*
Farewell to my Belief-Prison
By Jane Tawel
December 26, 2025
*
I woke up — gradually
And in pieces
And slowly, slowly
It dawned —
That my comfortable belief-system
had become a prison.
All the other people –
Friends and family that I love
Beckoned me
through the prison-bars of their beliefs
to: “Come back. Come back.
You are wrong to leave the safety of confined captivity”.
Holding out their hands
They did not
could not
would not
See.
(It is rather frightening, after all,
to escape from a prison in which you are only
being held by your collective fears).
Oh, how I looked with love and longing,
Back to those I had toiled with in the fields,
singing our jailhouse songs of Grace,
and doing penance in our mixed-up views that Faith,
would one day set us free, and we would be home —
Never realizing we were already free.
And we were already Home.
Here. Now.
*
Oh, how I knew and understood
My dearly beloved fellow inmates.
For while their prisons kept their outsides clean
Their innermost God-cups
were overflowing in dogma poop.
In our belief-prisons,
Our fat-fingers, smeared with holy and unholy oils,
Pointed through our imagined prison-bars,
Neglecting to see the beams
We had used to build our barriers;
Thinking that the shacks made out of splinters
that our neighbors lived in
were what had put them into debtors’ prisons,
(prisons not nearly so nice as ours).
And yet we continued to chant —
Forgive us our debts,
(but God-forbid! —
don’t make us forgive
those we have made our debtors).
*
And so, One Day,
When I could no longer recite
the same old lies that buried the Truth
in our entombing stories,
of resurrection for Someone else,
but never resurrection for our dead souls;
I stepped outside the prison’s Open Door
(and knocked over a small table in the process).
And while the fresh air was bracing
And my heart was absolutely racing
I kept inching forward
Step by step,
Led only by the millenniums
of a thousand pinpoints of Light.
*
Balancing precariously
on the Universe’s Bright Enlightened Beam,
and tiptoeing carefully
on the Cross-road had never been many roads
but only, always One;
I stumbled upwards and onwards,
Here and Now,
along the Narrow Way.
I do admit, I miss at times
the custody I mistook for communion,
and the finely decorated walls
I mistook for Creativity.
Oh, how I raised my hands in praise
and feeble offerings to those I once thought
were blinded by The Light,
(but in fact, were only blinded by The Might.)
I preached from within my prison
to those (I thought) outside the fold
of the security of my imprisoned-beliefs,
And in those comforting black and white walls
of the old prison I had long embraced as home,
I did get glimpses of clear Sky.
And I am still so very grateful
for the many dearly loved prison guards –
who had, after all, only tried to keep me safe
and who had, as even blind guides can,
opened my eyes to what had been born
and Who was eternally being Born
in the Heart’s longing for salvation.
But I am no longer sorry, even though still sad,
That when I stuck one small-Soul foot,
Outside my belief-prison’s walls,
the other prisoners shoved me
the rest of the way out;
for they could not bear to leave behind
their imaginary Maximum-Security Prison
and they could not bear to think
that I might find a Home outside their walls.
I do bear the stigmata of their hands
shoving hard against my back,
pushing me out and forward
like a blowing Wind
that one day, God may use beneath me
to help my wings grow strong.
*
And I have found that Now —
and wildly, freely, only Here and Now —
(and yet also, There and Then)
I have stumbling found
that we were born for freedom,
and that Salvation is only ever, True-ly grasped
by letting go
as Love leads us
further out, and out, and out
and further in and In.
*
I thank You,
Creator-Word,
For sparking a burning flame
In this small human being.
And for standing at the door
Of my imprisoned self
And knocking hard and long
(and also softly and in Stillness).
I thank you, All
My freedom-fighting and freedom-finding
many and yet One, brothers and sisters,
Who trembled and still tremulously shine
from different points of view and
different points of the One Light,
to tell the World
about a better Way.
And I join my small self’s soul
With All of Yours
as One, we journey on,
out of all
the crippling, darkening belief-prisons,
and onto the Soul’s Free Path,
the One I-Am of Truth, and Love, and Light:
leading, yet not leaving;
moving, and being moved-in;
out of this world’s incarceration
and In-to Eternity’s
Incarnation.
Here. Now.
Born in each moment,
And eternally in and among us.
May it Be. Amen.
© Jane Tawel, 2025
Jane Tawel 