The Spirit of Love that Connects us all

About 8 years ago a friend of mine very suddenly died.  She had had a cough for weeks, she thought the remnants of a cold she could not shake.  Finally one night in frustration she went to the emergency room to get an antibiotic.  Instead she left with a referral to hospice.  They had x-rayed her lungs and seen a mass too huge to be operable.  It took her a week to tell everyone.  It took me two weeks to recover from the shock.  We made a date for me to come see her a week later.  But on that date her husband called to say that she was in so much pain she had been given a heavy dose of moraine and was out of it.  We rescheduled, but the same thing happened on the next date.  Then they stopped taking calls.  She died 6 weeks after she went to the hospital for the x-ray and I never got to say goodbye.

I was sad and shaken that she was gone so fast.  I also learned.  I learned that it is a myth this idea that there is some permanence to the people we know.  Anyone of us could die in a car crash or have a heart attack today and be gone.  The idea that we will know someone is dying, and that we will be able to rush to their side, is not true.  I could have just taken that as a bitter fact, but instead I chose to make sacred that fact. I started a new Birthday tradition.   I consider as I write my birthday cards to people what I would want that person to know if they, or I, did not make it to their next birthday.  I consider whether there are any unfinished messages, but most especially what the appreciations and unexpressed love and gratitude are.  Wayne Dyer is famous for saying "Don't die with your music in you."  I would change that to be:  "Let not death separate us, without our Love being fully expressed."  People tell me these birthday cards are unlike any others they get - very special and precious.  I knew a woman who held a living memorial for herself a year before her death (she was very slowly dying) because she said she did not know what good it would do for all the nice things to be said about her after she died!  This is funny, but how true.  Why do we wait until after people are dead to say those precious things?

Today is 9/11.  A date I generally try to ignore because I do not like the focus on terrorism and the justification of the US's numerous wars abroad.  But what touched me then and ever since is the kindness that people showed total strangers and loved ones a like on that day.  Today on NPR there was an interview with the CEO of one of the companies that occupied the upper floors of tower 1 of the twin towers.   This man lost 642 employees on that day and only lived himself because he was taking his son to his first day of Kindergarten.  In the interview the reporter is asking him about the loss of all of his employees, and he tells her that he also lost his younger brother who was only 36, He says that his brother called his sister and she said "OH thank God, you are not there. You are safe" and he said "No, I am here.  I am going to die.  I have called to say goodbye to you and that I love you."

I started to cry at that point in the story, as I have for 15 years whenever I hear the numerous stories of people calling from the burning towers or from the plane that they know is about to be crashed into a building.  They call their loved ones to say goodbye, as do children from schools where students with automatic weapons roam the halls killing people.  I have been told that soldiers as they lay dying in battlefields call out to their mothers and wives.  It is fundamental to human nature that as we face death we turn to the connect of love we have to other humans.  It is as the former Prime Minster of Canada said on this death bed:  "Love is the only thing which matters."  For me this truth is a profoundly spiritual one as well that Love is at the core of Life.

Calling all Angels

Another theological question would be : Are there angels?

Crimson Glory sings;                                                   
We fly without fear
Through the valley of shadows
Waging our war against evil
In your world
We rule the heavens and earth
From kingdoms of light
We are the holy

This sort of alludes to the popular notion of Angels as dressed in white robes with wings and halos, sent to save us or to bring us home.  Angels of God that fight evil.  With that image comes the question of whether we can see angels when we are alive or only as we face death? and whether angels actions are direct or indirect?

In the Lyrics to Calling All Angels, Train seems to suggest that Angels save in the way of bringing us hope, reminding us of the presence of God and keeping us safe.

I need a sign, to let me know you're here...
I need to know, that things are gonna look up....

When there is no place safe and no safe place to put my head
When you can feel the world shake from the words that are said

And I'm, calling all Angels
And I'm, calling all you Angel

Certainly throughout the ages people have called on angels to protect them and often those who were sainted by the Catholic church were called upon specifically to provide certain kinds of protection.  St. Christopher is said to protect travelers, St. Anthony was to protect "lost souls" and apparently the archangel Michael had time also to protect people's home.   Although in this idolatrous age a google search of ANGELS to protect the home will still bring up several home security systems first, so certainly the 21st century folk have some confusion about where our real protection comes from.

