Building Spirituality - Summation

It's Spring again, a time when most folks engage in the traditional Spring House Cleaning. Mop, vacuum, wash the walls and windows, and when you're done go around the neighborhood and gather up all the neighbors' trash and garbage and scatter it around the house.Of course you don't do that. Not with respect to your physical house. How about your spiritual house? That's a different story, isn't it. The world dumps its cares on you every evening via TV news; pick up the newspaper and read about the human tragedies in your own city or town. It's pretty depressing, and unless you're a masochist I would propose that you don't care to be depressed.


Depressed. Interesting word and in this context there is a peculiar irony to be found. Roughly, the word means to be "pushed in" and therein lies the irony and the choice: where you want to be pushed into. If you've been following this series of articles then you know that the Real World offers no security or peace of mind. The irony I mentioned is simply that the forces of Evil (Reality) are bringing about that which they fear the most: that you will retreat to your Center of Being, your Heart of Hearts where the Father dwells and awaits your pleasure. The key to happiness lies within you - and nowhere else! Oh, you can look up at the sky all you want; in the daytime you'll see clouds and a sky that used to be bluer, at night you'll see stars. That's all there is up there. Jesus wasn't kidding when he said, "Think not what you will eat of wear...the Father knows ye have need of these things." Did you get that last part? Your father. Maybe this sounds too much like religion, though it doesn't have to. Call it your better judgement, instinct, intuition, whatever; the point is that it's there and you KNOW it! Just think back to some crisis in your life, a time when you thought it was all over. At the last moment you found a way out; someone gave you the right thought, a material resource, or simple friendship, or more than likely you got an inspired thought, a brilliant solution to your problem - and it seemed to come from nowhere. Bulletin: It wasn't from nowhere!

Unfortunately, many people have to hit rock bottom before turning inward. Some never do, and a high percentage of these commit suicide, others are incarcerated for life in mental institutions, none knowing that each and every one had within himself the key to salvation. It's true. This is not a theory but my own personal experience.

For many years I was lost in an alcoholic fog as I tried to make my way through the Real World. Several childhood issues mandated that life would be hard for me: I was soul damaged but didn't realize it. I went to a Catholic parochial school and received a great education along with heavy doses of indoctrination into a toxic belief system that only served to feed my fear and confusion. I got drunk the first time at the age of seven years and that seemed to give me a way out. The euphoria was irrestistable, I felt there was nothing I couldn't do. Alcohol erased any bad feelings I had about myself; it helped me overcome the feelings of uselessness, self pity, and unworthiness that were so deeply ingrained in my psyche. It was my best friend. It led me down the primrose path to self-destruction, but the problem wasn't alcohol: the problem was my warped view of God, the world, and my place in it. Today I enjoy a life that I couldn't have dreamed for myself.

I went all the way down. At 4:00AM on March 1st, 1981, my eyes were open. The past, which had been a source of guilt and remorse all my life, suddenly became the basis of my recovery. I spent a years doing dangerous things, in dangerous places, with dangerous people. In my life I have known five murderers and two of their victims. I have had loaded weapons pointed at me on four different occasions; three of the parties were angry (one was a cop who was as drunk as I was), and one was a friend who was horsing around with a .45 Colt 1911A automatic pistol. That was the only time the weapon in question went off - at point blank range - and missed! Other instances of personal peril occurred to me, and each time I was spared by some power that I couldn't identify and largely ignored: I was just lucky!Lucky? Hmmm. The greatest reminder of this "luck" involved a miracle that took place sometime in September of 1958. I was in the army, training in New Jersey, and four weeks into my enlistment I started bleeding profusely from the nose. I was rushed to the hospital where I spent three days awake: I couldn't fall asleep because the dctors couldn't figure out why I was bleeding so. If I fell asleep I would never wake up again: that was quite clear. On the morning of the fourth day I was exhausted, fifteen pounds lighter, and suffering a monumental depression. There was only one place to turn.

"God, whatever you are, wherever you are," I said in extremis. "I have this problem and don't know what to do. I want to sleep so badly, but I don't know if to give up would be suicide." The reason I had to remain awake all this time was because I had to keep finger pressure apllied to the side of my nose to slow the bleeding. Even so I had to be wheeled to a latrine every three hours to evacuate a stomach full off blood. So, with whole blood flowing into one arm, glucose and water into the other, I turned my to the last refuge I could think of. "In my twenty years I've never done anything worthwhile," I concluded. "This might be my last chance to do the right thing; so I'll do my best to stay awake - the rest is up to you." Shortly thereafter a nurse and an orderly pushing a wheelchair rushed into the ward and whisked me off to another part of the hospital. A doctor, a major was waiting for me an an examining room where he started running some tests. One of these was a simus test so painful that I passed out. I was told later that an officer's wife came into the room and went into hysterics: she thought I was dead. I thought so too when I returned to consciousness; I was being wheeled down a corridor with a cloth over my face. The first thought that came to mind: "I didn't make it." The next thing I knew the same doctor, now in scrubs, fanned the cloth away from my face and told me they knew what was wrong and that he was going to fix it. And he did.

I found out only later what had happened. After the operation I was taken to the recovery room where I slept for a day and a half. WhenI awoke a nurse who'd stayed with me through one night was there. I asked her what happened and she told me that it was the strangest thing she'd ever witnessed. While I was talking to "whatever you are, wherever you are" an air force lieutenant was being admitted to the hospital with the EXACT SAME CONDITION! They figured out what was wrong with him (cartilage growing through the sinus membrane, the result of an earlier accident: broken nose) and somebody remembered me - four days later.

That, friends, is what I call a miracle. I was still a lost soul relying on "luck" which some years later ran out. It was on that early morning in March of 1981, when I was at my lowest, deepest and darkest despair that I was reminded of that time in that army hospital when I faced death. The voice that speaks to me through my thoughts said, "Remember when things were really hopeless, and you turned to me?" For the first time, I actually heard it.

I've been listening ever since.