Q: I have a question about loyalty. Somehow, I always manage to get myself in a position where I have to choose between mom and dad, and then a struggle occurs. Can you help me to recognize the true nature of loyalty?
John: As with absolutely everything else, it doesn’t belong to what is able to hold it or move it. It belongs to the truth. Its ground is the same as the true ground of everything else. Its ground is the same ground as what your father is, what your mother is, what you are.
For you to be loyal to one over the other, or to find your self in a split of loyalties, is for you not to be coming from the same ground as loyalty comes from – as what your father, your mother and you come from.
You can only be loyal to what you actually know the truth of in your relationship with each of them, enabling you to be their own real ground.
What you are in how you move toward them invites each of them back to what they first are. Then they respond to you and love you – not first because you’re their son but because when they’re with you they know the truth, within, more clearly. Around you, they more easily love the truth.
Your first loyalty to what you know the truth of brings them to their first loyalty. That, your parents know, is a beauty to them.