Christianity is not the only religion that has the concept of angels.  Buddhism has the concept of devas, (different word in different Asian cultures) who are luminous beings who do not eat or sleep and who fly. They can be seen or heard by those humans who have developed their spiritual powers. They are not however immortal, all knowing, all powerful and there are considered to be several levels of devas.  

Muslim belief in angels is not that different than traditional Christian belief in angels. They are beings of light with wings who do not eat. The Koran also mentions angels specifically Gabriel (Jibreel) and Michael (Mika'eel) as well as Israfeel and Malik.  Although Muslims do not believe in any fallen angels.   But similarly they see angels as executing God's laws in the world, visiting people at the time of death, recording the behavior of humans for the day of judgement and acting as guardians keeping us safe, and keeping paradise.  One breathes the soul into fetus, sort of assigning its fate in life!

I myself am agnostic about angels with wings or spirits who come to us at death (despite my love of the old tv show Touched by an Angel which included a rather good looking angel of death.)  But I do believe in a kind of angel that has no halo.  I after 3 car accidents in rather short order in my late 20's hung a Christmas ornament of an angel that a friend had made and given me in my car.  I was never in another car accident (although heaven knows, literally, how many near misses there were.)   When that angel became very faded and bedraggled I eventually decided that she needed an honorable retirement, and got a new angel ornament.  Right now I'm on my third car angel.  Does this mean that I believe in little beings in white robes protecting me like the object suggests?   No, I think in the sense that countless New Age writers suggest we create (or co-create)with the Divine our own reality and this includes setting intention.  I believe as I hang my angel I am setting an intention to not get into car accidents and putting it out to the universe that I will be kept safe. I have given two other friends after they also had a series of accidents, angels to hang in their cars.  I believe the fierceness of my own belief worked like a placebo to make them also believe that they would be kept safe, and both so far have been.

I have always put out to the universe that I would not be raped and I never have although I think I was on at least one occasion skating over thin ice to avoid that fate (guarded by an angel?).   I similarly after having being pick pocketed several times in my 20's and once having my home burglarized put it out to the universe that I would be safe and not robbed.  I so strongly believe that my intentions keep me safe (not "security systems") that I have at times not locked my car or my home, bowing only to the needs of others I share these things with to use locks.  But I have also believed that if anything was taken from me that apparently the thief needed it more. Apparently this practicing of non-attachment is translated very interestingly by the universe.  I have had a bike stolen and recovered.  A wallet lost and returned with half a month's pay in cash in side it and a car stolen (while I was out of the country and it was locked!) and reclaimed by the police before I even got home!  I simply do not have fear about this, and I believe my "faith" in my safety actually protects me.

Once while walking in a neighborhood primarily populated by a racial group not my own, two teenage boys came by and snatched the hat off my head and started playing catch with it tossing it back and forth between them, taunting me with it as I screamed for them to give it back.  Suddenly a man of their same racial group drove around a corner in a little yellow VW bug and told them sternly to give it back and they did!  This is the kind of angel I believe in.

The best Cat I ever had was named Mr. Cat after his dignified and gentlemanly ways.  After he died I realized however, that I had been overlooking the presence of an angel in my home for over a decade!  People talk about angels looking over their children while they sleep.  Mr. Cat would literally sit on the bed and help me tuck my daughter in at night, but then he would sleep next to her head on the pillow watching over and comforting her. He indeed was always watching over us extending comfort.  He would actually come when I sat on my couch holding the hand of a crying friend and put his paw on our hands and lie down.  Unlike other cats who would drop their eyes in submission if you stared at them he had an unblinking gaze that seemed to ooze love, compassion and wisdom.  He was always there somewhere in the background sending this energy.  I was a single parent for many years and he died only after I remarried.  I realized that he had come and served as co-parent.  He was an angel, sent my God and I mean that truly.

