That We Are

I dreamed last night of a house with plate glass walls in the front. It was my house, and contained two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The bedroom which was not the main one was obviously the room of a young man child.
The back garden lead, by way of two latched wicket gates, to a deep gully and the sea.The front garden was neat, with a gravelled driveway and succulent plants growing under trees.

A couple of days ago I was caught in a knee-jerk reaction when my colleagues, commenting on the xenophobic violence in this land, started every sentence with 'They..'. I was blind with rage. They.They They. Not me, never 'I'. Them -the Other, and therefore unable to impinge on my safe, cosy, walled-off, electronically fed life. Until, of course, they do.

We are God - in a usage of the word 'God' that a Child of the Book would never quite understand. No smiting, no rule-making, no commanding Presence and Safe Haven, we are nevertheless the totality of Memory, the totality of Being, and the totality of Potential. This is the God who I know I Am.

So, in the last few days I have been watching myself setting myself on fire, and have sat crying on my bed as I ransacked my own house for a few pitiful goods which I had managed to buy with my meagre wages.

I have also been presiding over that pot of hot stew I made to comfort myself in the refugee camps; have brought clothes and basic necessities from my big house in the suburb to the families displaced from their own; and I have tended the sick, put out the fire on the burning man, and helped a woman in labour to deliver her child.

For this is what God does - stands up and admits responsibility for all the evil, all the grace, all the devastation and all the beauty. All that is, that We Are.

And that's why it hurts so much - there is no escaping Yourself.
Any who are prepared to stand and drink of this cup of realisation is only a self-aware deity. And those who cannot, yet - well they too are a part of me, and will down this bitter draught at some stage of our existence.