Made Whole

… [A]n inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.  In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials … 1 Peter 1:4-6

We might think of it this way, just for an exercise, that the unity of the cosmos was shattered at the Fall.  What we need, as humans – as the keepers of creation we were meant to be, is a restoration of that perfect, primordial communion.  Salvation means that we become whole.  The break is healed. 

I am beginning, slowly, to understand why there is so much chicanery and silliness associated with Christianity and enlightenment in general.  It’s very difficult to talk about the relationship between selflessness and tribulation without sounding as though the problems of life are illusions or that God is some kind of sadist or something. 

We are going to grieve in this world, and our grief and our pain are real.  God does not waste our suffering if we are willing to hand it over to Him.  We do not ever have to “go through all this for nothing”.  He will order the broken and jumbled, seemingly random chunks and pieces of life into a stairway that we might ascend. 

The inheritance that is being kept for us is exactly that wholeness or oneness and the barrier to heaven is the self to which we are so attached.  My fear is that an end to my “self” is the same as non-being.  It isn’t.  The one who enters heaven has detached only from the illusory persona, the mask of thoughts and emotions and attitudes that is the old carnal mind.  We mistake the mask we wear and the character we have come to create and inhabit for our being. 

Shatter my illusions, O Lord, that I might be unbroken.