Wherever you go, there you are...

...that's what my disenchanted enchantress says.
And it would appear to be true.
Here we are, having moved a million miles away from any human or geographical attachment, running like mad away from ourselves, dreaming half-hearted dreams of rebirth and metamorphosis, and when we arrive breathlessly at our destination...there we are, waiting, staring ourselves down with blank eyes and empty hearts.
Appropriately or not, the raving voices of a fairy-tale mob scream-singing, "Kill the beast!" are now throbbing through my head.
But, ah, here is where the fallacy of the efficacy of killing our enemies becomes most apparent--all meticulously built fences and tenuously drawn borders exposed as meaningless fantasies: the enemy is myself, as it always has been, and love is the only scalpel sharp enough to cut through death, releasing life--through evil, releasing good.
Here the most profound question posed to humanity becomes excruciatingly clear: Can we love our enemies? Perhaps the answer is simply, "Not until we learn to love ourselves."
Is it possible for me to embrace the blank-eyed creepo that follows me everywhere I go, to love him out of his contempt, to woo him out of his cynicism, to imagine him out of his boredom, to reassure him out of his anxiety?
Eh, maybe.

In more concrete terms:
Today is the beginning of my eighth week in Denver, and personal transformation is slightly more elusive than I had hoped. There was no welcoming committee waiting in a polite line outside my apartment when I arrived, shaking my hand one by one and assuring me that Denver was quite glad to have me. There was no leader-less entourage sipping tea at the coffee shop down the block, waiting for me to stroll up in a display of almost unbearable charisma and lead them away into the city on a series of life- and world-altering adventures. Alas, I must admit that I still have not a single soul in Denver I could walk up to, place my hand on his shoulder, and say affectionately, "Friend..."
This is a lonely city for a SAD individual for whom every smile is lined with singularly sharp shanks. (This is precisely like the brain chemistry of the abused and abandoned boys I work with--neurons, synapses, and hormones twisted (or simply unformed) by years of neglect and trauma. Their brains no longer allow them to live adaptive lives. Their homeostasis is terror, and the slightest escalation is perhaps beyond what I have experienced or can imagine. While I might lay blame on them for their violence and borderline sociopathy, I am reminded that their brains lay un- or malformed. They are literally incapable, at the most basic level, of handling social relationships. And I am told that it will take just as long to unravel this knotted snarl of nerve endings as it took to tangle it in the first place. Yes, this is precisely what I fear it is like with me.) I have my new beginning in this new place, but I fear that all I have accomplished in this relocation is to cut myself off from the few support systems I had in the first place. I am uprooted--albeit from a place where I was not flourishing in the least--and now I begin to tenuously weave my roots into this new soil in the hopes that it is kinder than what I have known.

But, after eight weeks, I begin to feel like an exile of old, an indignantly indigenous wild-man dragged to the paved streets of Babylon. Which is fairly ludicrous, since I came here happily of my own accord, with those quite hopeful dreams of rebirth and metamorphosis. Not to mention the fact that there is rather little wild about me--sure, I grew up in a bastard country town, but I spent most of my childhood playing adventure games on my computer and wondering why other kids wandered outside. Still, I feel a fragment of wildness slitting through the hardness of my heart, paining me and causing me to hope. I hope to, like Daniel, dream revolutionary trees and humbly resist the violent ways of urban empire. I hope to cling to a wild, nameless god with a furious keening for all the upside-down madness of justice. And I try to have courage and continue to hope as I remember Daniel’s pit--the pit of all prophets, most of whom find no salvation. It is here that I begin to feel the frailty of my spirit, that I understand my bondage to the violent politics of fear.
I am isolated here, from wilderness, from community. How, in such a place as this, does one know the god who will not be named? I am bound by rationality, by the dis-enchanted philosophy of a global empire whose cravings have not been sated in the least. There is no room in this tight proof for the madness of children and the indigent. No room for wonder or mystery. This is the cage I have mindlessly crafted for my spirit. Who can argue with the towering rationality of skyscrapers--the homes of and altars to our one, true God: Mammon.

Yes, now I am talking about something else, but precisely the same thing.
Because this is the problem, isn't it? Sure, my brain is twisted and malformed. Sure, I'm lonely and rather depressed. Sure, I am simultaneously ravingly desperate and coldly jaded. But these are only symptoms. The problem, to oversimplify it, is the way we (as racing humans) have fled full-speed from a world of small, autonomous communities who are bound by respect and uttermost dependence to each other and (just as importantly) to a place. We have fled to cities as old as Cain's, to altars to our own (illusion of) independence.
Which leaves me here, a madman in a civilization of sanity (hoping that the Truth is just the opposite), feeling alone and disconnected (how else could one feel in a culture built entirely on a disconnect from everything alive and real?), lost in my dreams of an older and better way, refusing (for better or worse) to come to grips with the "world" my fellow humans have created and accept as unquestionably necessary.
I can't stop thinking about it, can't stop talking about it: I feel betrayed. I've been told everything is like this when it is precisely like that. It seems it is this way with everything. My spirituality, for example. I have been told my whole life that Jesus was a kind, tame man who came to save our intangible souls. But, as some person or another once said, "Who would kill Mr. Rogers?" Nobody kills a nice guy for offering them eternal life. Nobody kills a heretic because they are just so very upset that someone would say something so very untrue, tsk, tsk, tsk. No: you murder heretics and blasphemers because they are a threat to your social power. When a man comes along with a vision of a kingdom that doesn't include the power structures that benefit you so beautifully, it's time for an execution. Let's not even go into the fact that Rome also needed to have a reason to give this very nice and good man a political execution. I imagine the fact that he was rumored to be the Messiah, the King of the Jews, the one who has come to overthrow all oppression (including the colonial oppression which is the very lifeblood of your existence) would be a good enough reason. Likewise, I've been told to take up my cross (read: spiritual burden) with no reference to what a horrifying proposition this would be for a 1st century Jew who understood that the cross was an instrument of torture, irreplaceable in the politics of fear, used solely for social dissidents to make a very clear statement that Rome would suffer no revolution. To tell this person to take up his cross is to say, very plainly, "Resist this oppressive social order at any cost, even your own life." I could go on and on, and I do, in my mind, day after day, running through the inconsistent madnesses of an imperial Christianity which seems wholly ignorant of a concept so simple and so central as what it would mean for Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah.
So, yes, I feel rather betrayed, as if the Church has planted one big ol' sloppy Judas kiss right on my cheek.
But yet I can't turn my back, can't walk away, can't give up on the hope that...well, that everything might change.
I feel utterly lost, a member of an empire, an oppressor in my own right, unable to trust anyone because everyone has lied to me about the way things are, unable to do anything because everything I do is tainted in some way or another--completely and truly lost with no point of reference to which way is up, down, left, or right.
I fear that the god I passionately served for a good fifteen years is a false idol, an illusion created to justify the way things are.
I fear that the god I am seeking and finding is just as false, an illusion created to justify the way I want things to be.
I feel paralyzed, as though I am standing blindfolded on the razor's edge precipice of a meaningless mountain, about to tumble regardless of which way I lean. I stand completely still as the razor slices slowly through my feet.
I have never been more aware of my need for salvation, never more unsure of which way to turn.
"How does one approach this when all our past loves have let us down?"
I'm just a furious false prophet longing to be true.
And I fear (for your sake and mine) that I have not even begun to articulate what I mean.