Do not be afraid

“Do not be afraid, little flock. It is my Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

These sublime words from Luke 12 accompany me this morning as I awake to an America vastly different from the one I bid farewell to last night. The people have spoken; my country has collectively expressed its wish for the future. The decision was clean and unequivocal. By the hand of democracy, my fellow citizens have chosen this path. As fellow Americans, we will now walk it together.

I know that many, if not most, in my Wisdom School network were hoping for a different outcome, had their hopes pinned on it. For those whose highest values are geared to conscience, ethics, integrity, inclusion, to return a now-unconvictable felon to the highest office in our land is an unfathomable absurdity, interpretable only as a mass capitulation to collective insanity, a collective trauma bonding (as alas, is the predictable outcome of prolonged exposure to a rampant narcissist). Either that, or a sure sign that God has indeed abandoned us, abandoned GOD for that matter. 

I would ask you to honor your grief, give it space, but not to barricade yourself behind it, not to let it incapacitate you or harden your heart to your neighbors who have seen things otherwise. The job ahead of us, in whatever way we experience it, is reconciliation and rebuilding. Just as in Asheville, where red folks and blue folks came together in a remarkable unison to rebuild their beloved city, that is what we must do now. Rebuild our beloved city.

The times ahead may indeed bring diminishment, radical diminishment—and it is right here that I believe Wisdom has some tools in the toolkit not widely known in the larger “blue” spiritual culture to which we otherwise mostly belong. One of these is a wider evolutionary roadmap. For the three years now that some of us have been working with the Gebser material, it is manifestly clear that we are situated on an evolutionary cusp point, with that newly arriving Integral consciousness still trying to break through, with the external conditions still not quite conducive. In a rushed and hugely arrogant but still I believe on-target recent analysis, Ken Wilber has suggested that we are undergoing an evolutionary correction point, as some of the individualism-run-amok excesses of the most liberal edge of wokeness now must be pruned back to rebalance the overall evolutionary trajectory.  That basically coincides with my own take of what’s happening out in the heartlands of America. I don’t really see collective insanity as the driver; but rather that Trump managed to galvanize and re-energize a voice that had been systematically stifled (and demeaned) by an elitist and intransigently secular-individualistic “elitism” of recent decades. 

And of course, that’s what Gurdjieff has been saying all along. What of the megalocosmos? What of our true human purpose and accountability? What are we NOT permitted to do, in order that the very conditions of “Our Common Father’s” deep desire to sojourn among us  can in fact continue to manifest? During the past year or so as I’ve made the rounds leading our “Holding our Planet” Wisdom Schools, I have gently been trying to place this wider roadmap before us all, suggesting that we have indeed allowed our focus to become too small, too timid, too parochial, to really grasp our cosmic responsibilities and the help coming to us the moment we are willing to walk through the eye of the needle of authentic remorse into the unaccustomed freedom of compassionate understanding.

“Do not be afraid, little flock. It is my Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

The game is not over yet. We are still under the loving hand of our Common Father, and the marching orders have not changed: to live and establish ourselves in alignment with the highest benchmarks of what we know human beings are capable of: courage, commitment, compassion, forgiveness, conscience, integrity. To simply keep walking toward these, arm and arm if at all possible, for there the force of individual integrity is vastly magnified.

I do not think the end of this tunnel is yet in sight. By the end of four more years of Trump followed most likely by eight of Vance, the ethos of our country will have been significantly resculpted. And I suspect in the end it will be Mother Nature, not human remorse of conscience, that will step in to call the question on our evolutionary perturbation. I am reconciling myself to the distinct possibility of living out my final years on this planet in the shadow of this dark, retractive time.

And yes, those dark seasons have come before to our planet. And daylight returns. 

Until then, as we all navigate through this season of winnowing, it will be more important than ever for those of you who can stay with it, to hold fast to sobriety, integrity, impartiality, and mêtis (skillful action at exactly the right time). To be able to look sphinx-like into the eyes of this necessary winnowing and not wince or flail. Not to indulge in nostalgia, self-pity, blame, or rumination. To keep walking forward in forgiveness and quiet hope into the future. Our Father is still trying to give us the Kingdom; the timing depends on our readiness to bear it. Let us continue, quietly, with the readying. 

“For all that lies behind, thank you. For all that is to come, yes.”  —Dag Hammarskjold

Hold fast the hope! Love you all, Cynthia