In our society we often say about a person who rescues us, or bring us something or has remarkable timing, or shows much kindness:  "Oh you are such an angel".   Maybe we need to start taking that inner knowing much more seriously.  For if angels are to help us know God on earth than our fellow humans are not exempt from being God's angels.  Consider for a moment who are the angels that have shown up in your life?  By accident or intention?  Familiar or strangers?

For many years when I lead workshops on spiritual topics I would do just like the old "secret Santa" routine, "secret angels".   People would pick out of a paper bag the name of one of the participants in the workshop and during the week we were together they were to do secret acts of kindness, comfort and encouragement...they were to think of how to shine the light of God into that person's life.  People were not infrequently more touched by thinking about another in this way than what they received during that week.  Once I accidentally left someone's name out of the bag, and this was a person with a handicap  who struggled in life in many ways who was very much dismayed to loose out on this.  I was also distraught because of this mistake and chagrinly announced this on the last day of our conference.   Then a thing of Grace happened. Numerous participants did special anonymous angel acts for her in the remaining day of the conference signing them Your Secret Angels.  She tearfully approached me to tell me this and told me she had learned from this to trust God patiently even when all visible signs would indicate that the spirit was not available, and to know that God acts in God's own time.  I learned that if I called on angels, that they would act even despite my own human fallibility.

Hope in My Soul

Hope is a very central issue to me. I was almost named Hope when I was born.  I was born out of the reconciliation of my parent’s separation, and my father wanted to name me Hope.  My mother vetoed this name.  Two years later when my sister was born his hope had died into a stubborn faith that they would continue, and so he wanted to name her Faith.  My mother vetoed this name, and she was named Fay.  Was his hope sucessful?  My parents were married till my mother died, for 11 more years after he reached for the name Hope.  But they were kept together by her dying and would have separated if she had not become ill.

I hoped my mother would live during the two and half years she lay dying.  Hope was disappointed when she died.  Thus also began my career of hoping for impossible things and yet needing hope to survive that which is awful.

For me at that time the Emily Dickerson poem was truth:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all

I then launched a lifetime of activism.  As a favorite quote of mine says: “An idealist is someone who is homesick for a land they have never been.”  Certainly activists always struggle for things that are not yet: justice, peace, community.  To struggle for these things which are not yet, one has to have hope.

Somehow I have been the champion of lost causes.  I worked for years as a volunteer in prisons, work which touched my soul and was deep and meaningful…and when I would go to fundraise for it I would see how clearly our society judged prisoners “hopeless”.  I tried to stop nuclear weapons which amassed more quickly than demonstrators.  And now in my most challenging of impossible causes I’m fighting climate change.  So I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the significance of hope.

Recently, I went to hear Meg Wheatly, a Buddhist, talk on being a warrior for our time.  For me the most significant part of the talk was when she talked about hope.  She started to say something about the “ambush of hope” and how people’s disappointed hope can make them give up on what they are trying to do.  She said: “The space between hope and fear is inseparable.”  I have heard people who are without hope sort of bash hope, say it is just a form of trickery, a fool’s gold…something to be avoided.  I really cannot stand that message, it seems so dark and so fatalistic.  I was concerned that that was where she was going.   I have usefully heard people say the opposite of love is fear…but it was interesting to think that hope and fear are inseparable.  Because yes, I had to admit that when I have hope there is always a niggling fear somewhere that I will be wrong, be foolish or be disappointed.   And when I have fear there is also a little niggling hope that it will be ok and everything will turn out well.

Then Meg said she’d heard the joke: “expectation is pre-meditated disappointment.”  I laughed in recognition of how often my expectations have brought me disappointment.

I have written in my Jan blog on Gratitude and Expectations: “I have been thinking about how expectations, like goals and dreams are generally a good thing and help us aim for things and collectively move forward in life.  And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way”. 

It all comes into clearer focus for me that goals, visions and dreams are a good thing that help us move forward, but that expectations do lead to disappointment.  Certainly the relationship between disappointment and fear is clear…and now leads to the issue of hope.  Then someone said: “I think an aspiration is hope without expectation.”  Whether one agrees with that term it does begin to distinguish a way of hoping that is unattached.

