A Balm in Gilead... A Bethlehem in Babylon... Cultivating Hope in the Midst of Despair

No balm in Gilead

A balm is a curative ointment… a healing influence,

And Gilead is, metaphorically, any difficult circumstance.

The season of Peace On Earth, Goodwill Toward Men is upon us again. The multicolored lights blinking all around us, and caroling, come together to create an inescapable sense of celebration. But for many, all these attempts at merry-making make no difference. The despair and destruction that is a constant theme of their reality continues unabated. 

For these members of the human family there are no sweet songs and pretty lights. There is no warmth and no circumstance of comfort. They are not the beneficiaries of any goodwill among men. All they and their kin have come to know is the displacement created by poverty and war. There is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness enveloping them. 

There are no gifts - none to give, none to get. The “gift of life” has become an experience in wretchedness. For them there is no balm in the rocky circumstances of their lives… the physicians have abandoned them.  They feel forgotten in a world currently themed to celebrate the coming of God into the human experience. 

In this Season of Goodwill toward men we are tasked to not forget about them. Their presence among us should shake and disturb us. We should know no rest until their burden becomes our burden… their distress, our distress… their pain, our pain. We should want to do something about their displacement. 

How can we focus solely on the celebration of hope when all some know is despair?

Some of us would rather turn a blind eye and deaf ears to them. Their presence in our reality is inconvenient. The consciousness of their misery spoils our mirthfulness.Well, as inconvenient as it may be, we are required in this season of benevolence to pay attention to their plight. They are here among us, and we should not be allowed to ignore them. Those of us who prosper should stop to reflect about our part, if any, in the ongoing tragedy of these lives. 

This is a season when we should stop and wonder whether we are complicit, knowingly or unknowingly, in the despair created of poverty and violence. We should pause and think about the many ways in which we may be actors in the tragedies that beset the oppressed of our earth.

No Bethlehem in Babylon…

The word Bethlehem means House of Bread.

In a world predicated on the building of Empires, we have often become insensitive to our trampling on the rights of those perceived to be powerless. The rich get richer in many cases as a function of the despair their activities inflict on the lives of others. 

This is a season to pause. It is a time to comfort the afflicted. It is a solemn moment to make the comfortable... uncomfortable. 

Let us not turn a blind eye to our complicity in the destruction and the displacement that haunts the lives of many around us. Let us stop pretending that we can continue to find safety behind the middlemen who do our unwholesome work for us. 

The Presence of God in our midst should force us to confront our priests, our stockbrokers, our political and philosophical henchmen; those who make it convenient for us to live in a world where our hope is predicated on the despair of many. This is no time to ignore the advantages that have accrued to some because of their mistreatment of others… A world in which the top one percent owns over fifty percent of the world's wealth.

 We should stop believing that we can continue to find safety behind our superior armament and those who manufacture and bear them. That day will come when the rock of our self-defense will become inadequate.  Our complicity in forcing what Bob Marley calls “a devil’s illusion” down the throats of the unfortunate shall come back to haunt us. Our faith in our stocks, and in our gold will be shattered. The assumptions on which we build our security will be disastrously shaken.

A More Hopeful Vision

Our world must become better. We must make a space in our hearts for the essential message of this season - Peace on earth, goodwill toward all. That message must take root in our lives and find resonance in all our interactions. 

Bethlehem must become a reality wherever we are. Our journey to the House of Bread begins and ends with our willingness to participate righteously in each others lives. That journey takes place every time Wisdom leads us to abandon those activities that bring grief and pain to our fellowmen. Our lives must become sources of healing to all who have come to know the brokenness of an iniquitous world. 

There is always a balm in Gilead - it materialises when we recognize our role as physicians to each other. Let us begin our work as physicians to each other by recognizing our own brokenness. Let us begin by seeking the repair we each need. The impact we have on others has everything to do with our own inner states. Our lives and the impact we have on others is a reflection of our own inner health… or the lack thereof.

The celebration of the Season of Light has an inner component - It is this… Let us let our light so shine that others may see our righteous work and be inspired to come to that place in their own experience where Heaven and Earth intersect.

That Light of which we speak becomes the Star that we can follow in our search for that place in our experience where God lives. 

Look up, look out; but more importantly… realize that your search for the Sign from Heaven begins within.

And Forgive Us Our Trespasses...

How do we renew ourselves? 

We renew ourselves by renewing our relationships; and the renewal of our relationships happen when we engage in the process of forgiving and being forgiven. 

This is the most fundamental requirement of any process of personal growth. It is a cornerstone of true liberation, one that comes from an acknowledgement of the truth that we are nowhere near being perfect, and neither are the other folks in, or who have been in our lives. We are flawed, and so are they. The barriers to moving forward are inherent in this fact. 

Yes, this is a self-evident truth of our existence. And it must be dealt with before anything else. Our barriers become stumbling blocks when we attempt to deny that they are there. We have all heard that confession is good for the soul, and I am here to say that it is a cornerstone of our viability as whole persons. Any attempt to build our lives without it will fail.

The stumbling blocks that once characterized our interactions however, can become stepping-stones. This becomes possible when we cultivate the wisdom and courage that are necessary to liberate us from the scandals that hinder our moving forward. As our elders told us; speak the truth…call the devil a liar. 

Release yourself from the overwhelming coercion of not daring to live with the authenticity that being willing to confess your faults brings to your life. 

It is interesting to note here that the terms scandal and stumbling block have the same etiology, that is to say both words have the same root meaning. They are transliterations of the same word. When we are able to speak the truth without malice, we will experience liberation. Truth that is told with healing intent acts as a tonic, as an elixir, and as an antidote. It makes us stronger. It restores our joy. Ultimately, it is the remedy we need for what ails us.

Our redemption hinges on the necessary work of forgiveness. Our restoration to a state of good spiritual and physical health as individuals, as communities, and as a nation is dependent on our ability and willingness to engage in the genuine acts of forgiveness. To paraphrase a well- known piece of wisdom from Nelson Mandela:

To harbor resentment against others is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill our enemies.

Excerpt from:

Of Paradise Despised...

By - Roy Alexander Graham

Theater of the Absurd

The Judas Cradle used in the Spanish Inquisition 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities —Voltaire

We should be vigilant in our critique, and strident in our opposition to those in positions of leadership among us who demonstrate the kind of amorality that expresses itself as a total disregard for the values on which sustainable societies are built.

Such characters are leeches on the body politic of any society. They are nothing more than vampires who operate in the dark to sustain their vile interests, and the interests of those they serve. They have no regard for anything held sacred by those who work to create and maintain civil society. We have a duty to shine a bright light on them and their deeds, and expose them to the just consequences of their corrupted essence.

How do we recognize them? By their deeds. The truth is uncomplicated. 

When a person who has lied all his life presents himself from some artificial height and declares that he is the most honest person ever… watch out. When a known thief recommends himself as the greatest accountant ever… take heed. When a whoremonger, a rapist and a child abuser presents himself as the best parent in the history of the world… beware. When a hateful, bigoted, nasty purveyor of mischief hoists himself up as a candidate for the highest office in the land… such a person should be rejected out of hand. 

Make no mistake about it, such characters are dangerous. In the interest of civility we must reject them in no uncertain terms. As a society we make a tragic mistake when we cuddle those who care about nothing but their own narrow interests, and the interests of the corrupt co-conspirators who share their twisted sense of reality.

A society that ignores the obvious malfeasance of persons who lie with the utmost ease, and often, will no doubt pay the tragic consequences. Worse still are the consequences for a society in which the absurd behaviors of a corrupted few are rationalized and adopted as convenient norms. The dangers for such a society are underlined in the quote from Voltaire… 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

And so the question for us becomes… the dilemma we must confront is: 

What will we become to each other when we accept the corrupt presentations of reality that derive from the absurd behavior of amoral characters?

Be warned. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Falling Forward...

Reflections on Our Fragility, Our Humanity, and Our Poetry

“ We hold the world, and everything in it, in our creative palms. 

We set and unset the limits of our universe to our advantage… or to our chagrin.”

                                                My grandson Elijah

Our Fragility

I am fragile.

My fragility reveals itself

As my hardness…

My hardness masquerades as strength.

I can become strong…

When I am honest about my vulnerabilities.

Autumn comes. It arrives right after that season of vibrancy. It is the sometimes anticlimactic moment that interrupts the flaunting of our fecund ways. The season of fruitfulness that highlights our ability to reproduce our essential selves wanes, and we begin to shed our attractive regalia as we prepare for that necessary season of reflective dormancy. 

In place of the boastful presentations of our potency, we find ourselves settling into that quintessential deciduous Now that exposes our many vulnerabilities. As the Fall approaches we involuntarily give up the appearance of invincibility, and assume the humbling stance of a nakedness that reveals all our curves… flattering or unflattering…  . 

