Spiritual Sundays | Twenty Three
Infinitely Loved Broken People
Dear friend,
The kettle clicks off, the water when still boiling hot makes the best tea. I drink more tea and coffee than is likely good for the health of my body. I like the taste and the effect of the drinks on my mood. Both tea and coffee elevate feelings of well being. at least they do for me, and given their popularity around the globe it’s probable they do that for millions of people.
My grandad was addicted to nicotine and alcohol and my Dad wore it down to alcohol only. Both men ended their days with an unhealthy habit of knocking back the booze before midday.
When Dad was in his care home we’d take him to the local pub and the delight on his face was deeply moving. He was so close to the end of his life, and there was no way he could get hold of alcohol in the home, we figured it could do no harm for him to enjoy some freedom and a couple of pints and a plate of fish and chips.
He was so simple and gentle in those last few years. Like a child, including the temper tantrums. He was so lost at times, he clung to his stubbornness as a kind of life buoy, a marker in the vast nothingness before him. He’d bash the other resident’s shins with his aluminium walking frame till they vacated his favourite seat near the biscuits then fall asleep in it until tea time.
It’s hard to think of him in that place without a needle of pain in my heart. All the same I came to love him more in those days than I had since I was a child, his vulnerability disarming the resentments I’d built up throughout the course of my numerous therapy sessions with Danielle, my first therapist.
In the end, there is only love.
What more do we need to know?
When I first entered therapy I idealised my upbringing. I can remember quite clearly stating to Danielle that I’d had a perfect childhood. My parents had loved one another and stayed together and given me and my brother everything we’d needed to thrive in the world.
So why all of the misery?
Together we spent years picking apart my childhood, adolescent and early adulthood.
A painful process that succeeded in one thing, making me aware that I was suffering, accepting it, even if the causes of that suffering were not actually the limitations and mistakes made by my parents in bringing me up, I was at least moving in the right direction.
How poisonous are those cultures, national, regional, familial, individual, where we are required to live in perfect happiness. The world is not like that. We are not failures if we suffer in this world. Each of us suffers eventually and we must come to terms with this if we are to pass through the pain, transforming it from darkness to fuel for the light that burns within.
What I’m saying is it’s okay to feel lost, angry, sad, hopeless, desperate, excluded, lonely, embarrassed, you name it… It’s part of the duality of this world.
Suffering is inevitable if we are only aware of the image of the world our five physical senses present to us. If we seek satisfaction through fulfilling the pleasure demands of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell we will always be in a state of want.
If we make status and wealth and power our gods we will never taste satisfaction for more than a fleeting moment. There is never enough if we live only on the level of the senses and the demands of the false self. Which is precisely how I lived up until the world piled up the suffering to the point where I knew my own brokenness.
Like a chick in an egg the sky cracked and the daylight found me, soft and vulnerable and willing to be loved by a power my mind cannot conceive.
Are we not all broken people?
But loved infinitely by an infinite loving mystery we call by many names, or no name at all. Maybe it’s a belief in the back of your mind of the goodness in the living ones. Something good in you at the core of your being. A maypole around which the faults and inconsistencies of being human dance and weave the world.
Imagine yourself now as a child loved and protected by a Divine Mother and Father. The Saints and Gurus your Brothers and Sisters. Your earth mother and father part of this greater family, including all living beings, on a planet that is alive and sentient.
How would that change life on this planet if every one of us knew this as the foundations of our world?
Never mind it though. We must live through the times to come where some of us here live only for the satisfaction of sense desires and the pursuit of wealth, power and fame.
We can enjoy our successes, good food and good company. We can love one another and take comfort in the arms of loved ones. We can take care of our friends and families and we can be kind to those we meet in passing.
Deep down, in the depths of our being we can also love the formless power behind all of the physical world. We can know ourselves as one with this loving power. We can be imperfect and broken and loved.
As it has been, for the enlightened souls of this world, so will it be for you.
As has been said many times, when it comes it will be now.
The future and past are mental constructions.
They exist only in the human imagination.
We once knew this.
When we were children.
Before we learned about clocks.
Judge neither yourself nor another.
It’s hard to do and enough to bring you into the safety of the present moment.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey