I never knew what freedom
meant until I came to a place where I realized I was truly free. There were times in the past when I had felt free but that didn’t mean my mind was truly free. You can’t have
freedom by feeling free. It is a
state of being, one that we need to choose to enter into; where we choose to throw
out the shackles of our yesterdays, the spokes in the wheels of our todays and
the bumps foreseen in our tomorrows. And that freedom comes only when the heart
gets beaten and broken out of its own predisposed cage. A heart that is willfully
exposed to love and hate and the various spectrum of emotions in between.
That at the end of it all, what
I believe, is the ‘curse’ on humanity. We always get to the gem inside only by
digging past the sand, drilling past the rock and beating past the heat. It is
the sad state of a species that is cursed to live with the wisdom that in
breaking is where we will find our becoming! In hurt is where we will find our
most prolific graces.
You couldn’t possibly write a
good song without it coming out of the depths of a broken heart. You couldn’t write
a book without its intimate lines being first written on the bleeding walls of
a bruised heart. You couldn’t honestly look a person in the eye and proclaim
love for them, if you haven’t ever gone to the depths of the pain that love inflicts,
to make good on the beauty that love can eventually yield.
There is a profound teaching in the
Kabballah about the development of the soul. Kabballah teaches that the human soul
has fallen thru 125 steps from its highest position of godliness and then it
spends all its days trying to climb back those steps thru five layers of
spirituality. I think, it’s safe to say…that mirrors at least in part what the
Bible says about a fallen man and how he needs his mind renewed every day to
come to a place where his soul is perfected, like his spirit already has been
thru Christ. Quite honestly, you can’t renew what you don’t recognize needs
renewal. And you won’t know what needs renewal, if it doesn’t put you through
the pain and discomfort that you finally realize you need to break free from!! In short, you can’t remove or add what you don’t even know exists!
The human soul, if pushed right,
sheds layers of its human quality as it attains godliness, or in plain words - renewal.
And that shedding always happens thru pain and growth, not general bliss and stagnancy.
We lose in order to gain. I didn’t understand it back then, but I do now. To be
honest, I have lost more people than I’ve gained, lost more money than I’ve earned,
lost more respect than I’ve cared to protect, lost more sanity than I’ve cared
to hold on to. But in the process, I also lost the one thing, the only thing
that stood between me and God: Me!
Once I lost myself in the
vastness of all that can be, well, there was nothing preventing me from
reaching higher in my pursuit of what was always meant to be – A higher state
of being!
The result:
I feel
emotionally settled. I don’t believe any man or woman can contribute to my joy
to the point where I can’t do without them, neither can they deprive me of my
joy to a point where I would desperately need them. And I don’t blame the devil
anymore like most in church are prone to doing. You can’t blame the thief for
stealing, when it was you that chose to keep the door open! There
are ‘demons’ that need casting out, but most of them originate on the inside of us,
not outside. I have realized that playing the victim and blaming an unseen
entity is an excuse for not owning your life! I have no one to blame for what I
went through except myself. The day that realization settled in, I was free to
fly because the truth dawned on me that the only person that was holding me
captive was me, not the devil. Now, I own my actions; roots, leaves, fruits and
all. I own my sins. I own my mistakes. I own my choices. I own my pain. I own
my love. I own my peace. I own everything from the feelings of my mind to the
carnal desires of my body. I own it all. And when I need help from God, let it
be because I am fallen and I need help, not because someone made me eat a fruit
I wasn’t supposed to! I don’t know any serpent. I don’t know any Eve. I just
know Adam…and I am that Adam. It is on me!
I remember a scene
from the movie Eat Pray Love. After
visiting the Augusteum, Julia Roberts’ character writes a letter to her
ex-boyfriend:
Dear David,
We haven't had any communication in a
while...and it's given me time I needed to think. Remember when you said we
should live with each other and be unhappy......so we could be happy? Consider
it a testimony to how much I love you...that I spent so long pouring myself
into that offer...trying to make it work. But a friend took me to the most amazing
place the other day. It's called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to
house his remains. When the barbarians came, they trashed it along with
everything else. The great Augustus, Rome's first true great emperor...how
could he have imagined that Rome...the whole world, as far as he was concerned,
would be in ruins?
During the Dark Ages, someone came in here
and stole the emperor's ashes. In the 12th century, it became a fortress...then
a bullring. They stored fireworks in here after that. Nowadays, it's a bathroom
for the homeless...It's one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The
city has grown up around it over centuries. It feels like a precious wound...
...like a heartbreak you won't let go of
because it hurts too good.
We all want things to stay the same, David.
Settle for living in misery...because we're afraid of change, of things
crumbling to ruins. Then I looked around in this place, at the chaos it's
endured...the way it's been adapted, burned, pillaged...then found a way to
build itself back up again, and I was reassured.
Maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic. It's
just the world that is...and the only real trap is getting attached to any of
it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation. Even in this eternal
city, the Augusteum showed me...that we must always be prepared for endless
waves of transformation. Both of us deserve better than staying
together...because we're afraid we'll be destroyed if we don't.
My eyes had welled up during that
scene from the movie. And it resonates even now. Because, that letter was not
to some David. That letter was me writing it to the version of myself that
existed six years ago!
That Aden that was standing in
front of a tree begging for love, that was holding someone’s feet begging to do
their laundry, that was desperately looking for a text and a smile from someone
to feel good, that was trying hard to prove to people his innocence or the
pretenses of it, that compromised on everything he believed in to get and keep
people…that Aden that repeatedly fell in love with less than… that Aden is
DEAD! He isn’t alive and he will never come alive anymore. Not as long as there
is breath in THIS Aden’s body!
The version of what I am today
has forgotten how to hate, has relinquished his ego to attack and has put on a
new man that doesn’t feel a thing that is thrown at him. I don’t find the need
to defend myself or my theology. I don’t find the need to worry about what someone thinks about me, neither do I wish to gain someone’s approval. And I
don’t need anyone to validate me or my heart. Frankly, I think, if you're not the one that’s breathing for me, then it’s none of your fucking
business how I process MY Oxygen! There!
I might not be a poster boy for
all that’s virtuous but I am still that Roman wound that has allowed God to
heal it. Only the scar remains...but it’s not an ugly scar. It is a beautiful
scar. It is a scar that is a testament to emotional grit, spiritual strength
and plain human survival.
For now, THAT is a definition of fulfillment,
I am happy to live with!
To know who I am, to know who my
God is and stand in the fullness of what I am, big or small, good or bad and
just breathe… because there is so much to take in and enjoy!
