Reflections (part 2 of 3)

“Know him as the radiant light of lights.  There shines not the sun, neither moon nor star, Nor flash of lightening, nor fire lit on earth.”

The Upanishads

I spent the rest of the afternoon, after our meeting with our state caseworker, in the back yard, chain smoking cigarettes so as to stay tethered to some sort of sanity as I watched my son refuse to interact with me (if you try to play in the water with Cale, he either hits you in the face or starts banging his head onto the concrete, so everyone just has to stay away from him while he plays in the water), and feeling so damn sorry for myself that I wondered if I might magically produce a diaper to go along with my whiny baby attitude.       

I wondered if all hope of ever having any kind of a decent family life, where my other two kids might actually get to participate in sports, or go to cub scouts, or girl scouts, or dance classes, etc., or where Shane and I might actually be able to go out on a date once in awhile, or where I might one day be able to have a career of my own, or hell, where any of us could ever leave the damn house at all, was utterly and completely gone.   

I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life chain smoking cigarettes in this back yard, entirely devoted to watching Cale pour water, so that he can simply not notice when I die.  I mean, my mother-in-law’s nephew doesn’t even know that his mom is gone. 

I remembered all of the times in which I’ve heard the comment, “Don’t worry, God has a plan!” and I actually began to panic as I thought, “My God.  Could this really be it?  Is THIS God’s plan?”

I wondered how it is that the company that Shane works for gets away with not covering therapy for Autism or developmental disabilities.  I mean, how is it that such a successful corporation (and they’re by no means the only one that gets away with this) can simply pass us off onto the states?  And I wondered if it was possible that we could be waiting for a Medicaid waiver forever.  And I wondered if Shane’s family had given up on Cale.  I mean, the fact that my sister-in-law has started looking for group homes for him could be interpreted that way.  

I wondered why it is that nobody, including God, seems to be willing to fight for Cale.  “Doesn’t anybody give a shit that we’re losing him?!” I thought, “Doesn’t anybody give a shit that he’s slipping away?!”

I looked at Cale.  He was busily filling his bucket with water from the hose, and then dumping it out onto the concrete, filling it again, and dumping it out, filling it again, and dumping it out, occasionally deviating slightly by dumping the water directly over his head, all while smiling big at the imaginary friends that play in the air beside him.

“Maybe he’s already gone,” I thought, “Maybe my mother in law, who has seen this before in her own brother’s son, knows something that I don’t know, or that I simply refuse to accept.”

I couldn’t stand it.

“Are we really supposed to just give up on him?” I thought, “A group home?  Really?  And will I have to live the rest of my life knowing that therapy might’ve prevented it, but that I was unable to get it for him?  Is THIS God’s plan?”

I began bumping my own head on the table in front of me.

“Wow,” I thought, “If there is such a thing as destiny, or if God does, indeed, have a plan, then he’s really kind of an asshole, isn’t he?  He’s just sitting there doing nothing, on top of all of his “infinite power,” watching me watch my child slip away.  He couldn’t possibly be this big of an asshole.  It makes so much more sense that he’s not actually there.” 

I’m one who occasionally needs to understand something with my brain.  I mean, blind faith is great and all.  And when one needs to feel the actual closeness of God, the last place to look is to philosophic thought (that’s just my own opinion of course).  But sometimes I come up against something that I just can’t get past until I understand it.  And I believe that God knows this about me, and accommodates – much like my daughter, at school, having to have her assignments “modified” (which really means lessened) to accommodate her level of ability - because when it comes to spirituality, logic is probably, at best, the bonehead version.  But there have been a lot of times in which I’ve needed bonehead version. 

I had just concluded that God wasn’t there.  Not only that, but I had been arriving at this conclusion over and over again this summer, and it was getting rather old.  Why did I keep arriving at this conclusion?  What was it about my concept of God that kept allowing him to be shimmied right on out of existence?   

I read the Conversations With God books, by Neal Donald Walsh, years ago.  And these, along with Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, and a few of the other books from the “new age” section at Barnes and Noble, in addition to more books on religion, philosophy, psychology, and healing than I can count, eventually led me to some of the ancient texts - the Bible, the Kabbalah, the Tao-Te-Ching, the Upanishads, etc.  And thinking about all of these made me realize that I must have a very thick skull if I’ve needed so much help in forming a concept of God that I can actually live with.

