Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Here's to Rabbit Holes

A few months ago the faint, pink hues of dawn began to appear in the skies of my consciousness. I began to be aware of the unfamiliar, but very welcome, sensations of life. Around this time I wrote my brother an email. I'm not sure I was aware at the time I wrote it of the germination taking place within my heart. In that email I shared with my brother a waking dream, perhaps a vision, that I'd had. In the dream...
I was wounded and crawling across a battlefield. There were dead and dying everywhere, the blood and gore was sickening, and all seemed lost. I crawled on and on dragging myself through the filth, hardly able to breathe, nearly paralyzed by dread and fear. Every second that passed I expected to be my last, with every movement I expected to feel the death blow as the enemy, in the full brutality of his obvious victory, claimed me as another victim. Then, from somewhere, came an impulse: "Look Up". I did.

For the first time in a long time I looked up and saw what I would have seen at any point had it occurred to me to look up instead of focusing on the horror and the filth on the ground beneath me. There He was, the Warrior King straight out of Revelation, sword and all, with his battle host surrounding him in the full splendor of inevitable victory. The battle wasn't lost. The enemy wasn't winning after all.

I looked across the wide expanse of the field of battle and there were so many wounded... crawling... heads down... completely unaware of the victory over their heads. I looked down and my gaze was caught by the putrid panoply spread beneath me. The bright hope of morning was dimmed into the dismal gray of coming night. The Warrior King faded quickly into a memory of light, a faint image at the margins of thought. I was wounded and crawling across a battlefield.

Look up you damn fool. LOOK UP!
That was the story of my life. Crawling, defeated, sidelined, wounded, doomed to repeat the same mistakes and follow the same road day after changeless day, year after senseless year.

Writing that email to my brother marked a turning point. I wonder how he would like being compared to Morpheus from the Matrix? I believe it was God's great pleasure to use my brother in just that way. To offer me a choice and an opportunity to unplug from the dream state of false existence and be reborn into that otherworld, that real world, that dangerous but free Kingdom of God where I can be trained to infiltrate the darkness and wake more sleepers to life.

I have followed the white rabbit. I have chosen the red pill. I've stuck my hand in the mirror. The doors of perception are being cleansed, everything is beginning to appear as it is: infinite (to paraphrase William Blake).

No comments: