our longest stride

Diane Pendola has put out another wonderful reflection in her season essay called Earthlines:

Can we destroy evil by destroying a person who incarnates evil? Or are we all diminished by this choice,  sinking us as a community towards the evil we seek to eliminate? Jesus said, "Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Those whose sins you retain are retained." I wonder, if by championing the death penalty we do not continue to retain the sin in our own communal body? In a cosmotheandric reality we are not a collection of individuals, we are a community of persons. As a community of persons, intrinsically interconnected with one another, can we choose to live by the higher values of our human natures?  Can we lift up the most wounded members of our body rather than seeking to destroy those parts of ourselves that stubbornly resist destruction (as history demonstrates) but which still remain an open possibility of transformation? I am not saying that the perpetrators of this horrible crime should ever be on the streets again. But can I - we -see them as human, as  human beings capable of great evil,  perpetrators of great evil but more than the evil within them? This is very difficult. But it goes to the heart of who we understand ourselves to be as human beings. Human consciousness is  responsible for the greatest evils in the world- and the greatest love. Do we believe that evil is an ultimate power? Then there is no possibility of forgiveness and the law of karma eventually devours us.  Do we believe that Love is the ultimate power? Then forgiveness is possible. Then we can re-invent what it means to be human.

...  I am engaged in an experiment that demands the longest stride of soul I ever took. Those relegated to the dark cells of our prisons and the rejected corners of our minds are us. We rise or fall together. We cannot deny the evil that is within us any more....

    The human heart can go to the lengths of God.

            Dark and cold we may be, but this

            Is no winter now.

            The frozen misery

            Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,

            The thunder is the thunder of the flows,

            The thaws, the flood, the upstart Spring.

            Thank God our time is now when wrong

            Comes up to face us everywhere,

            Never to leave us 'til we take

            The longest stride of soul one ever took.

            Affairs are now soul size.

            The enterprise

            Is exploration into God.                             (Christopher Fry, The Sleep of Prisoners)

I suggest reading the whole essay and getting on her email list! 

Haola and Happy Holidays