The Best Revenge
Yesterday I ran across a young person posting on a pagan message board, who was asking for help in getting revenge upon someone whom he felt had wronged him. There were a fair number of responses, mostly filled with references to the dire karmic consequeces of revenge, or the effects of the Three-Fold Law, or both, and most of them really doing more to illuminate the lack of understanding of the persons who had written them than they shed any real light on the problems facing the young man who was asking for advice.
Me, I was forcibly reminded of a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno:
"Oh, Bruno, you shouldn't do that!" I cried. "Don't you know that's revenge? And revenge is a wicked, cruel, dangerous thing!"
"River-edge?" said Bruno. "What a funny word! I suppose oo call it cruel and dangerous 'cause, if oo wented too far and tumbleded in, oo'd get drownded."
"No, not river-edge," I explained: "revenge" (saying the word very slowly). But I couldn't help thinking that Bruno's explanation did very well for either word."
Which led my train of thought, inevitably, to the oft-repeated dictum of 17th-Century poet George Herbert: "Living well is the best revenge."
And it struck me then that the best revenge is not living well, but living rightly.
Yes, I said living rightly. If we are living consciously, in the moment, strivng to be aware of and experience fully everything that happens to us, while at the same time striving ever to choose right action, as the Gods and our experiences give to us the ability to discern what right action ought to be, we pass beyond the need for things like revenge. And we see that those who engendered the circumstances which caused us to desire revenge are living in the life that they have made for themselves, and that our revenge would be superfluous.
And yes, I fail of this ideal all too often. But there are those times where I manage to transcend my limitations, and I find myself living in an expanded awareness of what I am doing and why, and the question of what is right action is obvious, obvious...
...and then I fall back into the simply ordinary. But it is, now, an ordinary life with new hope and vision for something that is more than ordinary. And is that not why we chose to walk this path, because we were drawn to seek that which is beyond the ordinary?
Me, I was forcibly reminded of a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno:
"Oh, Bruno, you shouldn't do that!" I cried. "Don't you know that's revenge? And revenge is a wicked, cruel, dangerous thing!"
"River-edge?" said Bruno. "What a funny word! I suppose oo call it cruel and dangerous 'cause, if oo wented too far and tumbleded in, oo'd get drownded."
"No, not river-edge," I explained: "revenge" (saying the word very slowly). But I couldn't help thinking that Bruno's explanation did very well for either word."
Which led my train of thought, inevitably, to the oft-repeated dictum of 17th-Century poet George Herbert: "Living well is the best revenge."
And it struck me then that the best revenge is not living well, but living rightly.
Yes, I said living rightly. If we are living consciously, in the moment, strivng to be aware of and experience fully everything that happens to us, while at the same time striving ever to choose right action, as the Gods and our experiences give to us the ability to discern what right action ought to be, we pass beyond the need for things like revenge. And we see that those who engendered the circumstances which caused us to desire revenge are living in the life that they have made for themselves, and that our revenge would be superfluous.
And yes, I fail of this ideal all too often. But there are those times where I manage to transcend my limitations, and I find myself living in an expanded awareness of what I am doing and why, and the question of what is right action is obvious, obvious...
...and then I fall back into the simply ordinary. But it is, now, an ordinary life with new hope and vision for something that is more than ordinary. And is that not why we chose to walk this path, because we were drawn to seek that which is beyond the ordinary?