I know that my redeemer lives - it's not what you think it is.

I trust you to kill me…

Today, I meditated on a passage of writing by Madeleine L’Engle. The passage talked about suffering and concluded with an affirmation of “I know my redeemer lives”. 

I closed my eyes and let the phrase “I know my redeemer lives” resonate in me….. 

I envisioned that I was led down a staircase and was told I would meet my living redeemer when I got to the bottom.

At the bottom of the staircase, I looked up and saw the grim reaper.   I was surprised and he said, “you knew it would be me.”  And I did.  I thought about the leaves that fall to the ground and rot, become soil and new life.  I thought of the dead animal in the field that decays and becomes soil and new life.  I thought of all the deaths of hopes and dreams and agendas in my life and how even though they were the end of something, they were the birth of something else.   How death is redemptive.  How new life only comes when something old dies. 

Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed. 

I took the grim reaper’s hand.  It was warm and friendly.  Not scary at all.   This was my redeemer after all.   I asked him, “where are you going to take me?” and he said he wasn’t going to take me anywhere, I was already where I needed to be. 

We just stood there and I thought about how death and suffering are the redeemer.  I thought about how alive death and suffering are all the time.   How my redeemer lives.  

I thought about how that is the story of the crucifixion.  

As the meditation drew to a close, he moved away from me and became large.  He raised his hands and in a loud voice said,  “Behold I make all things new.”  

And he was gone. 

We are told in the Bible that the final enemy to be destroyed is death.   I always thought that this meant that death would be destroyed – as in – death would no longer exist and we would live forever.  But maybe I missed something with this way of seeing it.

After all, we are told that our spiritual lives are supposed to consist of death.   We are to be dying daily, losing our life in order to find it, picking up a cross daily, giving up everything.   How can we live in death mode if the goal is to get rid of death altogether? 

Maybe the passage about destroying the final enemy (death) is talking about the destruction of the enmity – not the destruction of death itself.  We are told that Christ destroyed enmity and reconciled all things.  If this is true, then death is no longer an enemy, but a friend.   Maybe we can see it as a redeemer, just as we see it in the crucifixion.   The sting is taken out.  Death and suffering whether figurative or even literal,  are now simply means to new life, resurrections and the making and growing of new things. 

I know that my redeemer lives.   

From "checkmate" by Rumi

The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely, and very strong.

If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say

'I trust you to kill me.'

I know that my redeemer lives

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The Enemy

If we loved our enemies, then enemies would cease to exist.

We like to create enemies.

The ego is that part of our consciousness that when we were tiny infants, forms and informs us that we are a separate self – no longer a part of our mother, but US.  

This separation is necessary and healthy to developing an identity, but as we mature, we find that, like most things, there are pros and cons wrapped up in the ego.    

Eckart Tolle says that the ego is the part of our mind that needs an enemy to survive. 

“The content of the ego varies from person to person, but in every ego the same structure operates. In other words: Egos only differ on the surface. Deep down they are all the same. In what way are they the same? They live on identification and separation.

When you live through the mind-made-self comprised of thought and emotion that is the ego, the basis for your identity is precarious because thought and emotion are by their very nature ephemeral, fleeting. So, every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of “the other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of faultfinding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”   -Tolle

I’ve been in some conversations with friends recently where talk of “the enemy” came up.   In religious-speak, I hear this a lot.  Something bad happens, and it’s the “enemy”.   These friends had stepped out into a new realm spiritually recently and had started to explore spiritual places they’d never been before and give forms of healing to the world that they’d never given before.  Two got quite sick and one had very stressful issues arise in her family.  All three interpreted this as Satan (the enemy) trying to block their endeavors. 

It’s not just religious folk who use this frame.  We all do.   In our lives, we are just going along our merry way, relatively satisfied and something happens to upset our apple cart.  Maybe it’s something we initiated (as with my friends and their new spiritual endeavors), maybe it’s some tragedy or loss that befalls us.  Whatever the case, our sense of self is threatened, we lose our bearings, the rug is ripped out from under us. 

Our ego, in an attempt to recover our sense of self, will want to create an enemy to fight against, rather than allow some part of us to die so that something new can be reborn.    

Consciousness is like a deep, wide, swift-flowing river. On the surface many things are happening and there are many reflections; but that is obviously not the whole river. The river is a total thing, it includes what is below as well as what is above. It is the same with consciousness; but very few of us know what is taking place below. Most of us are satisfied if we can live fairly well, with some security and a little happiness on the surface. As long as we have a little food and shelter, a little puja, little gods and little joys, our playing around on the surface is good enough for us. Because we are so easily satisfied, we never inquire into the depths; and perhaps the depths are stronger, more powerful, more urgent in their demands than what is happening on top. So there is a contradiction between what is transpiring on the surface, and what is going on below. Most of us are aware of this contradiction only when there is a crisis, because the surface mind has so completely adjusted itself to the environment.

