LESSONS OF THE
THREE A.M. HOUR©
By Linda Lee
Greene, January 7, 2019
The
three o’clock hour bewitched me again this night and pulled me awake. There are
mystic presences in that middle-of-the-night-niche, charismas impatient to
whisper secrets in my ear, or if not secrets exactly, Universal truths they
wish me to contemplate that are too often shrouded in humanity’s repressive
tendencies.
Floating on ethers deceptively soft and
silky came the urgent word “responsibility.” I retaliated by stating under my
breath that responsibility is a clear and obvious human principle. You and I
exercise it all the time. We’ve got that one down pat. But these phantoms who
visit me during the night don’t deal with the commonplace—their purpose is to
challenge me to think beyond the familiar implication of things. I began by
asking Google for the definition of the word. Google’s response was that “responsibility
is the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having
control over someone.” I understood that these few words held within themselves
only a hint of what my middle-of-the-night-messengers wished to convey to me—so
I searched further. I found it in a chapter titled “Responsibility” in a remarkable
book I read initially a year or so ago and have been leafing through casually again
in the last few days. Apparently, the theme of the chapter has stayed with me
unconsciously. HOLINESS is the name of the book, written by the deceased British
historian, theologian, and spirituality writer Donald Nicholl.
Nicholl hits on several key issues in
the chapter, all of them addressed from a spiritual point of view. For instance
in his discussion about one of the ways we use our tongues, he says on page 69,
“…We are responsible for every single word that we utter with our tongues; and
if we utter bitter words we not only harm others, we also harm our own bodies.
Our bitterness produces chemical changes in our bodies that harm them; and if
bitter speech is continually repeated, the body will eventually declare itself
diseased as a form of protest.”
Hurtful, bitter words are too often
the accepted and/or ignored pattern in today’s world. I worry that the practice
of it will manifest as a pandemic of disease and kill off a generation or more
of us before our times.
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