Visible Hope

Belonging matters.

When I was a child, I once felt a part of something bigger than all of us within the group – but I really felt it. I really believed it. It mattered to me in a deep way.

My psyche had been fractured when I got there. I didn’t know this then. It wasn’t something I would come to realize until much later. Then I had to delve into my emotional and mental world to survive – and it was, and sometimes still is – brutal, raw, and exhausting.

I spent nine years growing up in a commune/cult. That’s not how it started out. It was a hippy commune in the wilds of Western Massachusetts. A commune that began out of the tumult of Vietnam – out of resistance to the powerful planet brokers who saw young people as fodder for their wars. It was also a natural defiance against societal norms – it’s what every generation discovers as those young people come into their adolescence and early adulthood. They strive to find their way in this world and not be confined by what was before – especially when they’ve been abused or otherwise oppressed by those raising them as children.

I was a sponge taking in the message that I heard in the Beatles records my older brother played. All you need is love. It was hope.

It primed me to believe and want to live what the adults in the commune were saying. Their tactics didn’t loosen the shackles of what went before, and love became coercion to get in line, follow the leader, and practice the edicts sent down from the charismatic one who believed he was ordained by spirit. He followed the heroes journey by rejecting the message to lead a flock – only he was listening to another flawed messenger who allegedly channeled spirit, and our leader chose to increase his power rather than humble himself within the group.

But I adored so many of these people who really did want to live in harmony and peace, and learn to honor the Earth and its peoples. I belonged.

If that were the end of the story, we could walk away feeling content and keep our hope, but it got dark. And then it got darker.

I became cynical, and the anger of all my life came out of my pores and my mouth and my psyche was filled with hate and contempt.

Good therapists helped me deprogram from the twisted spiritualism, neglect, and other abuse at the commune/cult, and my early childhood trauma.

We’re back to another point in history where a cult leader emerged for those whom hate, fear and resentment give purpose to. Non-inducted people are puzzled in that leader’s hold over those people. How can they elevate such a twisted person?

It’s easy. He made them feel like they mattered, like they belong. Only it’s more insidious. He is no troubled hero who wanted to create something good and miserably failed; he spoke directly to their worst selves knowing that their allegiance would give him the power he sought.

Hope, though, doesn’t belong to any one or any thing. Hope is the spiritual world made visible. Hope doesn’t promise anything. It remains whether we give it up or hang onto it. No one can claim it as their own, and everyone can claim it as their own.

It was the last thing in Pandora’s Box, and it is love’s best offering in this world.