Robert Kennedy: What We Are Asked To Do

Lairich Rig / Thousand-year-old yew tree / CC BY-SA 2.0

Ann: Bobby, it might seem strange but I want to ask you about self-sabotage. I suspect I am sabotaging my spiritual work with chronic illness which is proving difficult to manage let alone resolve. I don’t know why I’m asking you because it seems like you were a guided missile with unlimited energy and faith.

Bobby: You’re not too far off, Ann, because sometimes my missile was guided in the wrong direction. Loyalty can be a snare, my tribe against the world, and Joe McCarthy was a friend of the tribe. One of many things I wish I could go back and do differently.

I am humbled by your trust in bring this dilemma to me, but understand perhaps better than you might think. So many women in my family were talented and motivated but felt that all avenues were not open to them. You come from a very different background but a nevertheless similarly closed society. There were ways of doing things, there was a prescribed route, and you did not deviate if you wanted the respect of the tribe.

Neither of us came in with natures that equipped us for the roles we were expected to play. I pummeled myself into a replica of the Kennedy clan’s up and coming young man because I thought that, if I didn’t have my clan, I had nothing and would cease to exist. And I stayed loyal to the end come hell or high water.

Only with Jack’s passing and my descent into the deep well of darkness of holy abandonment did I allow myself to contemplate a role in which I committed myself more to values than to advancement and winning. In the end I was motivated by the crushing hardship I saw in our country, our country no less, of people all over the nation who did not have enough to eat, whose schools were hardly worthy of the name, and whose futures were blighted from the moment they first drew breath. Then I saw my mission, and so I aimed my guided missile, as you so correctly described it, at that problem. My run for the presidency was as a means to that end, not a means in itself. I finally had a reason for living outside of my function within the tribe.

You have pretty much taken the inverse of my path. You are acting out of talent and commitment, but you have not internalized the mission. You still carry at your core the internal strictures you were raised with. There is a cognitive dissonance in your system that is wreaking havoc on your body, and that conflict has yet to be resolved.

Part of you does not want to be whole because you see that achievement as an abandonment of your family, those people whose respect you craved all of your life. You have not really grasped in your heart that God is your tribe, that his mission of union and light is yours, and that no other mission exists. You fear that every step in that direction will result in ouster and condemnation by the tribe.

St. Francis, my name saint, took his clothes off in the square and gave them to his father. Jesus said to Mary, you are not my mother. It was not that they did not love their families of birth; it was that they had turned to serve their Creator whose mission took precedence over particular family obligations. They had to state their conviction out loud and act in such a way that there was no going back.

You are trying to straddle both sides of a razor’s edge. You still go about your life as if nothing has changed. Your clairaudient work is compartmentalized. You abhor a proselytizer and you fear being labeled as such, as one who had turned, who drank the Kool-Aid and is now lost. “It’s too bad,” you can hear them saying.

I am here to tell you that it has to be done. It is time for commitment and strength of purpose. Nothing else matters but your fealty and service to Spirit, for this is where each of us will find our daily bread and our spiritual nourishment.

Ann: You never turned away from your family.

Robert: No, and you need not either. You just have to put your work, your mission, at the forefront of your life. My choices were in some ways easier than your own. I did not have to buck the privileged isolationist tendencies of your social upbringing which led to your escape from same and the reclusive tendencies that structure your current life. . My family was involved and at least outwardly committed to those less fortunate than ourselves. Your family’s lifestyle, while not cruel, was based on self-preservation of the clan and it privileges. You could not join that empty lifestyle, but you didn’t want to buck it either so you withdrew with the conflict intact.

Ann, your body needs a rest from this interminable inner war. You have declared yourself to be a clairaudient channel, but you have not commenced the study to realize the spiritual commitment that that role asks of you. It is not enough to parrot the wise words of others. It is for you to learn to live them. Nothing less than a full commitment to practice, to realization of the holy discipline that is necessary for you to bring your spirit, body, and daily life into alignment.

The Catholic Church provided this structure for me. You must find your own which is harder because you are trying to start from the ground up, and this is an almost impossible task. Find a structure you can build on. Use the words of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Dali Lama, make a meditation practice that receives, announces, and then implements holy values. This is the way to wholeness.

Though my life ended before I could follow my commitments out for the benefit of others, I was whole at the end. I knew why I had incarnated, and I lived it every day. So answer for yourself these two questions? Why am I here? What do I need to do to carry out my purpose? Then do it without pause or hesitation, and the conflict will resolve. The time for half measures has passed.

June 21, 2020