Another person said: “Hope is being willing to face the pain of disappointment”.  Which I think speaks to the idea that we realize there are no guarantees for the things we hope for, and we do it anyway.

Meg then introduced these two quotes.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  Vaclav Havel President of Czechoslovia  1989-92

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
― Thomas Merton

These two quotes are important to me because of the work on “Active Hope” that I have done with Joanna Macy.  Joanna has been for decades, starting with our responses to the nuclear arms race been inviting Americans to look at our grief and despair about the world.  She says in her Work that Reconnects that we must start with gratitude for what is and then experience our grief so we are not dragged down by it and can then see with new eyes and be freed to act.  The part of this formula that did not resonate with me at first was gratitude.  It was hard for me to notice what to be grateful for when I was so worried!   However, my work with Joanna has been very profound.

I recall at a workshop where I felt deeply sunk in a sense of despair over the threat of the dying of the oceans that I felt no hope.  Joanna’s assistant Anne spoke and said that she did not think we would survive but that she was sustained by “resting in the arms of all of you, in the love of you.”  I realized as I reflected upon this that I did not know if we will survive but that if the worst scenarios were to play out that I would still want in the descent of humanity for us to treat each other with as much respect as possible, without violence, to try to be fair with each other, to face our challenges cooperatively and with love. I realized that it meant I would make the same choices that I would make while fighting for our survival if I thought we would not survive.  I realized that I needed not to “concentrate on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” as Merton says.  Or as Meg Wheatly said: “It becomes “What is”.  A place of gratitude.  Gratitude for what we still have.”

After my experience in Joanna’s workshop my “hope” changed.  It was not desperate, it was actually much deeper.  There was a calm I felt even in the face of much worse news.  There was the perseverance to just keep forging forward.  And strangely the gratitude showed up.  I felt like some people with chronic illnesses report feeling…just grateful for all the small things.  Grateful for what we still have, for as long as we have it.  Grateful to rest in the love of community.

The English language is said to be poor in that it has only one word for love.  It does not distinguish between the love of parents and children, from romantic love, or the love of a comrade or for the world in general.  The same could be said about the word hope.  There is this kind of hope that has expectations and the danger of much disappointment and there is this other kind of hope that has surrendered all expectations and that is just a steady direction and intention for Good – an almost instinct towards Light.

Why do we Die?

Why do we die? is a question humanity has been trying to figure out since the beginning of time.  Alternately we ask: why do we live?  And what happens when we die? And what is the purpose of life?

I think it is perhaps more useful to ask the question what if we did not die?  I think this formation begins to reveal some of the purpose of death.  Most of us are not fond of deadlines, experiencing stress around them, or having had bad consequences for them or disappointing outcomes.  Nonetheless, if we are honest with ourselves they do push us to get things done; they do lead to the completion of tasks and to a sense of accomplishment.  Death is a deadline on life.

If you knew you would live forever would you set goals?  Would the goals matter?  Would it matter who you married or how you parented if you could just marry again or have "new" children?  (would people even marry?  What does till death do us part mean then?)  Would job performance matter?  Would career path matter?  Would there be any push to get anything done?  In fact in the Star Trek series there are a people called the Q who are immortal, and they are shown to be very immature, aimless and self-absorbed because of the lack of finality in their lives.  And in fact throughout history many martyrs and heroes/heroines have the meaning of their life be defined by what they were willing to die for, to forfeit their life for.  This formulation also points out that if we live "safely" all the way to the finish line, preserving our life at every turn, but never really doing anything, will we have lived at all?

In some belief systems we do not live forever, but we live multiple lives.  However, the belief in reincarnation would actually underscore the importance of death.  For each life then is conceptualized as building upon the learning of the past - constructed in a way that allows for specific learning.  How then would that happen if we never died and had the chance to try in a new or different ways, to learn the lessons that our soul  is trying for?  Many people have found their meaning and purpose in life by asking themselves the question what do I want to do before I die?

