Vachon Imagined

I want you to imagine an hourglass.

Living in this digital age, there are probably people who don’t even know what one is. It is a single glass containing sand on two sides, the sand flowing from one side to the other. And yes, it tells time.

Quite remarkable when you consider it without analyzing or intellectualizing it.

One flow of movement, separated into what appear to be two equal parts. Neither works without the other. Take one component away, and the hourglass no longer works as it was created to.

This is how humans work in the land of God, or the land of invisible knowledge.

We forget that we are one movement operating in two worlds. Or, using the allegory of the hourglass, two realms.

Imagine you are the sand.

Moving between two worlds. Operating as one life. One movement.

You recognize this when you begin to understand, even conceptually, that the world you can see, touch, and experience is a mirror of the one beneath it.

They are not separate.

You have simply come to believe they are.

And this is the only sin: pride.

Not as a moral judgment handed down from the land that holds all possibility into the land that makes things visible. Both are operating, with or without your consent.

But when you begin to believe that you are your identity, that you are a man, a woman, a Jew, a Christian, a celebrity, a profession, a name, a status, you don’t merely lose sight of the movement for a moment.

You forget it altogether.

And when we forget, we judge.

We separate.

We decide who belongs and who doesn’t. Who is worthy and who isn’t. Who is right and who is wrong. We turn difference into division and division into certainty.

Then look at what follows.

Civil war. Disruption. Violence. Hatred. Ignorance. Hell.

Not because humanity suddenly became something other than itself, but because we became convinced that we were separate.

Judgment is where it begins.

And love is what heals it.

Because love does not require us to erase difference. It simply refuses to make difference into separation. It remembers the movement.

It remembers that the sand on one side of the hourglass has never stopped being connected to the sand on the other.

Love heals judgment because love is all there is.

There is nothing else.

Pride cannot see this because it is too infatuated with I.

Instead of the I AM who allows it.

Who permits it.

Who sees it.

The sand keeps moving either way.