Heavenletters

There are no locks on My doors, no secret treasure chest. There is no room you cannot enter. There is no forbiddenness where I am.

The moment I read this, it occurs to me that forbiddenness must be a key element of the human plight. How many fairy tales and other stories rely on the pattern of forbiddenness and danger or punishment. Of course there is no forbiddenness with You, dear God. Without the illusion of a vulnerable body, where could forbiddenness come in, what need would forbiddenness – or hatred, greed, resentment and anything less then love – serve? Without an imagined body, not even emotional hurt or harm would be possible. Imagined and believed-in physicalness is what enables this whole adventure of an imagined life on an imagined earth. How ingenious to invent someting that does not and cannot really exist: destructible physicalness. And perhaps this imagined reality had to be stabilized for all those seeming millennia before we started to remember in greater numbers. Otherwise, that reality might simply disintegrate and evaporate, and how could we learn to live in both worlds at once then?

Now, obviously, this comment got out of hand. I don't mind, I hope you don't either. I do not really want to speculate, but if a word has such a sudden and booming reverberation – forbiddenness – you cannot help listening into it, sometimes finding that the most obvious, the most taken-for-granted things can really be the weirdest.