Rest
I have been so fucking troubled in this world for the past year.
So weary and unrested, all the time. Tortured and haggled constantly. A man of constant sorrow. A hungry ghost. A constant battle has waged within me. A war, Good vs Evil. I have tried every argument against God as to why human life is miserable, loveless, and worthless. Every spiritual book tells that love is the force in the universe, but I had to find out myself. My worst fear was that my argument would win, that I would be proven right, but I had to pose the question anyway. I have tested every limb of goodness, I have tried to break every limb of goodness, hoping to validate and justify my despair, hoping to prove that in some way prove that I WASN’T a fool for existing in despair afterall. In this way, there is some vain satisfaction in causing yourself pain.
I have not let myself have peace. There has been something in myself that has damned me to hell, that has laid a sentence over myself and has given me no pardon. I have been my own judge, jury, and executioner.
Who is to blame for what has happened to me? I have looked for someone to blame.. I have blamed myself, I have blamed God, but none of this blame has given me any relief. I have no idea why what happened to me happened in the way it did. It’s just my karma. Who is to fault for my ignorance?
I have been on the stand and cried and cried, begged for mercy before my self… but I could not grant myself pardon, could not forgive myself for what I had done. Could not accept… could not settle down… there has been a splinter in me that has nagged me constantly.
Am I worthy? Can I forgive myself for my failures?
It is the worst burden.
I have been Satan. I have been the angel fallen from god because he tried to be God. Shamed and guilty I could not forgive myself and ask mysef or the other angels for forgiveness.
God is always there, always loving. It wasn’t God who doomed me to my hell, it was myself. He was never far away if I was willing to surrender my self hatred to him.
But I clung to my self hatred out of a sense of vengeance, that perhaps I could gain that power back that I have longed for, the power that I once had. That somehow by damning myself, by destroying myself I could make God feel as guilty as I have felt.
God is not a damning God. He never damns his creatures. But we can damn ourselves so much that we can separate ourselves from him forever. I could never make God love me by pretending to not care.
Don’t pretend you don’t care, Tully. That’s what the ego does, these stories you make up to pretend you don’t want God. Be careful what you pretend. Pretend to lie long enough and you will start to believe the lie, that you are really separate from God. And the fiction might grab you, like it did me.
I want God. When I pretend I don’t want Him, it is only out of shame, out of a feeling that I am not worthy to be his subject. I go off and try to play by myself, but what a lonely, lonely place that is. It is a place I cannot stand to be in for long.
God does not judge us. We condemn ourselves to unworthiness. In the eyes of God I am worthy as I am right now. God didn’t cast us out of eden, the creator gave us the free will to choose whether we want to stay in Eden or not.
I have nothing to prove, to myself or to God. I am worthy as I am, deeply humbled and fucking humiliated in my journey away from Him.
I never chose to leave him, consciously at least. I never made a choice against Him, but still I found myself away from him. You can imagine my surprise at having strayed so far. You can imagine my surprise when I started to end up with those who had actively forsook God. For a time I became one of those who actively had forsaken God…
Because if I had never actively forsaken Him, then why did I find myself so astray from him? If I had tried my best, how could he had failed me?
Well, my faith has now been redeemed and I am one of the lucky ones who hung in there long enough to feel his forgiveness to kick in. My own forgivenss.
I do not need to prove myself to him anymore, I do not need to beg for mercy anymore, I am not a sinner begging for mercy because I know his love for me.
Amen
