever pure part, 

Our Holy Spirit-generated, light-filled selves.

Our thimble full of Divinity

Never spoiled by our stupidity, toe stubbing, innane mischief and outright meanness.

Clean and sweet as the first sip from a cool spring.

It can never be ruined by anything we do down here in Earth School.

Nothing touches or ruins the Source in us. Ever.

I believe I spoke with that part of her today, I could feel that she was still clean and whole in that pool of shit where she is swimming in misery.

I tried to put my hand down into her dark place and send a little love,  from that same clean place in me. 

And I think we both came someway today.

HEART-SHATTERED LIVES, 

READY FOR LOVE,

DON'T FOR A MOMENT,

ESCAPE GOD'S NOTICE.

Psalm 51:17