Death also puts a time line on love.  It means we do not have forever to get it right.  It means that if we want to be generous, kind, supportive, involved, etc., NOW is the time to do that; we may not have tomorrow.  It means that if we have rendered a hurt it is important to rectify it quickly.  It means that there is a deadline on forgiveness.  If we lived forever would we have motivation to move in decisively with love?  I have heard people say that they say "I love you" when they part from a loved one because, God forbid one of them be killed before they are together again, they want the last thing their loved one heard to be "I love you" and not "why didn't you put the dishes away?"  While this line of thought could be considered a bit morbid, there is a certain priority set in knowing that if our time is limited Love is the most important motion.  It is not uncommon for people on their death bed to say that Love is all that matters, for then as the deadline approaches all the detours and time wasters, and irrelevancies drop away and we see that we are here to Love.

Redemptive Possibilities

In May, I went to see the Rev. Jon Nelson.  Jon is a 78 year old retired Lutheran minister, and he also has a heart of gold and the deepest, most life embracing laugh I have ever heard in my life!  Jon is a fighter of the good fight:  he has had a prison ministry for 40 years, he helped create a black studies program in a small town in Missoula, MT and also low income housing, he rowed out in a boat into Puget Sound with his 80 year old mother to block the nuclear submarines and committed other acts of civil disobedience as led by God.  And with his loving wife they parented 14 children: 3 of their own, the rest foster children who they cared for and adopted (and all of whom he considers equally his own).

Jon and I were talking about an organization we started together several decades ago, and my own wonderment about whether it really made a difference or not.  He said:  "Ahh, but you planted 'the seed of the Redemptive Possibility'- the rest is in God's hands."  There is probably no better summery for Jon's life.  He did so much, but never with a concern for the outcome - just with a deep and abiding belief that God works through us for Redemption, and that the very possiblity of that is what it is all about.   Redemption of course is an idea at the very heart of Lutheranism.  I'm not a Lutheran, Jon and I are an odd pair in that regards.  Yet he testifys to me, by his life, what deep and true Christianity really looks like.

I comment to Jon that he has channelled father energy through out his life - that between his 14 kids and the myriad of prisoners who have loved him and were so underparented in their lives that he has held up for others what a father's love is.  Jon simply smiles and says:  "To those who much is given, much is required."  He explains how lucky he was to receive the deep love of both his parents and that he feels that simply filled and prepared him to give to others.  Jon is this sort of "pay it forward" kind of guy.  And again models what is possible when we live in the Redemptive possibilities.

I ask him for some parenting advise as I struggle with one of my teenagers and he has parented 14 kids - some of whom were in a whole lot of trouble.  His wife sagely says:  "Don't let them define you, and don't let them dictate your happiness."  But Jon laughs and says: We have always gone at this so differently, and then soberly says to me:  "Lean into the pain - yours and theirs - it is where the redemptive possibilities are."  Here are two people who have been married to each other for 53 years and it is not hard to see why- there love bounces off each other creating more love.

As I drive away I am a bit sad because Jon's health is failing in a variety of ways.  Ironically, this man who has the largest heart I have known is suffering slow heart failure. So I have this sense that I may have seen him for the last time.  I turn on some music and Carrie Newcomber is singing.
                       "Leaves do not fall, they just let go....
                        to make room for life to grow.
                       A seed contains a tree to be.
                       Death is Life's refrain."   (from the Song: Leaves do not fall)
Now I am at peace for I realize that even death carries those Redemptive Possibilities.

Post Note:  Jon died July 23, 2011

Moving Towards the Light

Yesterday was a beautiful first day of spring.  I went outside to survey the garden.  In the fall my husband and son had replaced some logs that held a bank in place.  They had dropped cut of pieces on the ground were months before flowers had been.  However, now in spring those same bulbs had tried to come forth only to find their tender buds under boards.  I moved the offending boards to find that the plants sensing a small crack of Light had grown sideways till they reached the edge of the board and then up - in a sort of backwards L.

Hmmm,  I thought: Life is kind of like that we sense the Light, even when it is only a small glint of it and we grow towards the Light.

Recently for our anniversary my husband and I were looking at the photoes from our wedding 4 years ago.  Everyone is familiar but older.  In the kids cases they are a foot taller now and more "mature" looking, but for most of us it means more grey hair and more wrinkles.  Yes I thought the slow march towards death.  Huh, how does that fit with my previous thought that all life grows towards the Light?

