Brian’s Reflection: Friday, June 26, 2009

I just wish I could understand my father.

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you
leave this world knowing the same, then everything
that happens in between can be dealt with.

- Michael Jackson, entertainer, who died on June 25, 2009,
age 50


Personally, I had no interest in Michael Jackson’s type of music. But I wondered about his self-mutilation – for so it seemed to me. I remember him as a little boy with his family group, adorable, talented, precocious. I saw him in the news over the years, becoming more and more bizarre - and wondered what had snapped in his soul, what inner blight had engulfed him. I have no idea whether he was a pedophile of not – but all his words about loving children lead me to believe that something about his childhood was horrific, and in some warped way he was trying to make sense of it.

There are few moments of traditional Greek tragedy in our modern World. Michael Jackson’s death is one of them – though I do not mean to exalt his death over the millions of children and adults who suffer and die in our World today as power-hungry politicians murder in order to have power and riches, and international corporations do the same.

I see in Michael’s death an image of the archetype of alienation from which the World suffers today. I see it in the inability of people to commit to Love for each other as an act of the will. And in the inability of nations to respect the culture and traditions of others. I see his self-mutilation as the searing scream of the millions of those who are rejected as unacceptable by those who callously set the standards for “acceptance”.

Michael Jackson was a tortured soul, a sad symbol of so many of us who cannot find a joy of Self in this World, who cannot find the spark of the Divine within and claim our own beauty.

If you choose to believe in a “God”, believe in the “God” who extends to you this beauty, which is yours no matter what anyone else has to say. There is no need to conform to another’s standard. You are born a part of the Fire at the heart of Being. You will only fulfill your destiny by being true to yourself.

Brian+