Ours to choose

Reading Richard Rohr's Wondrous Encounters this morning, I encountered this fact I had not known: "The Greek word for Devil is diabolos, which means split or divided, literally 'thrown apart.' "

It struck me for several reasons.  There is, first of all, something I learned early on in my faith, that sin is separation from God -- and that image of God hurling Satan out of Heaven, that comes, I think, from Milton's Paradise Lost.

But I also heard echoes from a passage in Byron Brown's Soul Without Shame, which we were reading in my spirituality book group earlier this week: "When your hurt is treated by others as something to be avoided or gotten rid of, the implicit rejection and hostility support a state of disconnection inside you."  Again -- it is that sense of separation that can be destructive.

The other awareness that struck me was a little sillier -- a friend read my Tarot for me yesterday afternoon, and though we giggled all the way through the reading (the coincidences and connections to the conversation we'd just been having were pretty amazing) I was struck by the card for wholeness and connection which appeared as the answer to "What's inside you that will save you?"

So when, finally, I read in Desmond Tutu's Made for Goodness that "when we recognize the goodness hidden behind the harm others have caused, we will be able to forgive them and "re-member" them.  We will be able to reclaim our common humanity, our membership in one family -- the human family."  So here we learn that if we are to end the diabolical divisions in our lives, we need to travel the road to forgiveness -- not just to forgiveness of others, but also to forgiveness of ourselves.

... which then reminds me of Logion 72 of the Gospel of Thomas:

A man said to Yeshua, "Speak to my brothers so that they will divide my father's belongings with me." Yeshua replied to him, "Sir, who has made me the divider?"  And he turned to his students and asked, "Am I here to divide?"

The answer, of course, is "No."  We are not here to divide, either: which is made clear later on in Thomas, in Logion 106:

Yeshua says, "When you are able to transform two into one, then you too will become a 'Son of Humanity,' and it will then be possible for you to say to a mountain, 'Move," and it will move."

There is, he says, extraordinary power in unification.  And diabolical, destructive power in disconnection and separation.

It is ours to choose.