Being a Sinner and a Saint

It’s pretty wild to see yourself making every ego mistake in the book… like what in the world!? I thought I got this already!

This seems to be part of the journey from “knowing” something (as in “yeah yeah, I know I know, I’ve read that and heard people say it a million times so I know what’s up”) to “OHHH, now I KNOW that in my own direct experience throughout the totality of my being. Now there’s no longer even a question that this works and that doesn’t.”

Learning from others is an incredibly valuable experience. Anyone who’s ever read a good book or had a great teacher knows this. Yet the thing is that we can’t ride the wave of someone else’s realization and expect it to be entirely sufficient for ourselves. Life just don’t work that way! We can’t skip around our own growth by simply internalizing the concepts. As the saying goes, you can’t just talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.

One of the great things about this human experience is that it provides us with such incredible opportunities to EXPERIENCE all this stuff so that we finally GET IT for ourselves.

“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

-Oscar Wilde

Let me share a video clip with you. It’s from the movie Leap of Faith, a comedy with actor Steve Martin (Jonas, in the movie) who plays a fake faith healer who goes from town to town preaching about Jesus and giving people “healings” (stuff like giving older people who walk in with difficulty a wheelchair and then having them miraculously stand up and walk on stage, haha). Anyways, in this scene the local sheriff is trying to call him out in front of a crowd by bringing up the preacher’s tainted past. The way Jonas responds to the accusations (about 2:30 in the video) is pretty awesome.

Ultimately this is about accepting yourself FULLY as you are and no longer running from what is.

HERE I AM.

You don’t “get there” by getting to a “there” that’s somewhere other than “here.” The ironic thing is that when you fully accept the darkness within you here and now, it ceases to hold its power over you, or more accurately you cease giving your power away to it and recognize that it is actually completely powerless and always was.

It seems that what we call “saintliness” is more about loving what is and from that love arises the behavior of a saint. It’s not about running away from your darkness, but being at peace with it and bringing the light of awareness to it which is itself incredibly healing and transformative.

It’s coming out of hiding.