|
In the confinement cells at the prison where I served as a chaplain, she and I met for a first time. We began talking together, in this part of the prison that housed inmates under disciplinary action or considered too dangerous to be housed with other inmates. I asked, "What is it that you get from working here?" She remarked few persons would choose to work as a nurse in a prison. I agreed with her. She said something about God and, then, "they are still persons." I knew, with her, the men incarcerated in that building shared a likeness to her and me, a kinship with us indelible and irreducible. I knew I could serve, like her, these men, for I sensed that kinship having nothing to do with what behaviors had led to them being in that confinement and in a prison. She and I were outside the cells, those men inside the cells, but essentially we were no different from them, not essentially. And essentially is the oneness we are, before she nursed, I chaplained, and those men behaved in ways that led them to being housed in a confinement building apart from other inmates and apart from society.
* * *
If we forget another, for we disagree with him or her, we have forgotten our own self. If I refuse to love anyone, I have withheld love from myself.
* * *
Now, where does this essentially arise from? Not from chaplain, from nurse, from prisoner, not from anyone or anything. As observed by Jean Klein, in I Am...
The name and form spring from this eternal background. It is only within this global background that real relationship can exist. From the narrow, fractional standpoint of individuality how can there be true relation? Relation appears in consciousness. From the standpoint of consciousness there is only relation with all things. Otherwise there is isolation and separation.
The "background" is prior to "name" and "form." As I have pointed to in recent writings, "individual" implies an essential apartness from others, from nature; that is, a seperation. Yet, Essence, the background, is not a fraction. A self seeing itself as a fraction, even a fraction of Totality, cannot discern others as expressions of Totality, which is a non-fraction, a non-apartness. A fraction can only see a fraction. The nurse was intuiting from Totality, speaking from the essential relationship. I am sure many others working in that same prison saw inmates only as inmates, as fractions, for they did not see with an openness to see-with Totality, or oneness. The ego only sees in others ego; the Self sees only Self. Grace sees both the particular patches, yet each as embodying the quilt. See, no one can be taught inclusion; oneness cannot be taught, only seen. This seeing is Love.
Continued... |
