Forgiveness: Parable of the Coat

*

When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.

Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.

So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.

The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.

So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.

It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.

So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.

*