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, 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.