This is a true story.
A friend said to me, “Accept that you are a beloved child of God; accept your greatness and allow it to unfold. Allow the light that you certainly are to brighten your day and your world.” I rejected such words, wanting only to see my littleness – my weakness and failures and feelings of unworthiness. My friend quickly spoke again and said: “Acceptance of the truth about your identity is the beginning of your journey. Your feelings of weakness and failure and unworthiness and similar illusions fade away when you accept the brightness of your glory.” High sounding words, but I wanted nothing to do with them, and fled to hide someplace where words like these could not find me. I chose shadows that my illusions cast thickly round about me.
The words spoken to me continued to linger in the dark places where I sought to hide. My friend did not chase after me like police with a warrant for my arrest. I felt no accusing finger pointing at me; and the words were not hammers and claws beating me down deeper into the darkness of my own creation. No. no.… The words were like soothing ointment, like cool water on a blazing summer’s day. Today her words remind me of my mother’s gentle tones coaxing me to a warm supper of my favorite foods.
But I hid from wise counsel year after year, till my hair grew gray and my skin developed wrinkles. The darkness did not recede; my illusions were to me as real as ever. Nonetheless, though now extremely dim, the words spoken many years ago gently continued to touch the strings of my heart and soul, calling to me to come home … to come home to my true self – my true identity as a beloved child of God.
One day I rose, feebly, from my dark place and commenced to walk. Words from the past echoed within me as fresh as the day first spoken, not as clearly audible, yet fully present to evoke my will to respond. Respond I did, slowly; and when I faltered and felt a desire to return to the pit of my gloom, a perceptibly stronger desire within me urged me to continue and to try again and again. The surprise to me was that I experienced only the presence of love in my new journey.
What I tell you happened to me many years ago. My journey slowly became as a river flows, from moment to moment awakened by the surprises of its own flowing. I am now accepting my full humanness enveloped in the presence of love, continually unfolding to experience my greatness and glory. I live in new shadows – shadows cast by love. Now I live in the joy of grateful realizations. How do I feel? I feel as a child might feel if he could express the experience, in words, of his birth from the womb through his mother’s birth canal and into the air and sunshine of a new world. I am as a child like a river flowing, ever emerging into vistas of unspeakable beauty.
And the voice of my dear friend came again and said: “Acceptance of the presence of love is the beginning of your journey, and remains.”
To you with love – always love,
– Joseph