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Resting by a lone walnut tree on the edge of the
open field, the village elder pauses to ponder the
usefulness of an old belief. He smiles as he talks
to himself. He is rehearsing before speaking to
the questioners he sees approaching far off in the
distance.
“To bless or not to bless,” he hears
himself question.
Eyes shut, hands on his lap, he follows his thoughts.
“That is a dilemma of enormous proportions
and of far reaching implications. Some would say
that it reaches far beyond the grave while filling
all of the empty spaces between us on this side
of the burial plot. When are we called to bless,
how shall we indeed bless?”
The wisdom on the wings of the wind whispers, “Always
and without exception; even when wronged.”
The village healer follows the strands of his meditation,
saddened that this lesson takes so long to learn.
“I am privileged to witness the unfolding
of sacred stories in the hallowed time and space
of the visits. More often than not, the visitor
reveals events of emotional slaughter, of abandonment,
of physical torture, of life sucking episodes that
require the best that hate can provide in order
to reclaim self-love grounded in felt justice.”
Interpreted in the tradition he knows best, hate
refers to the preference of oneself over the encroaching
other and to the strong opposition to the obvious
injustice in unmistakable terms.
Alerted by the dog that serves as the scout for
the advancing party, the old man sighs aloud, “This
is not something to be attempted lightly. It is
dangerous and defining.”
The villagers want to know about blessing and they
are nearing through the walnut grove.
Almost in prayer, the solitary figure rises to
utter softly,
“What does confronting injustice have to do
with the existential mandate to bless? Will most
advance that such a mandate arises out of the idealist’s
naïve wish to avoid conflict at all cost? Will
at least one be in agreement with the mandate as
the only way to disentangle ourselves from the tentacles
intent on dragging us into the cloud of black ink
that would fuel us to further the story of injustice?”
The villagers who hope to be confirmed in their
own views are bearing down on him.
This is what finds he finds within to say to the
visitors.
“None of us are without sin, blameless, authorless
of a wrong. When in the personal sphere, we are
the objects of another’s intention to harm
us, even destroy us, might we not seek to find the
full measure of responsibility we shoulder for the
injustice even down to the tiniest grain? Thereby
awaken to the creative power of avowed guilt, and
able to define and hold to what defines us and sets
limits, might we not find the equal measure of forgiveness
and set it in the scale and behold our shared humanity?”
When the one who was first in the shade of the
walnut tree rises to signal the limits of his understanding,
a child voices the soulful knowledge of the ancestors
buried nearby: “Not to bless everything and
everyone is to curse.”
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