In the beginning was the Word. And the Word is a silence in which attention and intention are rendered vibratory. Life–an enfleshment of the Word, with its same beginning and end–came into being that way. The only way to live healthily in a world that struggles between silence and speech, remembrance and forgetting, clinging and letting go–the only way to be free of resentment in a set up like that is to realize that the world, and others, are a part of you–and to preach healing to yourself. Others’ shadow sides will judge you, and great pain will be part of the bliss…and this will be intolerable unless you believe that you are called to everything, that there are no others, then set about caring for what is sick, resentful, outcast, in yourself. Do not “other” anyone or anything–do not “other” yourself by being an ego. It'll only create suffering, and you will be a perpetually tired human. [bxA]

Jesus came into the world–which is to say he came into the mind and body, stood between past and future, remembrance and forgetting– and neither the world nor “his own people” accepted him. What is the world, except the ego, so concerned with knowing that it is unable to accept that unknowing is also part of everything? He came to what was his own, and his own did not accept him. What is his own, except action, thought, emotion, sensation, and energy? If we are the body of Christ, we are re-learning lessons we skimmed over too quickly. It plays hell on our nervous systems, but we are learning to get cuddly again with a demanding curriculum of embodiment that ego didn't want to deal with. We eventually know what the teacher meant when he said “if you do not do well with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?”

Here we are, in the silly and messy midst of everything. All levels of incarnate existence seem to balk at the intensity of everything. And through Ego, we hold it all at a distance. The teacher said “You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am.” If you continue to live at an egoic distance with lived experience, there will be a “you” that’s separate from God, and “sins” that are somehow vastly different than virtue. We are like children playing in the marketplace. The flute plays and we don’t dance. Someone sings a dirge and we fail to mourn. We’re caught in fruitless and unskillful responses to WHAT IS, struggling to find the skillful means of prudence, temperance, fortitude.

And the remedy is “I am.” Not “thinking I am.” Just being. We are awareness and sound rendered solid enough to boop each other on the nose and stare into the abyss. John Vianney stared at the Tabernacle so long and so intently that what it held looked back at him. It was a staring contest: the kingdom of God, though, might just be a way to describe those spaces when, locked in the gaze of our own sentience, awareness itself blinks first.

The way is oneness, and we struggle to follow. Going forward, let us simply admit that we don’t have the wherewithal to get past first words. The Tao Te Ching says “The Way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way;” the rest of the book is just explanation of its first line. The Rule of Benedict starts with the word “Listen;” every subsequent word explains the first. The first word of the Psalter is “Happy”. The rest of the book is just a revelation that happiness is large enough to contain every possible human emotion, pleasant and unpleasant. And the bible’s first three words are “in the beginning.” When can that be, except now?