When Is Enough?

If I am a sheep, then safety is my largest need (thank you so much, Skip, for the teaching on Psalm 23: it changed my life!). Why? Because sheep are the most helpless of creatures. The secular world is consumed with safety. Insecurity drives the yetzer ha-ra. Pride covers the shame of our helplessness. Self-interest attempts to fill in the gaps where a Shepherd is needed. Competition, which is a form of covetousness, a form of believing that its going to be either Me or Them, is a knee jerk reaction to the intolerable vacuum of the truth of my helplessness in that aloneness that sets me up against the whole universe; and survival is the watchword of the loner. There at the edge I battled to survive, all alone in my self-perceived paradigm of abandonment. I fought the world from the edge of the insanity that isolation ALWAYS produces. I was thinking yesterday why solitary confinement is considered the worst of punishments, and it is because self ceases to exist without others. I am not a me, if there is not a you, too.

So what is safety? We say that there is “safety in numbers”. We perceive safety as insurance against the Unknown. We talk about ‘safety nets’ and are consumed on national levels with Defense. In a world of fracture, where Others look like a threat to safety instead of looking like what we need most for the unity that produces strength, that very apartness creates a need for what it destroys, which is the safety of unity. Sheep like to feel safe in the middle of a flock, where there are layers upon layers of Others that are standing between themselves and danger. A flock has to be separated before a predator can grab a sheep. (A shepherd has to round up that flock to be able to move it, too!) A sense of my helplessness, then, is a sense of the truth of my fracture from the whole. And it is an intolerable place. The very literal edge of insanity. Insanity, at a very fundamental level, by definition, is where I am no longer operating from a sense of my identity. Who I am, however, is a function of my connection with others. Without that connection, either by wicked intervention or heart-shattering trauma from without, or by rejection from within, who I am in my very identity wavers, and in that wavering, the torment of my very real helplessness, my vulnerability to the danger of Me apart from Them, becomes overwhelming. That sense of helplessness, in a very real way, is the driving force behind the yetzer ha-ra. “There is no peace, sayeth the LORD, unto the wicked”. Peace of what? Peace of unity.

That sense of helplessness however, I am finding out is also the driving force behind the yetzer ha-Tov. Surprisingly, it is from the place of my very real already-apartness, caused by the sin of fracture that already exists in my life, that I must operate from on a continual basis because it is the only place in which I can be fully honest. In fact, it is when I am feeling most at ease that I am running the biggest danger of delusion, for there are many temptations that are based on convincing myself that I already am in the middle of G-d’s favor. Wealth Theology depends on convincing people that they are SAFE through the abundance of things that the world perceives as safety nets and insurance and ‘proof’ of Belonging. If we were to be given a choice of insanities; a choice of suffering from either the torment of abandonment, or the delusions of the grandeur of Belonging, (when, in fact, we really don’t), which do you think you would choose? The anesthetic the devil offers to the sinner is that delusion that he is ‘safe’ by belonging to the world, but the world, which is running on the elemental fracture of singular Selves that are competing for survival against all other Selves, drives a real devil’s bargain with those who join the Church of Self; that Synagogue of Satan. You get to belong to the Church of Self in return for giving up your true identity. In the Earth made New I am promised a secret stone with my real name written on it. My real identity is a secret from me, because I believe it to be composed of the complete roll call of all the Others who have made it to eternity with me. It is hidden from me now to the extent that I am still fractured from who they are. That desperate place of fracture, the sense of my very real helplessness, created by that fracture, if I were to determine to walk in the truth, however, should be all that I can see in all my moments, for only in that place am I walking in the truth of that fracture.

If I do not know my problem, I cannot ask for help with that problem. If I do not ask for that help, my hand is not open to receive that help, for the help consists of rejoining my hand with the hand of my Shepherd, and with others around me. Now, I know how to grasp His hand: I just yelp for help. I also am getting a better idea of how to join my hand with His Body. I have to show up and be present and vulnerable and open and accounted for, but it has been a bit trickier to figure out how to join my hand with all those hostile Others who are still walking in the desperation of their fracture. How do you hug a porcupine? Now, I have been told in no uncertain terms not to join myself with sinners. Got it. That’s easy! But, I have also been told that anybody who is in need (fracture) is my neighbor. Problem. How do I reach out my hand to the drowning lost without being pulled under by their desperation? Well, paradoxically, I have been finding that if I stay present in each moment with as accurate a sense of my own desperation as I can tolerate, anyway, I also have the premier tool of connection with that neighbor in need. I can say “I have a problem, too. This is where I can commiserate with you. And, this is what I am finding works for me.” Witness. There is my hand to the lost world. Yeshua, in fact, came down into my very ditch with a True Witness from the Father to me, too. He came down to share my misery and torment so that He could also share His life and righteousness (connection) with me. And then He said, “Follow Me”. The Great Commission is where I was handed the purpose of my lostness and my sin, for it is from that place that I can speak to other lost sinners, of which Paul still says he has me beat as being chief (but it would not be for lack of trying, I can assure you!) from my own helplessness, and reach out a hand. My cure consists of ceasing to view G-d, myself and others as apart from myself, by making the effort of connection (righteousness). My helplessness is cured by helping those around me. By crying out to the Shepherd FROM that place of helplessness, I receive what I need to then turn around and help those around me, and helplessness then becomes transformed back into the power of unity.

It is true. The places where I become aware of my helplessness; the very edge of my insanity, in fact, is the place of my greatest source of power, for it is only there that my hand truly opens to help and to be helped. Asking for help from any other place does not work, for no other place opens my hand in the full honesty of that helplessness. And, you really do have to ask to receive! Halleluah!