We Are Each the Victim, Warrior, and Villain.
The line dividing poor victims from almighty warriors is thin. Cross over?
In fact, perhaps they are one archetype!
They are like two people flickering in and out of existence. Or maybe they are three (a trinity).
The victim is terrified. She feels inadequate to the task at hand. She looks to those around her begging for help. The victim wants to be rescued. She may need to be rescued in order to live.
It’s literally the victim’s essence to be rescued. At her most successful, she is able to cry in such a way that evokes a community response and returns her to safety.
This is the first response to trauma, and if rescue comes, her body releases the terror and returns to the bosom of love.
In a prolonged state of inescapable trauma, the victim is the one who shuts down and disappears into fantasy worlds for safety.
The warrior is just the victim with a shot of courage and a better opportunity to fight forward (to bypass or defeat the threat).
A warrior on the battlefield can quickly become a victim in need of rescue. Or the one who collapses into dissociation.
When we vilify the victim, we are saying, “You are on your own. Don’t cry for help. Don’t seek my comfort. Don’t trouble me with your tears.”
This vilification of our human need to be rescued from danger by our community is a sick manifestation of a system that lauds the I-ndividual and her power to make it on her own while obscuring the reality that no one ever makes it on their own!
The whole culture of the I-ndividual is a ruse to hide the theft of everything from land to potential for flourishing.
The one who vilifies the needs of others is the greatest parasite. You can bet on it. Because out of her mouth comes the propaganda of I-ndividual success and of I-ndividualism.
But in her hands are the spoils of her disguise. While you are watching her lips, and listening to her lies, she is looting everything.
While she talks of the warrior’s courage and acts as though she stands alone in her grand fight for success, she stands on the backs of those she is vilifying.
It’s quite a masterful trick getting the community to hate the one who is in harm’s way.
Before it is all over, you will be convinced that the one who showed her belly in vulnerable need is the one causing the harm.
A sleight of hand is underway indeed.
But watch what happens when the victim’s heart is filled with divine courage.
Suddenly the true warrior appears, lion-hearted, committed to a cause greater than she is, filled with vitality, passion, aliveness, and most importantly, truth.
The line between the victim and the warrior is vanquished with one simple word:
faith.
In that word rests the opportunity to fight forward and the courage to move. Win or lose, the warrior is emboldened. She will die with faith on her lips rather than lick your boot for the drippings of the stolen feast.
But there is something else about her! She is immune to your assessment. She’s on a mission to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, not just for herself, but for us all. She was born to show the way.
She leans now upon her beloved. The Spirit sustains her. The Spirit moves hearts to stand beside her. Her fight is so inspiring. Her battle cry is so utterly truthful, filled with victory and anguish all at the same time.
She wars in the space between trauma and triumph. No more will she be ashamed of her need. No more will she accept the looting as her own fault. She will have life and have it ever more abundantly.
This warrior is The Passionate Warrior. She stands in the red light district. This is the space between the darkness of nothing and the light coming to be upon the word of the divine.
It is also the place where uncertainty rises as the temptation to believe fool’s gold is real.
The passionate warrior speaks the word! Two words, actually!
When she speaks these two words, they call back her divine inheritance. This inheritance had to be hidden from her in order to get her tongue busy lapping up scraps instead of prophesying from the dictates of faith.
These words are infused with divine power; they are made of magic, forged from gnosis. They are full of life.
These words contain a complete restoration by grace.
As soon as they escape her lips, the passionate warrior is laid to rest and a new identity emerges.
The crossroads between trauma and triumph is no more!
The victim turned warrior becomes anew with just two words:
create flourishing!
And who is she now?
She goes by a myriad names. Each is one of the many names of God-dess. They fall like black diamonds from the lips of Divinity.
These are the true names obscured in the never-ending triangle within which we are each the victim, the warrior, and the villain. The unholy trinity!
Just as people disappear into this Bermuda Triangle, the ones who emerge from this trap enter an alternate universe where death is not really death, but new life becoming.
The red light district isn’t a place to sell your holy wares for cheap either. It’s just the place between nothing and something new, between the old structures and nothing at all.
The nature and quality of the red light district are defined for us by the presence or absence of the divine creator with-in us. Or more to the point, our knowledge of that presence.