Vachon Imagined

Your enemy is anything you hold in judgment.

The way to oneness with God, with Being itself, is to move beyond judgment. It is to move beyond the images you hold in your mind of “other” people. The sense of otherness, of separation, of not belonging, does not belong to God. It belongs to judgment.

We are one with God when these images are no longer condemned or praised, but simply seen as they are. Perception comes afterward and labels them good or bad, evil or praiseworthy. Judgment creates the illusion of separation. Love reveals there was never any separation to begin with.

When judgment falls away, we enter the Christ state.

This state is peace, oneness, glory beyond death, and sanctity beyond hope. It restores what the world believes has been lost. It rebuilds relationships once thought dead, not because the past changes, but because the one who remembers it has changed. It carries a quiet holiness that cannot be achieved by the separate self, only revealed when the separate self is surrendered.

Perhaps your enemy was the person who dismissed you, who would not hear your voice, who made you feel unseen. You carried that wound for years, believing they were the source of your suffering. Yet in holding them in judgment, you became unable to see the quieter moments when you dismissed someone else. Perhaps your spouse was speaking while your attention drifted elsewhere. Perhaps your child reached for you while your own pain occupied your mind. Perhaps a colleague offered an idea that you had already decided was not worth hearing. The faces change. The movement does not.

Or perhaps you were the giver.

The one who gave and gave until there seemed to be nothing left. You offered your time, your listening, your strength, your compassion. You became the dependable one, the helper, the rescuer. Then one day you realized no one seemed to see you.

Resentment quietly took root.

You judged others for taking from you, yet you never saw that your giving had become an identity. You denied others the dignity of giving because your worth had become tied to being needed. What appeared to be generosity had quietly become another expression of separation.

Perhaps your enemy betrayed your trust. Yet how many times have you betrayed yourself by remaining silent when truth wanted to speak? How often have you abandoned your own heart to preserve someone else’s approval, only to resent them for believing the version of you that you chose to present?

Perhaps your enemy refused forgiveness. Yet how long have you refused it to yourself, replaying old failures, old regrets, old wounds until they became your identity? The prison you thought another had built was one whose walls you continued to maintain.

This is why Christ asks us to remove the plank from our own eye before searching for the splinter in another’s. Not because another has done no harm, but because judgment blinds us to the same movement living within ourselves. The moment we see it, the enemy begins to disappear.

Then something extraordinary becomes possible.

We can apologize to the one we once called our enemy.

Not because their actions were justified. Not because truth no longer matters. But because we finally see how suffering perpetuates itself. What was done to us, we unknowingly continued in different forms. We dismissed because we had been dismissed. We abandoned because we had felt abandoned. We withheld because something had once been withheld from us.

The apology is not for what they did.

The apology is for the suffering we carried forward.

Breath by breath, we surrender judgment. Image by image, we release the stories that kept us separate. Pride gives way to humility, and humility gives way to love.

Then it becomes unmistakably clear that our enemy was never another person.

Our enemy was the judgment we held.

In the sanctity and purification of Christ, there is no other. There is no separate self. There is no “I” standing apart from “you.” There is only the indivisible life of God, forever whole, forever one.

Beyond judgment, there is no enemy left to forgive.

There is only Love, awakening to itself.