– Krishnamurti

 In our attempts to maintain our equilibrium, what enemies are created? 

Satan? 

The person who hurt us? 

God? 

Or perhaps we make an enemy of ourselves and become self-destructive through addiction.  For some, life itself becomes the enemy and depression sets in. 

It’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of fighting against one enemy after another.  In religion, we pray, we enact “faith” in an attempt to overcome doubt, sickness, sadness or grief.  Outside of religion, we may fight the enemy of loneliness with relationships (of many kinds).  We may fight the enemy of sadness with drugs, alcohol, recreation.  We may fight the enemy of boredom with entertainment, shopping, travel.   

Maybe you have your own set of enemies and weapons you use to fight them.

What if we actually LOVED our enemies? 

If we loved our enemies, then enemies would cease to exist.

What if there were no enemy? 

What if the thing you have placed in the role of enemy could be seen as a friend? 

In other words, what if my friends, rather than rejecting their sickness and stress, saw it as a friend that was arising from their depths as a teacher?  They had embarked on a spiritual quest, and had hoped to deepen themselves, and yet when two very powerful teachers – the body and relationships – spoke up and said, “here!  Pay attention here!  There is pain here and if you listen to it, it will teach you something profound and life giving,” they shut it up and shut it down.  

Once we decide that something or someone is the enemy, we don’t have to listen to him.  We don’t have to respect, embrace, learn from or welcome her in. 

You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it. You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate processes. If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear—which exists only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them—completely drops away.

– Krishnamurti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFGs7HP15d4

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The unredeemed

I was trying to redeem something

In my first marriage, it was bad for years before I left.  Sometimes I wonder why I stayed as long as I did.  I stayed for a lot of reasons:  love – I married young to my first love; religious legalism - I didn’t have “scriptural” grounds for divorce; obligation; sheer stubbornness; and at least in part....

 I was trying to redeem something. 

I married young - way too young.  I was eighteen and he was twenty.  People tried to talk us out of it.  People tried to tell me we were too young.  People tried to tell me he was too damaged.  People tried to tell me I’d damage him further.  People tried to tell me if he really loved me, he’d wait for me until I was older. 

I didn’t listen - did I mention I was stubborn?

He was my first real passion.  We were socked into religious legalism and fundamentalism.  We had the fanaticism of youth.  We teamed up and looked out at the world with through us-vs-them glasses.  What did the world know about our love?  What did those non-committed, lukewarm, so-called Christians know about commitment and real, true, sold-out Christianity?  It was better to marry than to burn with passion.....so we did.

I knew pretty soon afterward it had been a mistake.

I set out to fix it.

I knew I could.

Save it.  

Make it right. 

Redeem it.

This redemption would prove I had not made a mistake.  It would allow me to live with the consequences of my choice (you know - “you made your bed, so now lie in it”).  It would restore my belief I could heal this brilliant and broken soul I loved and had married. 

After years went by, I needed to redeem the tremendous investment of time and effort that I had put into it all. 

I had poured my whole life into this relationship.  I had grown up with this person.  I had been through creating children with this person.  I had poured all my hopes and dreams into the marriage and our family.  I had lost my very self.  I definitely had to redeem that. 

Sixteen years went by, and still ……..I had redeemed nothing. 

Then, as you might be able to predict, I had the "religious excuse” to leave  - adultery.   But it still it took me two years to decide to leave.  

How could I leave it unredeemed?  All that effort?  All those years? My very self? 

Two years later when it was all over I learned the truth of this:

 “Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will save it”

In trying to “save” and “redeem” something, I lost it anyway.  And I lost myself in the process. 

We all do it.  We spent countless years and dollars on a degree, so we slog away at a job we hate.  We spent lots of money on a car or a house that we really can’t afford, so we enslave ourselves to those payments and maintenance to redeem that investment.  We stay with a church or a charitable endeavor that we have lost passion for, because we gave years of our lives to that cause and we wouldn’t know how to create meaning in our lives without it. We took a hard stand on a moral or social position, so we maintain it to save face even though we don’t believe it anymore. 

We waste our lives trying to save it all – the money, the investment, the job, the pride. 

But… maybe….we just can’t do it.  We just can’t save it, or them, or us, or anything. 

Throw in the towel.

Throw away the oars.

Let it go. 

Leave it unredeemed.

We might just find redemption.

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