“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.
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