A (long) Prayer for Justice
I search for justice.
Where do I find it?
The punishment will always match the crime, it must; that is justice.
So let’s start with the crime.
My crime: impatience, recklessness, a creeping of ego to a final peak of self-infatuation.
Born out of naivety, luck, success in a field of limited competition.
The decline was swift, helped by a remaining sense of self-awareness.
I was right not to struggle, but to embrace the fall from grace.
I remain thankful for this, above all.
My God, how long would I still have to wait if I had fought this inevitability…
Like many have, and many will.
I see now that luck never deserted me, although I now know this to be of a higher origin.
I was down but not lost, forgotten; I was never despairing.
I was soon offered a way out of these initial depths.
It (who am I kidding: she) came with little warning — obvious in hindsight, but when is it not?
An immediate solution to my immediate problems.
Such immediacy was never to last, never to be more than a superficial fix.
Regardless, I would be wise to not forget the perfect remedy that I was offered.
And I do not: I draw on this now.
For a full punishment to this crime I have just spoken, would require endurance;
Fully immersed in and intimate with the antidotes to my previous sins.
Patience: to wait, to hope, to expect… and to wait.
Responsibility: understanding the force of my being on others, both the damage and the healing.
And finally, complete dissolution of my previous self and its own regard.
This is my true redemptive task.
I know I am worthy, I know I am ready, I know I have learnt that which I was asked…
But I’m not, I haven’t, because here I still am, alone.
Thinking otherwise would be to deny reality, to question You.
Then how to resolve these thoughts that continue?
I live, here now, in the remnants of a previous life.
I churn inside, I burn with intermittent rage, with injustice.
I hate that a place like this must exist in this world.
And then I think: just how bad is this?
How does this compare to the obstacles placed before the souls of others?
The indignity of detention after a journey made from hell to hope — where I currently complain to You now?
The grief of unexplainable loss of mutual, perfect love — the exact thing I crave more than anything else?
A sudden or gradual loss of control of the faculties of mind and body — two things in which I have been blessed with greater than most?
And that allows me to continue; more so — it leaves no other option.
To know that this space is one I must pass through,
To relate, to understand, to empathise,
Despite the high realms that I have been permitted to occupy.
To have experienced punishment so inescapably appropriate,
That I know that this life is ordered with Divine balance.
Justice is restored.
April 18 2015… October 12 2019