Safe
Safe
9 February 2002
Berkeley, CA
What does it mean to feel safe? I is a feeling, or a situation? Or is it a place? What is it anyway, this notion of safe? Are your valuables safe? Are they in a safe? Is the safe safe? How safe can we expect to be? What does it cost? What am I willing to pay for it? How safe is the homeland? Can a homeland be safe?
And now for some really bizarre questions. Am I safer now than I was in the past? If I were, why don't I feel that way? What is safe's relationship to power? Am I safer if I have more power? Am I less safe the more powerful I become? Strange questions for strange times.
This word safe is a curious one. I use it all the time, yet I never looked into where it came from and how the roots of this word can inform me about how I am thinking and feeling these days. As it turns out, in the English language anyway, safe has its roots in religion and theology. In the thirteenth century or so the word sauf entered into the public discourse. It meant "not damned", or "redeemed". And perhaps there is a deep longing in my psyche to know that ultimately I am not damned, or that I am somehow redeemed, whatever those two phrases might mean.
Redemption is about "buying back" For me to be safe, for me to be redeemed, who is the buyer? Who is the seller? What was/is the price? Is it worth it? What am I willing to pay to be safe? Have I already paid, and just don't know it? I remember hearing Pat Rodegast speak once - she channels Emmanuel. Someone once asked Emmanuel: What is the one thing that you wished that we all knew?
Emmanuel said, What I wish for you to know is this. You are safe. You are safe. You are incredibly safe.
Do the leaders of this country feel safe? In one sense, one very twisted sense, I suspect they do. I believe they believe they are already "redeemed". Safe and sound. Cocooned in the unreflected certainty of the rightness and righteousness of their position, and in their own personal redemption. For them God truly is on their side.
So what happens when those who are safe and sound suddenly find themselves to be as vulnerable as the rest of the hoards of the great unwashed, of what they believe to be the as yet still unredeemed � you know, us? What they do, I imagine, is bulk up. They lift weights. They buy lots of armor plating.
My money's on Emmanuel.