The heat of midnight tears
will bring you to God.
-- Mirabai
The personal pathways to God are unique, individual, countless, but in each there's a Turning Point--the Ancient Greeks called this Metanoia. Sometimes we recognize it instantly; or the discovery may only dawn in retrospect, after a lifetime of experience and reflection. For me, the revelation was
instantaneous, mind-boggling, overwhelming! And as Mirabai understood so many centuries ago, it was "the heat of midnight tears" which brought me to God.In my early thirties I found myself "lost in a dark wood"--more specifically, I was
hunched up on a closed toilet lid one night wailing my guts out. All the unfinished deaths in my life up till then had finally coalesced into a monstrous abyss of anguish inside me which seemed bottomless. My sister's death, my father's death, and now the death of my marriage--there weren't enough tears to grieve them all at once, not after shutting out their reality for so long. I was stripped bare to the emotional bone, helpless, hopeless, bereft.
One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
-- Joseph Campbell
These words describe what happened then. In my aching despair I prayed for the first time in my adult life. But since I'd long abandoned any belief in God, all I could conceive to pray to were the sentient atoms of my own dead father, which I envisioned still floating around somewhere far out in the interstellar void. What happened then still staggers my being. Instaneously, I was catapulted from agony to ecstasy--as if my soul were a pebble pulled all the way down to the depths in a Cosmic Slingshot, then abruptly released and sent soaring into the Heavens! I was transfixed by a laser beam of invisible Light; embraced in a profoundly compassionate, transcendent Presence, and irradiated with an irrepressible, all-encompassing Joy! Mere words simply cannot express it. I had encountered an unfathomable Reality beyond any I'd ever known--ever imagined even existed!--and I knew at once that my life was changed forever.
KANSAS CITY RENGA
April still conjures blossoms but the house is long gone
where I prayed to the far-flung atoms of my dead father
glittering like a sentient constellation at the galaxy's core
instantaneously from hair tips to heel ends I was split
wide open riddled by a blinding strobe of cosmic Light
that yanked me inside out catapulting grief to ecstasy
I was sitting on the toilet lid weeping in a rickety house
while my hollow marriage collapsed around me when
all heaven suddenly broke loose and everything changed
one timeless night at 47th and Jarboe in Kansas City
***
I wrote this poem earlier this year as my 10-line contribution to a 30-poet Renga titled Ghosts Over Water; and the Renga in turn was one facet of the AMERICA NOW AND HERE national celebration of all the arts which kicked off here in Kansas City. The unifying thematic thread for the Renga was Kansas City itself. But while most poets wrote more or less evocatively atmospheric urban slice of life pieces, I decided to go for broke and spectacularly fail by trying to compress into 10 lines--in a chain of 29 other 10-line links--the most overwhelming spiritual turning point and soul-transformative experience of my life. Impossible of course, but once the inspiration seized me, I felt I had no choice but to go for it.
Since that astounding night so long ago I've amassed a whole collection of spectacular failures--poems which attempt to square the circle by presuming to put into words something that's truly unspeakable. Nevertheless, isn't it time we begin to risk more courageously the scandalous absurdity of such heroic failures by opening out our personal and literary dialogues to encompass the invisible, ecstatic, transcendent dimensions of our lives? We're so glutted with suffocating information, but so poverty-stricken for insight, wisdom, revelation! As Emerson wrote: "We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that Divine Idea which each of us represents."
SONG OF THE SUPERNOVA
FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME I TRY TO STAMMER THE INEXPRESSIBLE--
THE GREAT SUPERNOVA THAT BLOWS MY MIND, INUNDATES MY HEART,
CAPSIZES MY SOUL. NEVER HAVE I FELT SO UTTERLY INADEQUATE!
ALL I CAN DO IS BOW LOW--BLIND, CLUELESS, GROPING FOR GRACE.
I REALIZE I'VE FAILED. BUT I HOPE AT LEAST THEY'LL SAY THIS:
HE NEVER TURNED BACK. HE FACED WONDERINGLY INTO THE LIGHT
AND KEPT ON STUMBLING FORWARD, CONSUMED BY A TRANSCENDENCE
WHICH OVERMASTERED HIM, STRIPPING HIM DOWN TO THE NAKED CORE.
YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PRESTIGIOUS PRIZES AND GLITTERING AWARDS.
I JUST WANT TO FALL IN LOVE, OVER AND OVER, WITH THE MYSTERY.
SO WHAT IF I'VE HARDLY HAD A DIME, OR EVEN A POT TO PISS IN.
THE EMPTIER I BECOME, THE VASTER THE UNIVERSE THAT FILLS ME!
STROKE YOURSELF, EVERYWHERE. KISS YOUR SHADOW TILL IT SHINES!
DON'T YOU KNOW? HAVEN'T YOU GUESSED YET? YOU ARE THE GLORY!
I AM THE SPLENDOR! WE ARE THOSE PRECIOUS PEARLS BEYOND PRICE!
ONCE THIS CAT GETS OUT OF THE BAG, ALL HEAVEN BREAKS LOOSE!
IF YOU SCRUTINIZE ANY ACT OF HATRED, OPPRESSION OR ABUSE,
YOU'LL DISCOVER IT ALWAYS SCREAMS "DENY YOUR OWN DIVINITY!"
DON'T. STAND FAST, WHATEVER THE COST. BELIEVE IN YOUR SOUL.
THAT STAR THAT EXPLODED? IT DECIDED TO BE REBORN--AS YOU.
***
Let's be talking more about this-- both the depths and the heights, and about how one can be threshold to the other. Let's break out of the toxic, soul-deadening trance to which our materialistic, post-modern dystopia addicts us. Let's swing the doors of our beings wide open once again to rediscover the vaster dimensions stretching beyond, around and within us.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across
the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
-- Rumi
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