All of these books have, for me, been like pieces of the same puzzle, or maybe they’re more like fingers that all point in the same direction.  All of them point to the fundamental unity of God, or Life, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, especially since I’m one that more easily understands spiritual principals when they’re told in story form, and since I like to think that I can easily see past the vast differences in times and places that these teachings have been written in.

All books, for me, are about spirituality - whether it’s a novel detailing one section of a particular character’s life journey, or a text on physics that deals with the behavior of atoms (yes, I look for God in Physics books as well).  It’s all the same.  It’s all the unfolding of God, or Life, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it.  God is everything.  And I don’t mean that God is IN everything.  I mean that he IS everything.  Literally. 

Then what is evil?  Or “Ego” (as Eckhart Tolle calls it)?  Or fear?  Or death?  Or darkness?  Or bad?  Or cold?  Etc.  Are all of these things, too, God?  And the answer, for me, for a great number of years, was yes.

If I understand it correctly, God manifested into physical form.  In other words, he turned himself into the universe, into the world, and into everything and everyone in the world (everything is made of the same stuff - even the physics books say that human flesh is made of the same elemental stuff that the stars are made of). 

In doing this, God created (or maybe it was simply a result of manifesting into physical form) “ego” or “self” (in other words, we “forgot” that we’re not really separate from each other or from the world) so that we could experience “others,” fear so that we could appreciate peace, death so that we could appreciate life, darkness so that we could appreciate light, bad so that we could appreciate good… blah, blah, blah, you get the idea.  If we had nothing to compare warmth too, we wouldn’t know that it was warmth.  If we had nothing to compare God to, we wouldn’t know that it was God.  We’d all still be living in one big blissful bubble having no idea at all that it was bliss.

Then (or at the same time) we developed consciousness (or free will) so that we could choose between certain opposites – between “good” and “bad.”  But it’s really all just God anyway.  I mean, have you ever noticed that you learn more from screwing things up than you do from getting things right?  The point isn’t to get things right.  The point is to keep trying to get things right.

This is kind of a crude rundown on the concept of God that I’ve had for a long time.  It’s a delightful concept, isn’t it?  I mean, it brings the whole world to life.  The stars are God.  The trees are God.  The atoms and the spaces in between are God.  It’s an idea that I’ve doted on, an idea that I’ve loved, an idea that I’ve lived and breathed for, for a lot of years.  And it worked really, really well for me clear up until it completely stopped working for me this summer.

As you may have spotted, there are a couple of weak spots in my conception.  First of all, it leaves out the idea of a God who is personal to me, or, at the very least, it makes the idea of a God who is personal to me unnecessary.  And this isn’t good, because, for me, having a personal God is necessary.  The second weak spot is this - if everything is God, then I’m God too.  Or, at least, one little part of God.   

This is a particularly bad combination for somebody like me, because these weak spots tend to affect each other.  Let me see if I can explain.

If I’m God, then I’m, at least in part, responsible for the well-being of my son.  And this is fine, as long as I have the power with which to help Cale (I can do the footwork – take him to the doctors, try to get him therapy, keep up on the latest Autism research, etc.).  But what am I supposed to do when I reach the end of my power to help Cale?  What am I supposed to do when I can’t get him therapy (I have no power over our insurance company or the state)?  And what am I supposed to make of it when every attempt to help my son seems to turn to shit (our last attempt actually landed him in the hospital). 

What I do is try to tap into God’s power, which makes sense doesn’t it?  My gas tank gets emptied, so I go to the gas station (the source) for more gas (power).  I pray.  And pray.  And pray.  And I keep trying to do the footwork (keep harassing the insurance company and the state and the doctors, etc.) because I know that if I could just try hard enough, could just get things to go the way that I think they should go, then my son could heal.  And my will is to have a healthy son, or, at the very least, to not have to keep living the way that we’ve been living this summer.  And if God is, indeed, personal to me, does actually love me, it must be his will too.  Can you see the problem?  