The self-conscious flexing of our perceived strengths that came in the wake of Spring and the heat of Summer, is replaced by a necessarily reflective and restful moment. This is the season in which our existential braggadocio can be replaced by a well conceived and executed rite of recreative confession. In that exercise, the fragility that masked itself as strength in the preceding seasons, gives way to a true honesty that can grow us… if we are ready… and if we allow it.

Our Humanity

I am human.

My humanity functions as my reason

For every awkward fact about me.

But I will become divine

When I recognize the limitations of this humanity.

It is in this season of recreative confession and reflection that we can speak with authenticity about who we are… and about how we are, and why we are.  It is in this quintessential moment that we come to know the reasons for the many “whys” and “hows” that become a focus of both our subjective, and our objective experiences. 

The trees know what it means to be trees… The lion roars its definition of self… Birds find their way to the resources they need to survive. They build nests that are marvels of instinctual engineering...

And we, we are challenged to come to terms with what we mean when we say we are. In the wake of a truly reflective moment we come to confess that to truly be, we must make ourselves available to the most consequential notions of what our lives should mean to the world around us. We come to the realization that we must unlimit ourselves. 

As a part of that unlimiting, we must discard, or at the very least, control all those influences that would cause us to become purveyors of the inconsequential. Those influences are many and varied in their presentation. They are religious. They are political. They come at us in well packaged literary, audio,  and visual arts. They come to us as ego-indulging “social media” entities that seek to redefine our sense of who we are, and why we are, and how we should be to each other. 

The thing these influences share in common is a forceful tendency to point us away from our responsibility to claim and direct the course of our lives. They hold up vanity as a thing to be aspired to. They point us away from our own potential, and toward fictitious heroes in fictional places. 

The unlimiting of ourselves unleashes the potentials that lay dormant within. Unlike the trees and the beasts with whom we share this earth, we can be counterintuitive regarding the given circumstances that face us, and that we are complicit in creating. We can discover in this season that the boundaries of our humanity are not predetermined...

Our Poetry

I am a poet… 

Beyond my hardness

My humanity gives volition to my fragility.

But beyond that

I am god-like… I create my world…

My life is a process of falling forward

My godlikeness is not a function of any perfection that I have achieved. My life is one experience after another through which I learn to be better. Like you, I have known shame… as well as praise. I have stumbled, and I learned to steady myself over uneven circumstances. I have been wrong; but with the help of my humility I have grown wiser - and less judgmental. 

The many stumbles that are a fact of our journey can become the motivation we need to move ever forward to our better selves, and to the kind of progress that can benefit our world. They become that if we do not allow ourselves to collapse in desperation from the potentially destructive heat of our many foibles. They become the force that pulls us out of the quicksand of a depressing complacency. That which depresses us can instead become a motivational force - if we avail ourselves of the right perspective. 

One person’s destiny denying implosion - is another’s motivation to pursue a more progressive circumstance.

Life Is A Process Of Falling Forward

Our lives are in fact poetry in motion. The world we inhabit is a function of what we create - it is the result of what we do from one kairotic moment to another. 

~We hold the world and everything in it in our creative palms. We set and unset the limits of our universe to our advantage… or to our chagrin.~

We are not unlike the trees and the grass in essence. When we avail ourselves of the nectar of life, we can become perennial in all our ways. That nectar is the passion that flows from a benevolent embrace of everything that makes the universe beautiful. Strengthen the weak if you are strong. Work to heal the afflicted. Comfort the broken-hearted. Join in the ongoing work to bring justice where there is inequity. 

We are never just the unwitting victims of the circumstances around us. The unlimiting of our potential as creators of our world… indeed… of our universe, is the ultimate engine in our movement forward to a more fulfilling future. 

A Word To Those Who Lead - On The Vanity Of Hateful Rhetoric

If I were a careless candle

Waxing eloquent from the flame of my own burning

I would set free by my heated tongue

The liquified rantings of my softened core

And for a fleeting moment

Touch with my vanishing heat

The exposed senses of those who seek my glow…

And just as my warmth were known

I would go cold

Returning to my hardened state…

If I were a careless candle

I would promise you light

And then go out

Leaving you cold… and dark… and hard.

(Lukewarm Thoughts - From  - ‘Of Scattered Seed and Broken Souls’  by Roy Alexander Graham)

The right to freely express ourselves has been sanctified in the highest Code of our society. It is one of the things that we claim with an almost religious zeal. Unfortunately we are not always very conscientious about the impact of our expressions on each other, and if we are, then we sometimes do not seem to care.

