Vachon Imagined

When it becomes easier to make racism the world, we don’t just lose accountability.

We lose ourselves.

God, with God, as God appearing human.

Life.

Intelligence.

Consciousness taking form.

That is what you are.

What your spouse is.

What your neighbor is.

What the government is.

What religion is.

What a family is.

What a culture is.

Memory taking form.

The I of humanity moving forward, becoming institutions, carrying what came before and calling it reality.

And if I can make an institution responsible for my experience, I can place my suffering somewhere outside of myself.

There is comfort in that.

There is release.

But the release doesn’t last.

Because what we refuse to meet within ourselves, we eventually ask someone else to carry.

The animal feeds on itself until it is empty.

Then it feeds on something else.

Another person.

Another institution.

Another body.

We do this and call it justice.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is simply suffering looking for somewhere else to go.

The blame feels good until it doesn’t.

The certainty feels good until it hurts someone.

The savior feels good until we need another savior.

And then we’re back at the beginning.

Ourselves.

The racist.

The prejudiced one.

The guilty one.

The victim.

The savior.

The criminal.

The pastor.

The human being.

All of us looking for release.

No one outside of the consciousness that expressed itself and then called itself another.

We build systems to fix what was never broken at the level of life itself.

And sometimes those systems are necessary.

They can protect people.

They can stop harm.

But they cannot save us from ourselves.

We are remarkably good at correcting harm while creating harm somewhere else.

We fix a policy and destabilize something else.

We correct an injustice and create another hierarchy.

We resist what wounded our ancestors and carry the resistance forward as though resistance itself were freedom.

But our ancestors are not freed by our hatred.

They are not freed by our becoming permanently opposed to the thing that opposed them.

Something has to stop here.

This is where the spirit of Jesus Christ becomes relevant.

Not as an institution.

Not as a doctrine owned by a church.

Not as a weapon.

As something that begins in the heart.

The real surgeon begins there.

Where life moves through all things.

Where what has been divided can become whole.

Jesus offers the paradox:

Know yourself.

And then discover that the self you were taught is not the whole of you.

I am this.

You are that.

They are those people.

This is my history.

This is what happened to me.

This is what was done to my ancestors.

This is who I am.

And we defend these identities as though defending them will finally give us peace.

But what if peace begins when we can see the identity without becoming it?

What if the deeper wound is the moment a child is taught to take separation and make it an identity?

The pain is real.

The history is real.

The consequences are real.

But the identity built around the pain can become another prison.

It passes through generations.

And people resist it believing they are protecting the dead.

But the dead do not need our hatred.

They need us to stop carrying what wounded them.

To meet the wound without becoming the wound.

To see hatred without becoming hatred.

To see injustice without making injustice our identity.

To see the self without worshiping the self.

Because Jesus was pointing toward something much simpler:

Know yourself.

Then empty yourself enough to discover what remains when everything you were taught begins to fall away.

The spirit of Jesus Christ does not belong to an institution.

It does not belong to a body.

It does not belong to a race.

It belongs to the heart that is willing.

The mind that is emptied.

The person willing to stop fighting long enough to see.

And that is where we return.

Not to another system.

Not to another savior.

Not to another identity.

But to life itself.

To what was there before we were taught who to hate.

Before we were taught who we were.

The thing beneath all of it.

Waiting.

Quietly.

To make all things new.

To make all things whole again.