When Moses left Egypt the first time, he likely did so in fear and shame. Just having murdered someone in indignation for how that person was treating a slave, Moses fled in what was probably fear for the repercussions of his actions.
It is often hard to go back and face things that we’ve done wrong. Moses faced the strongest test of all—having to take a moral stand, when fear and shame may have been the reason he fled in the first place.
Fearing for his life may have been a concern, when he first ran away. How much more so when he returned to contend with Pharoah? That has got to be one of the hardest places—to take a moral stand with someone, not to mention someone with the physical power and authority to kill you or do anything to you!
How much harder is it, when you cannot stand on moral high ground, when you challenge someone’s immorality, in this case an unjust reign. Moses had to remember that he had killed a man, and could not, in this sense, claim that even he was morally perfecet or above reproach.
Yet, in the midst of all this, God comes through and fights for us. “I will fight for you,” he says to Moses [at the Red Sea], “you need only be still.”
Shame gets in the way of doing right things, because we do not believe we are right ourselves. Forty years, Moses held back from returning to Egypt and doing anything more about the injustice his people had suffered under. He had run away, fearing for his life, unwilling to face the monumental task of ending his people’s suffering, which he had started with shedding blood, and in his own strength
But God does not call us to operate in our own strength. He offers, instead, for us to use His, a strength not founded in the moral virtue that we possess, but in the virtue that His Son possessed.
As I wrote these understandings, in my mind, I remember having a conversation with God, which is something I often do.
I said to God, “I often have trouble spending with you, because I feel somehow blocked by my shame. My instinct is to ask you to help with that, but somehow that does not feel right.”
For me, it seemed somehow wrong. Even though I’d heard many sermons, songs and teachings about “depending on Christ” and how we are all too “independent,” but something wasn’t quite right with my heart, even in saying “help me.”
I felt lead then, to open a book I’d been reading; “Johnathan Livingstone Seagull” by Richard Bach, a story about a personified seagull who learns to fly, and learns many spiritual messages besides. The book is deeply spiritual, and at one point in the reading of it, I exclaimed, “this book is not about seagulls at all.” It held great meaning for me, this book, and rang true with so many facets of what I’d already discovered about spiritual life.
The story to that point involved the seagull, loving to fly and be beautiful in doing all that he could be, for the sheer sake of being his purpose, no matter what the cost is. It turns out that the cost is actually quite high, and he is exiled from his tribe—a band of fearful, small-minded birds, whose only thought is getting the next thing to eat.
At the end of his rope, the seagull seems to die, and be taken by angel-like birds to a different world, where he learns that he too can have “perfect speed.” He can fly so well, with this group of enlightened gulls. In the end, he learns to travel instantly at the speed of thought, realizing his own perfection—the original Self that he was created to be.
Like Moses, he returns to his gull-tribe, to help liberate them. Soon a crowd starts gathering, and even at the cost of being exiled from the Flock, gull students come to him. They are so eager to learn the beautiful things that he can show them, that they are willing to give up all their social privileges and approval.
One young bird even comes with a paralyzed, broken wing. The Returning Seagull simply tells him to fly—that he has the right to be a perfect gull, not a shallow cast off image of himself.
Healed, restored in that moment, that flash, of enlightenment, the gull-student rises into the air.
And this is where my eyes caught the page. After dialoguing with God about needing help, but then not feeling quite right about it, this is what I found: these words, on the page…
“I CAN FLY.”
Those words, I too, had to believe, and in not believing them, I had somehow fundamentally hobbled myself and was not receiving God’s powerful lift in my life.
In that instant, I knew, like the healed seagull, what the answer was. I too can, and have the birthright to, be all that I am meant to be. Shame cripples that, it hobbles and destroys that. And yet, for me to ask for help, was not the right thing. Sometimes Jesus said, “Pick up your mat and walk.”
He knew we already could—healed, right: that was who we were created to be. That is who we are.
We are free to be who we are.
In the following paragraphs, Richard Bach outlines the seagull students’ questions to their new teacher. Nothing should limit you being who you are, he says.
“Not even the Laws of the Flock?” asks one.
“The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” answers the teacher, “there is no other.”
The strength of those words, and the purity with which they were put forth rings true to me even still. Everything God does is to bring us freedom—fighting on our behalf, or letting us become who we are meant to be, and always were. Even Him fighting for us, then, must never compromise our freedom.
“Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
I am reminded then of the struggles I’ve been having, bowled over and compelled by what appeared to be a Being, whose all-powerful persona could enforce commands like a dictator from on-High. I rose in increasing alarm and disgust for a Being like that, and have struggled with it ever since.
And finally, I have my answer—to how the God of freedom that I’ve come to know in my heart, could, at least, begin to be reconciled with the Monster of scripture.
Think then, of the words (and commandments) that Yahweh gives to the Israelites once He leads them to Mount Sinai. Most famously, these occur at the beginning of the Ten Words (Ten Commandments) saying, “I am YHWH your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.” These words go before some of the most emphasized instructions. Why?
Our human mind, being used to tit-for-tat or bullying psychology, may render them thus: “I’m the one who did goodies for you in the past; you owe me, so do this.”
I’ve realized that the words, “there is no true law except that which brings freedom,” are in fact the whole spirit behind what is being said. His purpose was to remind the people of what He’d done in the past, so as to clarify His intent. In other words, it is as if He is saying:
I did so much to free you, remember me as the one that brings you freedom, and do not associate me with some dark thing that binds you into more bondage. Remember that especially now that I give you these words, principles, mitzvot!
In startling contrast to the usual burdensome view of the ten commandments, one source describes them as two wings for the back of a butterfly, both needed (and both intact) in order to be able to truly fly. [This symbolism is born (borne?) out in legends and stories about how holy things, at least including the Ark of the Covenant, would carry those who travelled with them, rather than be carried along.]
“When God adds, he adds no sorrow to it.”
Everything that the true God instructs then, is a True Law. One that brings freedom. There is no other.
Perhaps what I hear God saying here: “As I am the one who gave you this freedom, so clearly I do not seek to limit that freedom now, but rather to expand it, to let you fly as you were meant to.”
—For Biblical New Years, Nisan 1 (March 24, 2012)
