What Are You Certain Of? : dead is not annihilation
What I have realized over the years is that life makes no sense unless I recognize, like the psalmist, that God is the author of my contingent being and that I am caught up in the mystery of God’s presence… I wind up humbled before the mystery of it all. Gary Smith,SJ
The car crash almost killed me. Extruded from the stillness of pristine bliss, the initial inkling of consciousness coalesces with a hint of knowing, “I want to go back. I must go back. With all of my all I long to go back. How can it be that I am slipping away?”
Every ounce of my desire yearns to return to the luminous night of the unborn, unbound, undying all that is. Again, and again, and again, the I that notices the knowing dissolves in the incomprehensible cloud in which nothing and no one is missing, even as nothing and no one, including me, is palpably discernible.
Every question I have ever asked is answered in the inexplicable immensity of the all-seeing cloud. Every person and every thing I have ever seen is present. Every desire I have every suffered is fulfilled. Again, and again, and again, the ‘I’ that is metabolized in glory is reconfigured and sent away from the unspeakable holiness of that for which I can find no adequate words. In hindsight it seems the ‘I’ that I call me is wholly assimilated in the all yet somehow ‘I’ is not annihilated. Of this, I am certain.
With each passage in then out, ordinary consciousness lingers longer, reforming itself in spite of my protestations. When finally my mind coagulates I mutely declare, “Everything I have ever wanted to know is here. Nothing and no one is missing in this undifferentiated all that is. With all that I am I want to be here.” The wordless words that follow are inconceivable to me. “You are saturated in sacredness and must bring it to life with you.” Still I resist, leaning into the cloud of unconscious all-consciousness until an invisible hand cracks a slit in my eyes and I see my seven year old daughter Leela standing near the foot of a hospital bed next to her father. Like lightening a sword impales me with the realization, “Oh. I am dying. If I die Leela will be left with her father. I cannot leave her alone with him.” Immediately I slip back into the great cloud of all that is.
This time when consciousness coalesces it is a waterfall of words tumbling from unseen heights in incredibly slow motion. As if passing through an electrical field, the speed of the word-fall accelerates until it matches the excruciatingly fast consciousness of the people standing at my hospital bedside. My heart is severed, half yearning to return to the consummate bliss of all in all and the other half determined to defend my daughter. Words are frozen on my lips. How can I possibly speak of this?
When my car flips end over end and spits me out onto my head, instead of being conclusively dead I am rapt in the depths of eternity. Wisdom absorbs my consciousness in absolute certainty that nothing is lost when we die. In fact, although no one and nothing is distinct as in earth bound particularity (and that includes the ‘I’ that from this living perspective I call me even though I now know there really is no separate ‘I’). No one and nothing is not in and of the naked singularity of Ultimate Reality. The light of darkness and the darkness of light are unified in a field-less field that has no horizon, no density, no space, no time and in which nothing is not there.
I know this naked singularity as the indestructible substance of every cell and every space of the fragile body mind I call Debra as well as the unborn, unbound, undying essence of all that is. There is only One.
This is the first time my “God given assignment” begins to bud in consciousness. I am to deliver the good news that nothing and no one is lost in death because there is only One Ultimate Reality. There are however several stumbling blocks. By what authority do I speak these words? Who in the world will listen? I still refuse to use the word ‘g-o-d’ and I think it is up to me to figure out how to package and deliver this message. I collapse at the prospect and fail abominably because I harbor the dire delusion that I must depend on my own wit and will to accomplish this daunting task. Ah, foolish me. This is not only presumptuous, it is impossible.
And so I attend to the business I tell myself I can do; defending my daughter, making her my reason for living, which of course does not bode well for either one of us as I lose my self in her and she must resist me to reclaim her self. But that is a different story.
Many years evaporate before I find myself standing at a pulpit and preaching with unwavering conviction the Good News to a grieving congregation, “I am convinced that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the ones we love because nothing and no one can ever be lost in the naked singularity of Ultimate Reality.”
Night Takes Queen and King
When a pair of canyon swallows
teach their nestlings to fly
the mobile family swift departs
leaves seasons nest behind.
Such is so for all of life
satisfying its term
the tenant leaves the tenement
proceeds another turn.
The nature of the tenant
is mobile energy
breathing life in corpulence
ignites dim eyes to see.
The tenant seeks a living room
whereto discharge its lode
waits til excess potential
returns to stillness hold.
On the heel of winter’s parasol
the seed amasses vim
its mobile power burgeons
to swagger round again.
Swallows fly south for winter
reverse the way to spring
day plays her solemn chess game
til night takes queen and king.
But when dawn’s blue-black apron
anoints the mountain’s breast
the radiance of consciousness
returns to fill life’s chest.
Essay and Poetry through Debra Asis, by the grace of Infinite Generosity
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Gary Smith,SJ’s quote is found in today’s selection in An Ignatian Book of Days by James Martin, SJ, a series of daily reflections from the Spiritual Wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the book we hear the voices of St. Ignatius as well as many great thinkers and writers, long gone and present day, each uniquely revealing the way of finding God in all things. And that is my intention; to find God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality in whatever presents itself to me each day in 2024.
Each day I read, reflect and write on the selection, hoping to articulate the ways in which I come to know God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality via personal experience, impelled by the leading of my inner life.
INVITATION
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All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being,
Debra Asis writing challenge
