Carry your crosses, wear your showy clothes and ring the bells.
Regularity runs the world. In its course there is no place for pieces that do not fit, that do not assemble. The intolerant social media that, like a pretentious vacuum cleaner, suck up images, minds and personalities proclaims “We or them”. The inhuman effort to ‘be part of’ frustrates and distresses so many, young and old alike, of the ‘them’.
Millions of failures to ‘be part of’ are discarded by the engulfing machinery of the ‘We’ —virtual and real—. The world ends divided into two, the healthy, beautiful and intelligent on one side and the socially ill, isolated, locked up, stigmatized, real zombies, living dead and cursed, on the other. We versus Them.
On both sides of the antagonists walls there are lepers. On the side of freedom and sanity there is loneliness, soft soil in the foundations and an existential emptiness hidden with smiles, bills and poses. Success does not prevent the infection of superficiality, sometimes it increases it, although it disguises itself as revelry, fame, views and likes. For leprosy there is no respect of persons, there are no physical, biological or spiritual boundaries that impede its advancement. Like an incessant and devastating pandemic its more than 4,000 years among humans, chameleonic, subtle and unappealable, it overwhelms in its laborious walk, with a tenacious militancy, to awaken consciousness. Nobody escapes the bacteria, nobody evades its overwhelming metaphysics. There are successful and unsuccessful people alike, both ill with leprosy.
But physical and social leprosy are not a curse, it is not a condemnation or a meaningless burden. It is a spring, an alarm to get up and go out on the roads. Life will pass through there. You don’t have to shut yourself up, you have to go out and search to find. The words of those who do not know The True Value of the Ring doesn’t matter. If they are against you, they are not for peace. Don’t listen to those who discourage you. When your infection is healed, return to give thanks, because there is nothing greater and happier than a grateful heart. Look, knock, search: God is not deaf and heaven is not made of bronze.
You will sense sanctity, it will be like an ethereal cloud, incomprehensible, distant and practically impossible. But no! You will understand that the soul and the body had their due share of sufferings, some inadmissible, others unfathomable, but all offered as one libation, like a song or a prayer that rose like incense to the heavens. You will see the cross that they carried, the pain and splinters that their bodies endured. Big or small, different. Ours is for us and no one else. Behind all that you will find a poor, humble and simple life. Without grandstanding, basic and above all things the greatest of all rebellions: blind obedience to the Father. There is nothing more liberating than a will directed absolutely and totally to love. And there will be God, you will see it in his eyes, his gestures and words. Transparent as air, fresh as an angelic song, new as fresh fruit.
They were lepers before being healed. They walked and did, they went off the road and onto the road and there they met. They prostrated, knelt or cried at the feet of the true Path full of life. Let nothing and no one confuse us. There is no incurable leprosy, there is no condemned soul or abandoned body, there is no veiled intelligence or subjugated will for those who can do everything.
It only remains to go from one to the others, to meet the one who always passes by.
Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusion II, Civil War (1991)
