3:12 AM -:- Posted by Allen    

On Being Decent

I try to be a decent man.

Sometimes in the name of defending decency, I can be brutal. I'm not so sure that is the most decent I can be.

In my next post below I unload pretty hard (again) on certain top WTP people. Regarding Charlie in particular, I took as my departure point the report I got from Doug Kenline. It turns out that Doug was far more devastated by what happened than I realized, and so my point of departure might not have been totally accurate. I'm not saying that it wasn't, I'm only saying that I don't know. So I am also saying that to whatever degree it was inaccurate and as a result I misspoke, I apologize. Not for the message in general, but only for any specific inaccuracies.

I've been a pretty harsh conscience for Bob Schulz. I could leave him alone, but--- no, I can't. He's too good a man with too great a vision to be allowed to run into oblivion unopposed. The emperoror's clothes are frayed, and I know one feels the embarassment more strongly while the jester is pointing out the flaws, but that discomfort is nothing compared to the inevitable self-damnation that comes when one realizes too late how far astray one has drifted.

And who the hell am I, anyway, to criticize people who are at least trying?

Well, it is first and foremost the role of a minster to be a voice for standards, and while I am out here on the soapbox rather than back home in my pulpit, yet I cannot be other than myself.

The problem is that I do have a brutal world-view. There are things that are right, and things that are wrong, and thus there are integrity and hypocricy.

A little wrong now and then is just being disoriented, and if it seldom reaches outside your own life, I will probably never say more than the first gentle thing. I will probably say it, to be sure, because I care about you, but I won't likely say it twice, or a second time loudly, because I also respect your free will, including your possession of the right to self-destruct as many trillions of times as it takes for you to tire of your bad habits.

But when you step out into the public arena and gain the trust of people who will rely on you without question, that might be another thing. It isn't, to the degree that they too have free will and the right to waste their lives on you. There, again, I might tell them once, ask them once to examine where they're going, but then it's up to them.

It's when you take that trust and intentionally amplify it, in fact play upon it, and you actually ask people to rely on you, that's when your failings have the potential to become a needle in my eye that I simply cannot choose to ignore, short of going back to my pulpit and my confessional and leaving the world to be whatever of itself it chooses to be.

Maybe I should do that. Recover to my religious practice and let the chips fall where they may.

After all, all of this is transition anyway, right? Nothing here is eternal?

That's the problem. You are eternal. And so long as it is the way of your existence, so is your misery.

I know, you're not miserable. Tell it to me, I'll believe you. Lie to me, I'll let you.

Doug poured out his personal misery by way of his audioblogging last night after his little smash-up against Charlie's I'm-a-Marine-and-you're-not way of expressing himself. I'm sure that Charlie was all wrapped up in his mission of the moment and had no idea of the tender nature of the spirit before him.

Certainly I have made the same mistake. The last time I got on Doug's case, I'm pretty sure I went too far. I said a thing or two that I didn't need to say; I made him look too hard at things he can't not look at anyway, things that he cannot live with and has not lived past.

That's the part I forget.

I get past everything. Something happened to me by the side of a river one day many years ago, and I got my eyes opened so far I can't even conceive of blinking any more. I see a simple, elegant, exquisite and yes, brutally honest universe of spirit that puts your every fiber right into your own face, forever. Hell would be a nice place compared to the stark light of Heaven, without it being possible to get past the things of Hell.

And that is what I really forget: that while I see something, and I know how to work with and in it, I should always remember that the other guy may not. Probably does not.

I can change my existence with a glance; all I have to do about something I don't want is contemplate its place with me for a moment, see that it is what it is, and it is done and I'm in a new place. And I know how to deliver others to that state.

But not through politics. Not as Mongo. Only from the pulpit and the confessional are my miracles possible, it seems.

Out here, I seem to cut too deep. I get a whiff of the cancer, and I have already drawn my scalpel and slashed. Trouble is, the dying man didn't know anything was wrong. So all he feels is the cut. And the loss, where something that he had, that he did not know that he had and that he did not know was bad but that he owned nonetheless, is now gone and I took it.

That's probably where Charlie will be when and if he learns about my blog of last evening. That's probably where Bob and Devvy are when they think of me: mystified, hurt, and even outraged.

How, they might cry, does one who loves us so, hurt us so effortlessly? Tha answer is simple: with an aching heart.

Be that as it may, Truth is a very sharp sword, and it cuts through darkness like a kiss through loneliness.

And heaven knows we are all lonely enough.

Certainly a little happiness with real depth would go a long way toward curing what ails the world. Unfortunately, what ails the world also serves a self-chosen few too well, and they will not go quietly into the night.

You know, it's the most amazing thing. I could abandon this entire scenario in the blink of an eye. I almost did, that day by the river. I would have, too, but for something I noticed. Waaay down, in the almost infinitely small "spaces" among the very effervescence of spirit itself, there is a bit of separation between each of us and all the rest of us, and for most of us, it is the dirt in the gears of life that spawns more agony than we dare notice. So I decided to stay, to do what I could to peel back the denial and to direct light through the eyes of the heart and hopefully, crying out with a voice like a trumpet, show the children of Abraham, and everybody else, too, the error of their way.

Some may say that I'm copping out when I insist that it is not I which causes the pain. But it is not. It is I who peels back the festering scab and rips the blinders off the lie in manifestation, so that a true healing may begin. May happen, actually, because in a miracle, there is no time. What was just isn't any longer, and what is seems so natural that within moments the Was is so gone as to be forgotten. It can be and should be that clean.

Even in the world at large. Or particularly so. You could all have awakened this morning after I've posted this, in a world where a good man and his bewildered friends are caught in the clutches of a force they don't understand, manifest as an IRS trial in a place called Texas, yet only, all of you, to go to bed tonight in a completely different world, one where the evil force has been dispelled by twelve men and women good and true, and the primary weapon of oppression in this once-stolen nation be gone, quickly to be forgotten like some bad and unbidden dream.

It could happen.

And I could be less brutal.

Anything is possible.