FROM THE BOUNDARY
Remember Galileo? ‘Look. Let’s get real. The sun doesn’t orbit the earth no matter what the Bible says. It doesn’t “rise”, nor “set”, no matter what we say. It’s the earth moving. The earth orbits the sun. Get it?’ That was in 1632. Shock! Horror! ‘You’re contradicting the Bible? God’s infallible Word? You’re a heretic. You should be defrocked, thrown from a tall building, burned alive, stoned, crucified – twice! Retract! Repent! Say sorry! Grovel!’ So Galileo did. ‘OK’, he said. ‘You’re right. I’m wrong. Mind, my retraction won’t stop the earth orbiting the sun.’ He lived another 10 years. The Church banned his books, just as it tried to do to the Jesuit priest, Tony de Mello – whose masterpiece, ‘Awareness’, had rocket-power – in 1998, 11 years after his death. In drawing upon ‘eastern’ spirituality he broke the rules, the Church said. He was a “danger” to the Faith. Oh dear. Does the ‘Faith’ stand on sand, then? How can a lone voice work its destruction? Well, yes, it can and once did. Remember whose voice it was? Did he ever suggest stoning anyone? He was the man who warned us about confusing the ‘Word’ of God and the “precepts of men” in sacred texts.
But there you are. That’s the Church. At times, it’s not unlike a ‘crowd’ which screams ‘Crucify! Crucify!’, a crowd which, despite its condescension, knows little, on times, of truth, of justice, of love, despite all its pretensions, all its posturing. Beware the crowd then. It’s better to walk alone.
That’s difficult though. The crowd gives security. If so many say that, think that, surely, you say, they must be right. And because there are so many acting that way, mouthing that way, of course you think you’re all on the right side, all donkeys together. Meanwhile, the sun continues to ‘rise’ and ‘set’, and truth, justice and love are settled by majority vote. Jesus was crucified by majority vote. The lone voice which says ‘No’ fractures the collective ego and must be silenced. Think of Kabir, the weaver. How could such an uneducated man ever pretend to have ‘touched’ God? Ridiculous. And what of the carpenter’s son? How dare he strut around putting us in our place? He’s either a liar, a heretic or just crazy – by majority vote. And then, by closing the door you prevent yourself from ever discovering anything for yourself or about yourself.
To be fair, we all suffer from ‘crowd syndrome’. As Wilde remarks in ‘De Profundis’, most people are other people. Their opinions are someone else’s, their lives consist in copying. We need to understand, as Jesus taught us, that it’s in our own individual lives that the history of the world will be forged, and that ultimately there’s no difference in this between our own lives and the lives of everyone else. We’re all individual pieces in the great jigsaw of life, a jigsaw with a limitless number of pieces as yet unplaced and only ever complete from age to age in the mind of Love.
We’re “individual pieces”. So yes – to discover anything we must walk alone. The door is open to us. Truth is there. Love is there. God is there. There are no witnesses. We’re on our own. The great ones have been there. So there’s nothing to stop us, only the crowd. But be prepared. When we proclaim our reality, whatever it is, even our friends and followers will leave us, betray us, deny us. Don’t look for anyone to stand with you. Even those you’ve fought for will remain silent. So look out – and be prepared for hard knocks. They’ll seek to poison you like Socrates, purge you like Galileo and de Mello, curse you like Kabir, crucify you like Christ. Few have the courage to stand against the crowd, the followers of followers. They may call themselves ‘Christians’. But don’t expect understanding, compassion, forgiveness, even integrity from them. Maybe we’ll just stay quiet and carry what we’ve discovered alone in our hearts. But then, isn’t Love stronger than life? You don’t carry it in a box. You don’t hide it in a vault. You cast it like petals from an apron. Whatever we’ve discovered is a new moon against a clear sky, something of limitless wonder. It’s a resurrection. There’s no resurrection in a tomb, only from it. So yes, count the cost but don’t be afraid. Ride the new moon.
Ride it beyond the limits of your fear. Proclaim your truth to the despised, to all those labelled as different, even those labelled ‘rejected by God’. Give your gifts freely. Ask nothing. Expect nothing. If it’s Love you’ve found, tell them of Love, that God is Love, that Love knows nothing of differences, of boundaries, that Love embraces everyone, rejects no one – not even the crowd; and that with Love we’re all held in the arms of God and each other in a new heaven and a new earth till time’s end. Oh yes, and if you’re really feeling cheeky tell them that the sun neither ‘rises’ nor ‘sets’, that our old world is ever on the move and now’s the time to climb aboard!
Go safely, then – until he next time.
Finding from the boundary: “He who has sought love truly has found it” (Kabir).