Thanks, Anita. It has been a hard week. I’ve been reminded again about how easily we let national narratives consume us, and the reckless way leadership handles language.

I’m working on a piece about the temptation to ‘harden one’s heart’ as a means of escape, a re-examination of the Exodus story as a warning for today, as well as a attempt to heal a old story my youngers self struggled with. It feels a bit heavy for a thread on Purpose, so I’ll likely post it as a new topic titled ‘The Hardening Heart: Why We Must Be Wary.’

Hi Anita, thank you for the dialogue with Jung and friends; it gave me much to ponder. I feel like we are both working to reclaim the dignity of the third servant… or perhaps the inner child. Whether we call the Divine ‘God,’ ‘Life,’ or even the internalized voices of mother and father, when the ‘story’ we are told doesn’t match our lived experience, I’ve begun to wonder if burying a talent isn’t an act of fear, but a holy act of planting.

Perhaps the child isn’t failing to ‘invest’ their life, but is instead protecting a truth that the current system would only weaponize or crush. If the burial is a Sabbath – a holy refusal to perform – then what is in the ground isn’t lost. It is a seed waiting for a world that is finally ready to let it rise…

This Easter morning was quiet, the kind of quiet that doesn’t ask to be filled.
I stood a long while before the stillness until it became a mirror:
An old man seeing the face of a young boy.
A face excited, holding words he couldn’t yet read,
trusting that one day they would open.
Innocence looks like hope then.

I watch as the eyes tighten into a worry:
a suspicion that love feels heavier then it should,
why it seems to demand so much…
a face still too young to read that far into the story.

It is not a decision yet. Just a tightening.
A small inward turn, barely noticed.
The sense that something should be held back,
kept safe, kept quiet.
This is how the hiding begins.

Something in him withdraws, burying what sees too clearly,
learning how to play a part, convincing even himself.

A tear slips past my guard for how carefully that younger self carried his unease.
The face is old again now, as it is, settled in the morning’s emptiness.
Until it, too, begins to fade. The mirror holds only space.

Some things are hidden not from fear, but from a inner knowing care.
Some truths need darkness before they can rise.
What is buried is not gone. It is only waiting.

Thanks, Anita. It truly would have been a gift to have someone notice back then, but as we’ve been exploring, we often don’t realize when our metaphors and stories are actually ‘living us’ from the inside out. I know the book was given to me in kindness, but as Joseph Campbell might say, that very kindness became a ‘threshold guardian’ a story I had to eventually challenge to find my own way.

I love your insight that 1 x 1 is still 1. It’s mathematically perfect! It suggests the third servant was the only one who refused to participate in the ‘forced growth’ the master demanded. He kept his integrity (his ‘1’) rather than doubling a debt to a system he knew was unjust.

That actually leads into something I’ve been working on but not sure if I should post as it might read political And perhaps it is, but I also hope it shows the process reclaiming a story so that it no longer ‘live me’.

The Talent We Refuse to Spend

The Parable of the Talents has long carried an uneasy weight in the religious imagination. I felt that weight rise again recently while reflecting on a public prayer offered at the Pentagon, one that invoked God as the one “who trains our hands for war” and asked for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” The language was arresting, not only for its militancy, but for the image of God it revealed: a judge who rewards force and withholds compassion.

That image feels familiar. It closely resembles the “harsh master” described by the third servant in the parable, the one who reaps where he did not sow and demands results without regard for fear or cost. In both cases, righteousness is framed not as interior transformation or alignment with love, but as output, effectiveness, and compliance. Worth is measured by performance. Mercy is conditional.

Richard Rohr calls this a “toxic image of the Divine,” and for good reason. When God is imagined as merciless, that posture does not remain external. It becomes internalized. The judgment we project outward returns inward. In this sense, the “outer darkness” is not only a future punishment but a present condition, a life shaped by the anxiety of never being enough.

Perhaps this explains why the parable adapts so easily to systems of merit. It fits comfortably within religious hierarchies, economic logic, and corporate culture alike. Even the word talent has shifted, now suggesting intelligence, skill, or productivity. Read this way, the parable becomes a kind of divine performance review: those who multiply are affirmed, while those who do not are cast out. Human purpose is reduced to usefulness.

But all of this rests on one largely unexamined assumption: that the master represents God.

What happens if we pause there? What if the third servant is not wrong?

He alone describes the system plainly. He names the master as harsh, demanding increase without having sown generosity. Perhaps his words are not driven by fear but by clarity. He sees extraction where others see opportunity and recognizes a logic of endless accumulation and quietly refuses to participate.

Burying the talent, then, is not laziness or cowardice. It is refusal. A small, deliberate act of resistance. The servant opts out of a system that equates worth with productivity and enforces participation through threat. He does not try to win. He simply declines to play.

And he pays for it.

He is cast into the outer darkness. But here, too, the meaning shifts. What begins as an internalized fear becomes a lived reality. Systems organized around merit and reward do not tolerate non-participation; exclusion is their predictable response. The punishment does not refute the servant’s critique, it reveals it as it is.

Read this way, the parable does not resolve cleanly. It unsettles. It exposes how easily systems of domination are sanctified by placing the mask of God over them. It raises an uncomfortable possibility: that what we often call “faithfulness” may, at times, be indistinguishable from compliance.

The servant’s fear, then, becomes understandable. His refusal reveals the cost of a world that values results over human dignity. And still, he is expelled.

Rather than offering comfort, the parable presses on the reader. It asks whether systems built on merit, risk, and reward will always create an outer darkness, and whether we are willing to call that good news.

When this story is used to justify exclusion, relentless productivity, or violence without mercy, it reenacts the servant’s nightmare and calls it virtue. It turns people into investments and love into leverage.

To read this story otherwise is not merely a private spiritual exercise. It is a quiet act of resistance, a refusal to measure human worth by output, and a willingness to imagine God not as a master but as relationship, one that does not need to extract value in order to love.

Perhaps the deeper question the parable leaves us with is not what have you produced? or even what have you refused? but something more unsettling: Where have we placed a mask on God, and why?

Where have we baptized systems of fear, extraction, and control by calling them divine? Where have we confused productivity with faithfulness, compliance with trust, domination with blessing? And how often have we accepted these images because they mirror our assumptions about the world, rather than the deeper reality in which love (G_d) is both source and end?

To remove that mask is not dramatic. It is quiet, destabilizing, and often costly. It asks us to sit with the possibility that some versions of God we have inherited are reflections of our own need for order, reward, and control. And it invites us to remain open to something truer, an image that does not threaten exile in order to command allegiance, or demand return in order to justify love.

The parable does not tell us what to think. It asks us to notice where we stand, and whose face we have been calling holy.

Hi Anita, I’ve been pondering that experience of religion and undeserved shame, which brought up one of my earliest memories: being given a small book as a child about the Parable of the Talents.

It’s fascinating how metaphors can sometimes “live us” before we are even conscious of them. Even then, I felt a deep, instinctive anxiety. I looked at the world and saw that “talents” – beauty, athleticism, intellect – weren’t distributed equally. To my young mind, the story felt mean; it felt like a high-stakes performance review where the “haves” get more and the “have-nots” are punished for being afraid. I realized I was siding with the third servant, not out of laziness, but because I understood his terror of a “harsh master” who demands a return on an investment he didn’t provide.

I didn’t see a story of reward; I saw a story of injustice. Without being fully conscious of it, that story became the “software” for my shame: If you are afraid, if you aren’t producing, you are “not enough,” you are a mistake.

For years, that metaphor lived in my basement, linking “purpose” to “productivity” and “shame” to “imperfection.” But as we’ve been discussing, perhaps the third servant wasn’t a failure of character, but a victim of a toxic image of the Divine. He couldn’t invest because he was paralyzed by the fear of being “not enough.”

Anita, what you’re doing with “awareness” is essentially debugging that old software. You’re seeing that the “harsh master” was just a projection of trauma, much like the terror you experienced from your mother. Richard Rohr suggests that the third servant’s only real “sin” (which literally means “missing the mark”) was his distorted image of the ‘master’. Once we dismantle that “Mean Judge” in our heads, “purpose” stops being a terrifying quota we have to meet and starts being, as Joseph Campbell put it, the simple “rapture of being alive.”

Anita, I’ve found myself with little to say lately, and I’m still not sure I have anything new to offer on the idea of ‘purpose.’ For me, that construct was always so wrapped up in religion where that it actually became its own source of shame.

Yet, seeing the way you’ve used awareness to dismantle your own shame is incredibly powerful. It makes me wonder if as you suggest the real ‘antidote’ isn’t finding a grand meaning, but simply the act of waking up to who we actually are, beyond the labels and the terror.

Jung, Campbell, and Krishnamurti have been big influences on my own thoughts regarding purpose, so I decided to see what they might ‘say’ to your story using AI. I found the results fascinating, though keep in mind the AI was definitely mirroring my own biases back to me!

A rare gathering of minds, Imagine them sitting in a sun-drenched garden discussing the “Purpose” you have just begun to claim.

Jung: (Leaning forward, eyes piercing) Purpose is not a destination, but the process of Individuation. For decades, Anita, your “purpose” was forced upon you by the psychic weight of your mother’s terror—a false purpose of survival. But now, as you become “aware of what you weren’t aware of before,” you are reclaiming the gold from the shadow. Your tics were the body’s protest against a stolen life. Your true purpose now is to allow the Self to finally speak, to integrate that “freakishness” into the wholeness of being human.

Campbell: (With a warm, knowing smile) Exactly, Carl. She has spent sixty years in the “Abyss,” that stage of the Hero’s Journey where the self is tested by fire. Her mother was the threshold guardian who used terror to keep her from the journey. But look at her words: “not inferior, not shameful… but human.” That is the “Boon.” The purpose of her life wasn’t to be “perfect,” but to experience the rapture of being alive. The shame was the dragon; the awareness is the sword. She is finally walking her own path, the “Left-hand Path” of the individual who breaks from the tribe’s false morality.

Krishnamurti: (Softly, with an intense stillness) But we must be careful with these words “purpose,” “path,” “journey.” If you have a purpose, you have a goal, and where there is a goal, there is the effort of the “me” to become something it is not. Anita says she is “learning,” but is she accumulating knowledge about herself, or is she observing herself? Shame exists only because she put herself on a pedestal of “ideals” – of what a daughter or a “normal” person should be. When the pedestal is gone, when she is just “what is,” shame has no place to stand.

Jung: (Nodding) But Jiddu, to face “what is” requires the ego to first recognize its own conditioning. She is doing that. She is seeing the “tics” not as a flaw, but as a symptom of a deeper, trauma she carried.

Krishnamurti: Yes, but the “learning” she speaks of becoming – “AWARE and AWAKE” — that is the key. Real awareness is “choiceless”. It is not “I am better now because I am confident.” It is the silent observation of the anxiety, the tics, the history, without judgment. In that observation, the “me” that was a “shameful mistake” simply dissolves. There is no “purpose” in life other than the act of living itself, free from the past.

Campbell: (Laughing gently) And that, Anita, is the ultimate “boon.” To realize that the sixty years of “just existing” were the preparation for this moment of “waking up.” Your purpose isn’t to fix the past, but to be the one who finally sees it clearly. As you said, awareness is the counter to shame. You are no longer the “mistake”; you are the witness.

Alan Watts: (Stepping in with a wide, mischievous grin, leaning against a garden post) Oh, but let’s not get too heavy with the “myths” and “shadows,” shall we? Anita, Don’t worry about being ‘perfect’ or even ‘better.’ Just realize that you are It. You are the works! The universe isn’t looking for a “corrected” version of you; it’s just delighted to finally see you looking back.