Spring is a time of renewal, heralded by the small vibrantly green shoots on the branches of the trees, bulbs springing up, early flowers, usually low lying, adorning the pristine forests, pathways and fields. Winter sheds her drab coat, and a glorious greenery, in all its hues, adorns the world. It’s a wonderful time, also acknowledged tacitly in the Christian narrative of death and resurrection.
This Easter was marked by a savage, uncalled for terrorist attack, resulting in a huge number of deaths and severe wounding of our Sri Lankan brothers and sisters. This callous barbaric attack is yet again illustrating how we can so easily fall prey to a malicious dehumanization of religious, political and tribal politics; where the core believers manifest a strong internal commitment to their orthodoxy (what ever that may be) but have no width or expansion of consciousness, nor compassion nor understanding of the ‘other’– that is, to all the extraordinary life around us–our complete and disparate human family–that manifests as a tableau for us to understand ourselves, through the myriad tribes that exist around us.
A missing element, no ‘snake’.
It is as if the terrorists–whether Islamic, Christian, Zionist, Hindu, or whatever orthodoxy one wants to characterize, have a missing element within them. They ALL believe in an Implicate Reality–hence the zealous nature of their orthodoxy, but they are missing the explicate reality which allows each one of us to expand, widen, open, become more feminine, expressive, truly caring, compassionate and human. In our pictorial essays on this subject, I am inferring that they are missing the explicate nature of the caduceus, which is the ‘snake’. This, in itself, is merely a pictorial representation of the capacity to ‘unfold’ as we grow through life. Their belief; so strong, dogmatic, restrictive, rigid, unwavering is the staff with no movement within it–no life, no expression save that ‘what is written’. This unfortunate rigidity of thought, rigidity of expression is shown throughout the world in any given country, as the Implicate Reality holds the core of humans, but the expression is missing; so there is no true light on the new, that which is being unfolded, save what was.
I grieve for humankind.