The ecological dream is to produce new energy by reprocessing all waste. Whatever has been thrown away or rejected is then reintegrated into the economy of life and a sense of equanimity and balance is achieved. But this is as hard to do in the inner life as at the global level. Whenever something is thrown away (waste) or labeled as useless (rejected), there is an accompanying feeling of failure, or of a missed opportunity, or of incompleteness. The deepest human instinct is for meaning, wholeness, connection and integration. Nothing should ever be seen as separated from the whole simply because it can’t be separate. We all have memories or relationships that we want to exclude because they don’t fit in with the desired pattern of our life. We need to realize that rejection never works. It only entangles us more with those aspects of a memory we dislike. Eventually it returns (as the rejected Jesus did) and is seen very differently. The rejected stone becomes the foundation stone.