In one of my books about Shamanism, somebody (and I can’t recall who right now) said that a good Shaman always waits for a person to ask for healing before that Shaman will attempt to help that person, not only because it’s the person’s actual act of asking for help that brings about a large portion of any healing that follows, but also because any attempt to heal a person who doesn’t want to be healed is considered a violation of that person’s spirit.  Oy, I probably screwed up the wording of this royally, but you get the idea. 

My son has never asked for healing (he can’t, because he can’t talk), but you could assume that some of his behavior indicates that he would like to feel better than he does.  I don’t know, however, if this really counts.  And I don’t exactly have anybody that I can ask, because, as you’re probably aware, Shamans aren’t very easy to come by these days.  But if anybody knows one then give me a call, will you?  And I mean a real one, not some “new age” hippie from Eugene who went to a workshop one time.

So what if Cale isn’t interested in being “healed?”  What if he just is who he is?  What if pouring water and peeing on the carpet is really all that he ever wants to do with his life?  Or what if it’s actually God’s will (God’s plan) for Cale to live like this for the rest of his life, and for us to live with him being like this for the rest of our lives?  What if I can’t stand God’s plan?

The problem with experiencing pure, unadulterated powerlessness to help my son, right underneath the nose of a God who is personal to me, who supposedly loves me, and who has “infinite power” but who refuses to do anything at all to help us, is that it means that my “personal God” must not love me at all.  In fact, he must actually hate me.  How else could he just leave me to watch my son fade away, with no way at all to help him? 

The only thing that makes more sense than my personal God hating me (it doesn’t make sense to me that God hates anybody) is that my personal God doesn’t actually exist.  And this sends my entire concept of God toppling to the ground.  It shouldn’t, seeing as how my concept doesn’t require a personal God to make it work logically.  But, you see, it kills the whole world.  The stars become regular old stars.  The trees become regular old trees.  The atoms and the spaces in between become regular old, Godless little atoms and regular old, Godless little spaces in between.  And I stop doting.  I stop loving.  I stop wanting to live.  I stop wanting to breathe.

I lit another cigarette and tried to blow the smoke away from Cale.  “So,” I began jumping up and down on my weak spots again, “Either God’s an asshole, or he doesn’t exist.  What is my choice to be?”

I laid my head down on the table in front of me and thought about it for a long, long time (about ten minutes).  Then, I suddenly sat straight up in my chair.  “The concept is inadequate,” I declared out loud to Cale and all of his imaginary little friends.  None of them bothered to look at me.

What had come to mind was a friend of mine whose daughter somehow survived Leukemia.  But, you see, they didn’t know, for a long time, whether she would survive it or not.  She’d get sort of better, and then get sick again.  And then better again.  And then sick again.  This went on for months and months and months, and I often wonder how many times my friend had to tolerate the comment, “Don’t worry, God has a plan!” 

I thought about my friend constantly during that time.  Constantly.  But I had nothing to offer him in the way of comfort.  I mean, can you imagine if I had called to offer up my perfectly inadequate little conception of God?  “God created death so that we could appreciate life.”  Jesus.  He would’ve been right to come straight through the cell phone receiver and rip my hair out by the chunks.  All I could really do was to call, occasionally, and listen, and hope that he would talk.

This got me thinking, though, that there must be a God.  I mean, if you knew this friend of mine at all, you’d never be able to question the existence of God again:).  Not only has he always been a true example of God’s undying grace, but he does celebrate life in a truly enviable way today.  “So what if it’s not so much that my conception is inaccurate?” I thought, “What if it’s just inadequate?  Maybe it’s just time for God to grow a little.  You know?  To get just a little bit bigger.”

What I love about the Dali Lama is that he never tries to convince anyone to become a Buddhist.  Instead he talks about butterflies.  He saw a mother butterfly’s willingness to sacrifice her own life for the well-being of her newly hatched caterpillars.  Then he talked about how this butterfly’s behavior didn’t come from religion, or philosophy, or politics, or race, or economics, etc., all of which are on a secondary level of our consciousness, but that this butterfly’s behavior came from something much more fundamental instead.  He says that we should relate to each other more often on this fundamental level instead on the secondary.  Neat huh? 

He also says that you can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that you created the problem with.  Ouch.