I woke up this morning knowing that I’m right. Something was said, and I disagreed with every fiber of my being and I had to stop listening before the depth of the wrongness pervaded beyond where it hung in the air and permeated my consciousness. And then I said something, and my neighbor thought I was so wrong that he unfriended me on Facebook. And that was just wrong.
Ever been there?
It’s a short leap, it seems from being right to condemning others for being wrong. In our immediate realities this may manifest in behaviors that seem inconsequential, but around the nation and around the world people are killing each other because they think differently, look differently, believe differently. People are suffering and dying because others deem them to be “wrong”.
Sometimes I feel as though I just need to shut out the world. The tragedies are too numerous and too immense; the cruelty is too overwhelming; the ideologies are too conflicting and too divisive…
When the journey seems long, the threshold becomes the goal. Please, please, just let me reach a doorway into something else.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.”
~ Rumi
So how do we get there? How do we remain sensitive, loving, compassionate individuals in a world that often seems so inhospitable to all of those qualities? Keep moving forward. Continue on the journey, always cloaked in your values, carrying your ideals; and every once in a while take a detour into that field. Enter the place where the desire to remain separate falls away, where the will to be right dissipates. Enter the place where we are all One. This is the place where compassion lives; this is the heart of it all.
That field – the one where we aren’t clinging to our beliefs and our “knowledge” to the point of shutting out other notions and discounting other ideas… that field can be the threshold to another way of being and a new way of knowing. That field is where we remain receptive to hearing each other, committed to understanding each other, open to forgiving each other.
Receptivity is not frailty. Forgiveness is not weakness. Far from leaving us vulnerable, our openness can be the strength that propels us forward to greater understanding and greater achievement. In the midst of everything, remember that there is strength in connection. Remember that there is power in peace.
~ Christiana
Beautiful! What a great way to end our Threshold series!
Thank you, Christiana, for this reminder.
I offer this meditation on your meditation because it has grown from the same longing, one that has lured me into soul work. To cross a threshold from ‘out here’ — in the thinking of head space of beliefs, values, and ‘rightness’ — is to move into liminal space of ‘in here,’ which is heart space. In here we move on the currents of empathy and mutual presence of feeling depths caring and cavorting in the ‘waters of love.’ The way I received Rumi’s poem is for that ‘field’ to be the interior realm of The Beloved Soul of the World. I wish his words started this way: “In here, beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing….”
I offer that for us to move beyond right and wrong we might best explore the shared realms that dwell below and beneath the language of values and opinions. To descend into Soul is to move into a watery place where words have not yet formed, but feelings and images continually bubble up and float like a lava lamp. There we have no attachment to what is arising. Those stirrings have not yet become divisive. It’s down in that Pool of Soul (that embraces and nurtures us all) that I suggest we meet. In short, to address the right/wrong game is an “inside job.” Move across the threshold of division and dive into the place where we can experience communion.
Thanks for stimulating these thoughts.
Rev. Roy Reynolds, Atlanta
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
This reflection is beautiful, Rev. Roy! Thank you so much for sharing it here.
Beautiful words today. Thank you sharing them.
Peggy
Thanks Christiana for another thought provoking piece.
Rev. Roy: your words resonated with me…. you eloquently express what I have struggled to put into words. Thank you.