Vachon Imagined

When Christians categorize themselves, a subtle bifurcation begins to take place. Listen carefully to the language: believers and nonbelievers, saved and unsaved, us and them. Categories emerge where life itself recognizes none. This is the beginning of judgment—the splitting off of something from which we were never truly separate.

No one can separate themselves from the source of life, no matter how hard they try. We may lose sight of it. We may bury it beneath shrines and temples, beneath gods made of stone or money, beneath ambition, certainty, fear, or self-righteousness. We may mistake our ideas about God for God. Yet the life that gives rise to all things remains untouched.

Christians categorize because humans categorize. It is part of the mind’s attempt to organize reality. But when people begin following other people more than the teachings of Christ, conditioning takes hold. Those conditioned beliefs become difficult to break because they are protected by the ego. They become what many traditions have called sin—not simply wrongdoing, but separation. Not an actual separation from God, for that is impossible, but the experience and illusion of separation from the very life that has never left us.

Ironically, it is often at our lowest point that this illusion begins to dissolve. When the people who said they loved us disappear, when life pushes upon us burdens we are not yet prepared to carry, when isolation becomes our only companion and our only confidant, something unexpected can emerge. In the silence, beneath the collapse of identity and expectation, we begin to encounter what was always there.

Whether we call it God, Spirit, Christ within, or simply awakening, it does not belong to one religion, one denomination, or one people. It is not separate from anyone, and it does not prefer as humans prefer. It does not seek to convert, shame, condemn, or disparage. Its ways are higher than our divisions because they are rooted in acceptance rather than exclusion.

Salvation is not the acquisition of something new but the recognition of what has always been true. We spend our lives trying to organize what is already perfectly ordered, trying to reach what has never been absent, trying to find what has always been within us.

The kingdom was never somewhere else.

It has always been within—

within every trial,

within every joy,

within every person.