Strength

People look down on me and pretend that I don’t know that they do it. I can never talk to them, not really. I can never say anything to them about things of importance, things like the nature of good and evil, how these things we take for granted are merely imposters for the reality we can never know. If I make an attempt to tell anyone these things a look of befuddlement crosses their face.

I know I have made a mistake.

Sadness and pleasure are symptomatic of my depraved nature. Joy and anger cause me to go off course. Love and hatred are a failing of my virtue. So it is that I find being free of joy and sorrow is achieving excellence, focusing my unchanging mind absolves me of the desires of pleasure and anger, to be conscious of no opposition allows love and hate to fall away. I find simplicity where there is no mingling of thought. I find the strength of purity where my spirit is unimpaired. When I take no action I engage in a constant manifestation of spontaneity.

By leaving the middle way and following the promptings of my mind I forsake my nature by invalidating the simplicity of my spirit and letting go of the essence of resting quietly in the world. By continually adding to my knowledge I grow perplexed and disordered in all things as my problems become increasingly more numerous until my mind drowns in multiplicity. By being still, by waiting patiently, by acting without any trace I rectify myself, bringing my strength back to center.

My uncle was a priest. He spoke to everyone as though he knew all about good and evil. At the funeral, people pretended they liked my uncle the priest but they talked about him behind my back, just loudly enough that I could hear. They said how the fire had sent him to hell. I remember being embarrassed for my uncle but neither did I speak up in his defense. In those days I always seemed outnumbered. I hadn’t the strength to oppose them.

Throughout my young life, my uncle made a special point of telling me that I would surely go to hell for my sins. He had an enormous portrait in his office on the wall behind his desk of a man crossing a river in a boat that seemed to be sailing toward an island, only it wasn’t a man and it wasn’t a real river. The boat was full of shadowy souls on their way to hell, the boatman was a wraith enshrouded in hate, the river was full of flames that didn’t consume what they burned.

They just blazed on and on, an eternal torment.

Being a priest my uncle had no children of his own. My mother explained how her brother had sacrificed such worldly things such as a wife and a family for his love of his god. I remember him as being much older than my mother but as a boy anyone older than forty seemed ancient as Methuselah to me.

I remember how he called me into that office one day after my mother informed her older brother of another of my endless parade of transgressions. He sat glowering like a black mountain in a huge leather-bound chair behind his desk sternly lecturing me on the virtues of goodness. Sitting there on my hard wooden stool feeling small and the strength of god descending upon me all I wanted to do was to stare at the portrait that framed my uncle’s face. My eyes kept straying to it until I was chastised for not paying sufficient attention to his admonitions.

The portrait burned up along with my uncle and that old church of his when the building caught on fire one cold January day. I remember how my mother had insisted on making me go with her to church that day.

I thought it was a day like any other.

When we got close to the church, however, we found the road was blocked by fire trucks. People were standing everywhere, watching. My mother parked and we got out of the car so we too could see what had happened. I saw flames pouring from the church windows. I saw how the firefighters drenched in sweat all had icicles hanging from their mustaches and eyebrows. The people watching the fire stared on in silence as if they feared drawing the boatman’s wrath as he swirled into the air in a haze of wrath and hate, smoke and soot.

I wondered for a long time if it was the portrait itself that caused the fire. I was young yet and impressionable. One day I recall how I had entered my uncle’s office alone. Standing before it I remember how detailed the picture was and how the deeper I gazed into it the more alive that portrait became. I thought how that flaming river might well have crept into the wall upon which it hung.

As a child and before it burned I was of the habit of going to the church alone, knowing the doors were always unlocked. Rummaging through the dungeon that served as a basement I discovered a gang of gargoyles lurking in the darkness. Though hideous to behold I couldn’t take my eyes from them. They were grimed in dust and spidered in cobwebs as if hidden there centuries ago, held against their will until the day someone like me came along to set them free. As I stood watching the church burn I wondered if the gargoyles would survive.

I knew my uncle would not.

I remember how the policemen standing nearby had to hold my mother to keep her from bolting with all her strength into that church to save her brother. Later she cried for him, endless rivers of tears that seemed to belie the distance I always sensed between them. I missed my uncle too and wept for him along with my mother but I was not unhappy when that portrait had turned back into the ash from which it sprang.

Months later when springtime arrived and the robins were singing in the treetops I ventured into the charred ruins of what had been my uncle’s church finding my way down into the dungeon where the gargoyles slept. They were cracked by the heat of the fire, most of them broken into many pieces. I gathered up two of the unbroken ones and although I had no idea why I wanted them I carried them home, wrapping them in cloth and hiding them in the attic where I kept my other treasures. Many decades later, though I have lost all my friends, nearly all my family, and every one of my lovers, those gargoyles have followed me across the years like demented angels panting at my door waiting to come in.

My uncle was a leader of men. Through guiding the shadowy souls in the boat by his force of wisdom he made sure his congregation sought out the isle of heaven instead of landing in the smoldering pit of hell.

He couldn’t save himself.

Being a master of myself I go beyond heaven and hell to seek out the mystery. To be a leader of others requires the force of wisdom. To master myself requires the strength of enlightenment. Trembling and in solitude I remain where I am, seeking the restoration of my true nature. Nothing more is needed for my enjoyment.

When I know I have enough I am rich.

By staying where I am I endure.

By persevering I cultivate my willpower.

By being eternally present I die and yet I do not perish.