The claiming of this right has an implicit assumption that as a society we are civilized enough to bear the burdens: intellectual, political, cultural, spiritual, social, and  legal; that the wanton expressions of our freedom of speech sometimes create. This is a careless assumption.

Time and again, events have shown this assumption to be problematic to say the least. Ideologues and demagogues, whether they be politicians or religious figures, continue to be overwhelmed by the ramifications of the frivolous exercise of this “Right”. Even as we speak we are witnesses to the negative banter of opposing voices, and to real violence, and threats of violence resulting from the indiscretions of a few who would dominate with their words.

For better or worse, our words create realities that we must then deal with in the various circumstances of our lives. As the agents of our thoughts, words express the deepest longings of our souls. Our words, at their best, create peace; at their worst, they result in tragic events. Our words can create feelings of compassion, or they can engender emotions that negate our efforts at well needed reconciliation.

Our expressions can build bridges that bring us together, or they can cause the kind of alienation that makes neighborliness almost impossible. Our words can heal, or they can cause wounds from which we never recover.

While we cherish the right to freely express ourselves, let us never forget the sacred responsibility that we have to make this world better. Let us help with the healing; not exacerbate the hurt. Our words create our world… for better or for worse.

Beautiful

* I wrote this for my Sweetheart pictured above. I have her permission to share it. *

You never have to try to impress me beyond my very first impression of you. I saw you and I thought… There she is, the one I have been looking for… and she is beautiful.

You are beautiful My Love.

There is a quality about you that is like the forest in Spring. Eventually the leaves will become monochromatic in appearance - but in essence they are a multiplicity of wonderful auras.

There is a certain splendor about you that draws me in. It calms and excites me all at once… it fills me up and empties me in the same voluptuous moment. It enervates me… it takes my breath away.

I look at you and my heart becomes a drum, playing the syncopated rhythms of a life in ecstasy. Together we are an inspired orchestra… filling the chamber of our life together with symphonies of joy, and all its compliant attributes.

I. Love. You.

Bob Marley... The Incredible Power Of A Prophetic Voice

https://youtu.be/TZzK29_V8jQ

Above and beyond the voices of the architects of war and strife ... beyond the strident fury of warmongers... beyond the froth and the incessant buzz of those who would keep us hopelessly off-balanced... are the prophetic voices that speak to our heartfelt desires for a more hopeful world.

Click on the link above and be inspired!

Living in the Stream of Consciousness

… . In the Stream of Consciousness there is freedom to be in your intellect and in your imagination. Where one ends the other begins… and the intermingling of both creates a powerhouse of possibilities. Here there is no pressure to be sensible or logical; instead we have the ability and the permission to flow... to drift, if you will, without the constraints of some predetermined outcome.

In the Stream of Consciousness Truth can reign supreme, because there is no deliberate pause for the convenient editing that seeks to elevate us above our judgement of others. Instead we are moved to forego our masks and bare our souls in a way that establishes the predicate : Judge not, lest ye be judged by the same measure to which we subject others.

In the Stream of Consciousness we position ourselves to keep the company of those who have necessarily found the value of Humility; a trait born of the realization that we are all victims and perpetrators of the foibles that some shout about in their need to point the finger away from themselves. It is here...in this place… that we are moved to declare : There go I, save for the grace of the Beneficent… the Merciful.

Like the river where those who seek salvation come to be submersed, the Stream of Consciousness is both a conservatory and a conduit. It is a place in which to grow, and a passage-way for those who seek healing. It is a place of confession and redirection. This is where we come to realize the existential maturity that is expressed in the statement: When I was a child I spoke and acted like a child; but as a function of my growth I have put aside my primitive ways. 

It is in this place that we give ourselves the opportunity to sort through the tension between our aspirations and our inclinations. With eyes wide open we may see and necessarily affirm the need to work toward true community despite the drag of our individualism.

Here is an oasis in the desert of our desperation. It is a place that is fertile with the promise of what we can become. At this retreat… in this sanctum … under this fountain … we gather to discard the dried up notions of our barren idealisms, and seek to cultivate that which is possible when we pause to give ourselves a chance to be better… to do better… and to inspire others to be more mindful of what they can become.

Many are those who will insist on indulging the formulaic redundancies that are a mainstay of their fundamentalism; but the Stream of Consciousness is substantially more than a babbling brook. It is much more than just a place where we come to be soothed, or to become comfortable in our complacency… it is, rather,  a place of change.

Unlimit yourself...