Life doesn’t work without reconciliation

Utter nonsense: “The soul usually knows what to do to heal itself, the challenge is to silence the mind.” It’s a pathetically false spirituality sowing hope into lives through foolish means and by a forlorn method. This is why it’s a lie: the soul has not one iota of an idea how to ‘heal itself’; to heal oneself is not within the realm of humanity.

We would only pretend to be healed if we ‘healed ourselves’.

The challenge of silencing the mind,
however, is the endeavour of reconciliation.

Whenever I’m pressed for time, I pine to reconcile the list of tasks that hanker for my attention. I redouble my efforts to find time to recover the backlog and to get ahead again.

Whenever my body is pressed, it’s sore or tired or ailing for some reason, I pray for physical reconciliation. I must do something to reduce inflammation, get to the doctor, get treatment, rest, or do something that my body’s demanding I do. My job is to reconcile what I must do.

Whenever someone’s holding me up in traffic, or there’s a delay I don’t understand, I acknowledge the anguish in my soul, and my soul’s imploring it would be reconciled.

Whenever someone I’ve counselled refuses to wrestle with the issues we discuss, they defy their own instinct which compelled them to come to me in the first place. There’s nothing worse than wasting our time in the process of expending maximum effort. It’s absolute futility. It’s not what I say that counts. It’s what you do that matters.

Whenever I see someone face injustice, where there’s no justice in sight, I get desperate for them to reconcile matters to their satisfaction so they can move on. Until the matter is reconciled there is no lasting peace. This is why justice and peace coalesce. Until reconciliation takes place, which is so often not about the parties who have long ago parted, but it is about the issues, there is no peace.

Whenever I feel sad or angry or fearful or vulnerable in any way, I want to reconcile the emotion, but I recognise I must understand it in order to do that. To reconcile what I’m feeling I must reconcile the truth of my experience through discernment and, in that, be honest.

Whenever I’m in conflict with someone, I want to do what I can to reconcile with them, and this first requires me to reconcile what contribution I made. This is peacemaking 101. I must get the log out of my eye first to have any hope of restoring what God always implores we restore.

Whenever I’m confused or overwhelmed mentally, and I’ve push myself too far, and said yes too often or too much, I find I must seek for reconciliation; I must quarantine myself a little to re-establish order.

Whenever I’ve made a mistake, and I either know immediately or later on, I know I must reconcile the matter, because if I don’t what will happen will hurt me, and possibly others too. Mistakes and errors and lapses, whether unintentional or intentional, must be reconciled. They just must.

Whenever change is forced upon me, or for a good reason change happens to me, I know the task is centrally about reconciling the stress of adaptation. I must adapt. And I do adapt if I just get on with it and keep doing my best.

Whenever the unexpected occurs, and life is like that, so many things happen that we don’t expect, the task is to reconcile our surprise, and to transmute what we would not have chosen and make it into an opportunity. And there’s so often life and joy and purpose and newness in these very unexpected developments in life.

Life truly is about reconciliation. Whenever we live in opposition to this most urgent of truths, we always experience dissonance. We wonder about the healing and about healing ourselves, and we ought not to wonder any further than to resolve to reconcile what just must be reconciled!

We may run away and try to escape, and try out many forms of denial, but inevitably we are faced with the ever-present opportunity to reconcile what needs to be reconciled.

We might go the other way, and attack through anger the audacity of God to construct life in a way that demands reconciliation. Nothing is changing this eternal law. We do best to accept it.

So, there you have it. Life makes no sense, and it just doesn’t work, until we reconcile that life is about reconciliation. We refuse it in our contempt, and we become contemptuous.

Whenever we resist the flow of life that insists we reconcile, we do ourselves and others damage in the process. The procedure we use in reconciling matters always varies, but it demands humility to face the truth and to stop despising what can only bite us if we ignore it or fight it.

At the extremities of the continuum of reconciliation lay the poles of maturity and narcissism. Only the mature reconcile no matter the cost, because it’s wisdom. Only the narcissist continues to plunge their head deeper into the mire, which is rank folly.

Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash