“And I turned out OK”

If we only knew to how great an extent this inner persuasion colors our decisions, our will for, and toward others in matters of sought control, we might gladly relinquish the helm.

Of course, it would take no less than what is commonly called a miracle. To see our assumed objectivity about ourselves as fit judges is the greatest presumption we inherit in these skins.

And God forbid (if one can receive it) I express any resistance to, or negativity toward any man who might throw up his hands and say “In this we are all in the same boat and all utterly hopeless and helpless against it.” It is impossible for man to surrender his deepest metrics by which he measures all. He is himself to himself, the sole place he is granted to stand and survey.

And love, for us, is only at best an exercise of invitation from what we endure as what is to us our deepest level. A “bringing in” to ourselves and to that deepest level we know, or claim to, of another.

And too rare might be the person who does not know something of that door “swinging both ways”, for always from above looking down, or from beneath undergirding, sits that judge who alone occupies truly deepest level. The “me” to whom all is happening in any recognition of what it believes is happening. In one sense, as some might see, we are forever in matters of marriage and divorce with the me as adjudicator…sometimes justice of the peace, sometimes warrior king or bouncer.

And we love/hate the me above all. It is what strives for exclusive and all powerful maintenance of self as exclusive and necessary to the true knowing of itself, while all the while no less engaged against the terrors of isolation. For it only knows itself as against a back drop of what it calls other. “Well, you are not me!” is nothing too unimaginably foreign to even the longest wed. That door is always being maintained whether only in thought or further, in words expressed.

But this is not strange to any, is it? There’s no claim of being anything but captain obvious, reciting the most trite observations.

To further reduce we long for both father and mother while likewise despising father and mother. Mother sitting in the gallery as only one with tears for us while we stand in the docket. But we may see, no less, with some recognition it has been that unqualified approval that has brought us to stand as defendant. The restrictions of father who knows all children must eventually face the world equipped with some responsibility is alternately hated, but also with some ruing of neglecting the steeling he had hoped, and perhaps was called for, to infuse.

We are products.

When in the lead of the parade we are self made. When before the bailiff approaching with cuffs, we cry product.

And this thing, in all instability and subject to all circumstance in dependence for the knowing of itself we often think

“And I turned out OK”.

How can a man…can a man…be free of all influences that were themselves subject to all influence?

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple?

Ya ever wonder what kind of circumstances a man saying that is leaving the door open to?
Will he be moved? Close the door?