This morning I awaken feeling the consciousness of others in my country, maybe the world, mourning over the loss of innocent children, killed at the hands of a mentally ill gunman.
I’m thinking about the sacrifice of these innocent children to bring the dark horror of madness to our attention. Will we get it this time?
Every time I see these stories of tragedy on the news, I wonder…how have we let it get to this? How have we made this okay? Oh, humanity. The things we have freedom to do… Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Thinking about this on a larger scale, and our free will….we have the choices in every moment about whether to be love or not, to act in love or not. We have the choice…but just because we have this freedom doesn’t mean we should act in evil ways towards one another.
[Tweet “Free will is tricky; the moment we make a choice is a tipping point, and we make them every day, all day long.”] Will this choice eventually lead to something beautiful, or will this choice eventually lead to something heinous? Is this choice life affirming, or death affirming?
I have always said that I consider evil to be unconsciousness. By that, I mean not being awake, not being present, not being healthy in our minds and hearts. Evil can take many forms from this point of view, from quiet assent when something horrid is occurring, to actually committing violent action against another.
As a survivor of violent crime as well as abuse as a child, I know what it means to be aggressed upon, to have your right to safety taken away, to wonder if you will live through what is done by the hands of another.
The descent into madness is a choice. I realize this is a bold statement, but I say this because I have experienced this choice. I have witnessed madness allowed to go unchecked, and I have felt my own mind explore the edges of madness, and the firm decision that I would heal those places within myself that would pull me down that dark road so that I would not repeat the madness that I encountered as a child.
Madness is allowed to run rampant. We live in a country where several forms of madness are encouraged. Greed, addiction, mental illness. We turn our heads away from people hurting one another. We medicate ourselves so we don’t have to feel our pain. Did you know that pain is a feedback mechanism? We feel physical pain when we have hurt our body, and we feel emotional pain when we experience something that’s not love. When we don’t pay attention to pain, we can let awful things happen.
When someone is mad, they don’t have the capacity to make a good decision any more, and that is when we must step in. If madness is allowed to go unchecked, there is nothing to prevent the presence of it becoming larger, growing.
Boundaries are in place for a reason. There is a line of acceptable behavior, and when it is crossed it is correct for us to be upset, enraged even. There’s that thing of feeling the pain again; being angry means a boundary has been crossed, and it is appropriate. Our shock at this most recent event will eventually dissolve and we’ll feel our anger and grief behind it. This is correct to feel!
But will we have the courage to feel our pain? And will we let our pain become something that mobilizes us to act, to say no? Will we enable madness to continue? Enabling is what we do when we don’t confront the truth and stand up to it, making it stop. Sometimes love means saying NO…Do we love ourselves and humanity enough to set a limit? How will it ever change if we don’t say NO?
At this time when the season invites us to remember brother and sisterhood and to love one another, our hearts are broken, dashed to the rocks. What a gift we’ve been given, an arrow straight to our hearts while the window of vulnerability is open. We have the opportunity to feel, to heal, to grow. We have this moment to decide whether we will let this happen ever again. The children. The innocent blood spilled. Oh, Mother/Father God. Please don’t let this lesson be lost, this precious sacrifice be in vain.
The baby Jesus was born into a dark and impoverished world, surrounded by violence. The light of the Christed One came into a world that was in stark contrast to the love and justice he eventually preached. If the metaphor holds up that the light of consciousness equals each of us being “Christed”, then the awakening of our own consciousness into our hearts will light up the wickedness in the world, exposing it for what it is.
See the light, then use the light to illuminate the dark corners where evil collects. A firm choice, a decision to commit is what is needed. What choice will we make?
If we want the world to change, we must first see the evil, then acknowledge it. The light of being awake will illuminate the correct path. Then, we must have the courage of commitment to take it.