Then I realized - oh yes, it is the same.  Our slow march towards death is also the path back to the Eternal Light.  It seems some of us will live shorter lives than we thought we would and others will live much longer than they thought they would.  So what of the march - does it matter if all our days our numbered how we spend those days? How do we make our days count?  I think it is not some "productive doing", but rather have we lived those days with Love and with Light?  Have you grown towards the Light today?

The final Goodbye

In the past year a college friend dropped over dead at age 48 of a massive heart attack, another friend of mine as they say "woke up dead one morning".   Right now as I write another friend of mine lays dying, a dying that came about so quickly only a half dozen people got to speak with her before she slipped into a morphine coma.  She went to the emergency room with what she thought was pnemonia and after some imaging was diagnosed with a huge aggressive cancerous mass in one lung.  The doctors said it was too late to do anything and ordered hospice - even so it was shocking that by three weeks later she was in a coma.

These collective experiences have found me once again reflecting upon our collective relationship to death.  We all know we will die and that every person we know will die.  Most of us try not to think about either fact very much.  I think more people die slowly with some warning, than people who die suddenly - and thus we assume that there will be some time, some warning around dying, some chance to say goodbye.   Those who are elderly live with different odds and assumptions, but most Americans I think assume you have to go past 65 before your chances of dying become very great.  And yet none of the people I mention were close to 65, and lots of people of all ages die every day.

I have heard it said and believe it to be true that death serves to place a useful limit on life.  It serves to make us make choices, to value our time and our days, to prioritize and to value what we choose.  If we lived forever would there be a terrible epidemics of procrastination?  Would people ever create deadlines?  Would people feel their choices mattered or were important?  Would we ever forgive others?  Would we work at our relationships?  So I know my death enhances my life and my relationships, and yet it seems impossible to live in the present with a simultaneous awareness of some approaching ending.  So we weave back and forth between a now that is all and a future that is finite.

In that crazy weaving how do we honor our relationships.  I think I do a pretty good job of telling people I appreciate them, or that I like them, or thank you for things.  But this is not the same thing as coming to completion with somone.   Have you ever talked to someone when you knew it would be your last conversation?  (Which I guess is to say have you ever said goodbye to someone dying - its just that in long distant relationships sometimes we say goodbye to an ill person and we suspect we will not speak again, but we don't know for sure.)  What is important to say in that last conversation?  I love you, this is what you have meant to me, thank you for being in my life, cross over without pain.  So that is fairly clear if we get to say goodbye - but what if we don't?

So many people live without really feeling their importance.  What I have always loved about the movie:  "It's a Wonderful Life" is the beautiful way we are shown the small common acts a man does and takes for granted that touch everyone he knows and actually change the world.   We don't get to have angels to show us these things - only our friends and family.   So how do we hold that mirror up to others and help them see their life as George Bailey did?

Does it matter if a soul dies without knowing these things?  I suppose on some cosmic level they come to know it all at the moment that the join the Great ALL.  I like to imagine that in some great review of the events of their life, that like George Bailey they will both see the events that were significant that they took for granted, as well as hurts they may have inflicted and discounted, that they will see both the themes, the highlights and lowpoints,  that some meaning can emerge from this lofty perspective that perhaps eluded them during this life.  I hope that they also can see into hearts were words did not illuminate- that they can see again or perhaps for the first time how deeply they were loved by all those who loved them -see for the first time where they made a difference when they did not know they did.

Years ago I had a practice on friends birthdays of writing them a card saying that I took the opportunity of their birth to say how glad I was that they lived.  I would tell them the traits I saw they had and what they brought to my life.  People loved these birthday cards and even started to continue the tradition with others they knew.  However, after a few years I started to feel like I was just writing the same things each year (after all people's most precious traits really don't change they endure over time.)  So I fell out of the habit.  I think now that was a mistake.   I think perhaps with a little less emphasis on traits and a little more emphasis on this is what you have meant to me this year that the sudden deaths will not feel like a conversation abrupty ended without the final goodbye. I think I have a lot of birthday cards to write this year.