Seventy Times Seven

In other words, the final rope has frayed and split

The further out I get from the steely spider webs of church and religion and the god I was raised by, the more I find Jesus and his counterpart Lilith walking with me. Together, they’ve become the archetypes of my life’s map - each an entity or being or manifestation of divine nature that has never forgotten about me.

So it doesn’t surprise me this morning when The Thought comes slipping under the door of my mind. It purrs and rubs against my legs, cocks its head, and narrows green-slitted eyes on my face. Like it’s waiting to see what I’ll do with it. Like The Thought wants to know if it should curl up and keep me company or slip back out the way it came.

I have learned to not react quickly. I have made a practice of holding every opposing or activating thought as softly as I’m able. So I close my eyes and listen to the sound of padded paws walking the perimeter of my oceany aura. The watery hands of who I’ve been and who I am still becoming splash against the soft body of The Thought and, although cat-like, The Thought does not run or hiss. It swims.

And I decide to let it stay.

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Trigger:

The Thought centers a teaching used to keep a whole lot of people quiet and obedient. As recently as this summer that teaching had grotesquely twisted its neck in a Death Becomes Her kind of way, fixing a dead god’s eyes to mine.

A long time ago, it curdled what was fresh and alive in me, turning parts of me to hollow, rotting roots. It flooded the soil of my life’s garden with something akin to a spiritual chemical. And it took me years to repair the mindful gut of my intuition. Lilith and Jesus have become soil-thick probiotics returning sacred, balancing bacteria to the depleted belly of my knowing.

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So when something splits open in me again this morning, I turn to face my archetypes, silently asking if this was really what they were asking me to tend to. But it was the turning itself that rattled the lid of the teaching, letting loose a wail caught inside. Something begging to be let out, to breathe, to take back its original shape. Like a ghost confined to a box, The Thought yowled black cat sharp for release.

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Understanding:

Seventy times seven, Jesus allegedly said. Don’t forgive someone once, but over and over and over again. And every sermon, every inch of pastoral advice, every christian self-help book, every bible study, every commentary has said the same thing. Or at least they have boiled it down to the same thing. Forgive and forget seems to be plastered over the walls, pounded into the floors, splintering overhead. It has spliced apart the divine inside of us all, producing a mindless obedience to an empire that platforms an alarming amount of narcissism and abuse.

When I was engaged to my now ex-husband something happened that fired off every red-hot flare in my body. I was ready to leave before I ever vowed to stay, but that persistent teaching snuffed out the light before it had time to take the whole sky. If I wanted god to forgive my sins, shouldn’t I forgive his?

The signaling of my intuition could have saved us both decades of suffering, but a lifetime of indoctrination won. I sent the purring creature of awakening back out under the door. I swallowed the lesson meant to keep me in line. I shaved down my edges and squeezed back into place.

Oh of course there were countless times I ‘forgave’ while the wound festered and bloomed inside me. I swallowed shards of stained glass in order to practice godliness. I forgave and forgave and forgave. And I never once forgave.

You know?

Early in the leaving years, I listened to a podcast series Rob Bell did on forgiveness and he gave an analogy that I still carry with me into every cord cutting we do. He said something like this: imagine you’re in the middle of the ocean. You’re floating in one life raft and the other person is floating in another. There’s a rope tying your rafts together and, no matter where the waves take you you’re stuck together. Your rafts bump into each other, you find yourself talking to them or listening to them even when you don’t want to. You can’t escape and so the resentment builds and builds and builds.

Forgiveness, Rob said, is cutting the rope and letting yourself drift free.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the other person. It isn’t about godliness or christian character - those things were made up later by Paul, who never knew Jesus. Forgiveness is the act of ending the bumping, rubbing, irritating, aggravation of the wound. Forgiveness is how we release ourselves.

It releases us, but it also releases the idea of vengeance.

There’s something teachers, wise women, Buddhas, and Christs have been itching at for centuries, some baseline understanding that the bitterness, hate, rage, and victimization that haunts us in our life rafts actually keeps us bound to the person(s) we so desperately want to be free from.

You know that quote about swallowing rat poison and expecting the other person to die? That.

A Third Way is pulsing through the heart of The Thought. We cut ourselves free and, in order to be truly free, we continue to practice releasing ourselves from the idea that returning the harm will vindicate us. What is there left to defend against if we are well and truly out to sea now? We sever. We drift away. We sleep well at night. We take the time we need to process and heal without ever wasting our time trying to paddle backward and get in the last word.

And whatever the other person does with our act of liberation continues to be none of our business.

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