"Give up religiosity and knowledge, and
people will benefit a hundredfold.
Discard morality and righteousness, and
people will return to natural love.
Abandon shrewdness and profiteering, and
there won't be any robbers or thieves.
These are external matters, however.
What is most important is what happens within:
look to what is pure;
hold to what is simple;
let go of self-interest;
temper your desires."
Love is the greatest mercy to one such as I, who even now battles a sense of self-worth that has been left for most of its life to gasp for breath in an emotional sewer. Not that it hasn't tried to come crawling back out on occasion. Always tantalized by love, it would see love and reach for it only to be knocked back by a cruel word, a physical hurt, an act of recklessness--my own or someone else's.
How to begin with love and end with it, too, when along this existential obstacle course are so many bumps and burns and scabs and scars and scrapes and bruises? How easy it is to hold one's wounds in contempt.
With love they not only heal, but are transformed. Asking how only holds the Creator in contempt. Just accept the gift, not because you are worthy, but because you are loved.
My self-worth begs in horror to know, "How can this be?" But I should only rest in wonder that it is, indeed.
people will benefit a hundredfold.
Discard morality and righteousness, and
people will return to natural love.
Abandon shrewdness and profiteering, and
there won't be any robbers or thieves.
These are external matters, however.
What is most important is what happens within:
look to what is pure;
hold to what is simple;
let go of self-interest;
temper your desires."
Love is the greatest mercy to one such as I, who even now battles a sense of self-worth that has been left for most of its life to gasp for breath in an emotional sewer. Not that it hasn't tried to come crawling back out on occasion. Always tantalized by love, it would see love and reach for it only to be knocked back by a cruel word, a physical hurt, an act of recklessness--my own or someone else's.
How to begin with love and end with it, too, when along this existential obstacle course are so many bumps and burns and scabs and scars and scrapes and bruises? How easy it is to hold one's wounds in contempt.
With love they not only heal, but are transformed. Asking how only holds the Creator in contempt. Just accept the gift, not because you are worthy, but because you are loved.
My self-worth begs in horror to know, "How can this be?" But I should only rest in wonder that it is, indeed.
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