As I mentioned in the video, today I was thinking about the burden of innocence that we all share and how Mary, the mother of Jesus, symbolizes that burden. Sometimes I imagine if some of us hurt folk were able to just pour out our hearts and tell the burdensome story of how we lost our innocence we would as easily be able to reclaim it.  But it seems the general fear is that if we share our story we will then be judged, so we end up either carrying the burden alone or we begin to judge ourselves as unworthy and then surrounding ourselves with people, thoughts, and vibrations etc. that legitimize that adopted point of view.  Of course, most of us who feel unworthy were taught to believe that about ourselves. And most painful of all is that we were often taught it by people we thought should love us like our family members, so called friends, or even ministers and religious people.

In my life I have met so many people who view themselves in a negative light because of their upbringing and surroundings. And yet blaming the environment does little to alleviate the pain–the burden of knowing that deep down, we are all still as innocent and precious as we were when we came into the world and yet we can’t get anyone to see it.  How frustrating?  How lonely?  It’s enough to make you want to scream.  But what good would it do if no one is listening? Who could we turn to be heard?

Now this is the part where I am tempted to explain all of the virtues of faith, but I am aware that many of our ears have grown deaf to that type of language. Still, I want to invite you to consider what it would take to release all that separates you from your true innocent nature.  And then I want you to imagine how difficult it is for most people to believe that they can ever reconnect with that root of who they are.  Can you feel your own innocence?  Can you see it in others? Do you live out of that awareness or are you settling for a life where everything about you has to be justified or judged by what you have done or what has been done to you?  These are just questions that I am posing for you to consider.  As I consider them myself, I see some very interesting connections to how many religious teachings are meant to function in our lives when we approach them from a place of faith rather than trying to understand them.

Man, I feel like crying because of my present inability to articulate faith.  But maybe that is how it is supposed to be.  Maybe we can’t explain our way back to our innocence because the whole contrary notion that we are otherwise is based on false explanations.  It’s fighting fire with fire. Perhaps the only way to experience the true sense of who we are in God is to begin by denying the lies of the judging and justifying world.  I don’t know.  All I know is that by faith I perceive that we are not the orphans we often experience ourselves to be and that at that very moment that we accept that, we will receive that strength that Mary would have needed to endure the burden of her innocence in a world of condemnation and that her son carried all the way to the Cross–that strength that enabled him to say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. And might I add that we don’t know what we do because we know not who we are.