The Promise.
“Hope is the one thing that is stronger than fear.” ~Buddha
The holidays have always been a double-edged sword for me: working as a retailer for so many years left me jaded and concerned by the surge of endless consumption, the ways it causes us to forget how we treat each other and the ways we redeem ourselves through acts of generosity. We‘re coerced and seduced into believing that these objects or these actions will make us happy or that they can change the world.
We seek outside – in objects and in another – “that” which will save us. And we build a world based on attachments, desires, and possessions that hinder our Living Spirit from growing.
In the Christian story of hope and salvation, God, a.k.a LOVE (as all-loving codes of conduct and the cosmos) gave us His son, Jesus (Lord as Salvation). To reach Christ (the Anointed One), we traveled through the Dark Night of the Soul – three Magi, powerful, wise, holy senses seeking Light – and found him, the newborn King, swaddled in tattered blankets and surrounded by shepherds (humility).
Jesus Christ was God’s Promise to the world, living hope through Presence - to trust the small still voice within that speaks with knowledge (conscience) not fear - and to follow forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love back into His Kingdom (consciousness and Knowingness).
Children embody the qualities of innocence and openness through which forgiveness and compassion are inspired - they carry within them, the Promise of God: that he will never abandon us, that we will find him in the stillness that precedes all desire, all thought, all action.
What promises have we failed to keep for our children, and, what promises have we broken to our inner child - not the child stuck in time, the one that something happened “to” whose story we keep alive so that we can have something to defend - but to the Eternal Child - to the hope and imagination that ushers us forward?
It brings to mind the quote from A Course in Miracles, “ Forgiveness makes lovely but it does not create” - we need innocence and imagination to create. If children are the portal of creation, without forgiveness for our failures we are prone to illusions - to the many reasons that we use to explain away the harm we do to our children on a daily basis.
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” said Nelson Mandela.
What I see in the world and around me inspires fear: many are choosing not to have children because they fear the world they will be born into, and others are forcing unwanted children to be born into the world while abandoning the ones that are here, suffering and abused.
We are not protecting our children, we are choosing egoic exploits - identity and objects over presence - over awareness and attention; we are killing the inner child of our children when we allow them to engage in unsupervised consumption - consuming violent images (some clear others cloaked), consuming hateful beliefs (some sanctioned some not), consuming empty calories.
If God’s promise was to never leave us, then it is we who have forgotten Him by abandoning our children.
This is not shame or guilt. This is a wake-up call —radical acceptance of how we’ve harmed our children. And yeah, maybe we were a little f’d up too, but that just goes to prove how patterns are passed down from generation to generation - why we don’t recognize them because of the many forms these mistakes take.
Start listening to your children. They hold within them the light of awareness, salvation from suffering, and the hope that will set us free. Our children radiate the Promise of Love and they are here to remind us - to bring us home again to the humility of having forgotten,
“AH! This is what Love is and this is what Love is NOT!”
Tell this message to the world. It comes from my soul and it is wishing for the Kingdom we have been Promised.