Know Me … No Me
The extent of my own Christianity was my baptismal as an infant into the Catholic Church. Only once after did I sit in a pew and that was some two decades later for the funeral of my Grandfather. Watching the rituals and listening to the lifeless chants of “Lord hear our prayer”, I remember thinking I didn’t miss much in my absentee-faith childhood.
I declared myself an atheist for much of my life, tempered with the occasional agnostic concessions to appease my still Catholic father. My own sense is that I was drawn to a Zen practice because there appeared on the surface to be No God. Buddha was a man and his teachings were to question everything including the teachings themselves! This suited my need to apply the scientific method to my still emerging faith.
As my mind/body healing journey took me deeper into unknown dis-ease, I was fortunate to have the Grace and guides of the cosmos. Teachers and paracletes seemed to arrive just as I entered a new chapter. Indeed my quest for wellness turned into a mission for awakening.
In the middle of the road map there was something larger than the little “me” that I had come to call myself that was calling me back. “Turn back, towards that which you turned away from.” The words echoed in my mind, and I felt the breath of universal consciousness come into my body on a warm summer morning meditation.
But with each insight there seemed to be an even deeper fall into a pit of ill health. I knew without a doubt that “I” was not alone, yet what good was God if the Grace could not pull the “me” that I had come to know out of the suffering that was growing deeper still?
During a very dark summer of the soul, I spent three days in the bowels of a hospital (The Ward, as it was affectionately known to the nightshift nursing staff.) During my internment I endured every kind of endocrine and neurological test my insurance would cover. On day two one of the CNAs noticed that I was in complete breakdown and she came over to my bed closed the curtains around her and asked me if I wanted help to bathe. My body shaking and eyes filled with tears, I nodded yes.
She looked at me closely as she prepared the washbasin and then came right up into my eyes and said,
“I know I am not suppose to talk of such things, but I feel I must tell you this and I trust you will understand.”
I nodded again in silence. “I have always taught my children,” she began, “to seek God at every opportunity.”
My eyes filled with tears and she came even closer and touched my face as she continued,
“Because if God has to come seek you, then it is because you are in trouble indeed.”
My head, nodded again and again and the tears poured down my face. She took a warm washcloth and wiped my face gently and as she washed my back, I could feel her make the sign of the cross up my spine. Even in my weakened state I recognized the touch of an Angel in the middle of my own health-hell.
But the summer was still young and I had much further to fall before the true healing could begin. As my body broke down, I found myself unable to walk or even sit Zazen. Laying in bed one morning as the sun rose into my window, I could feel my back contract into a tight pain filled pretzel. From my head to my tail bone and across my broad shoulders the heat burned my bones. Just as the pain reached a crescendo, I could see in the iris of my mind a form lifting this “cross” off of my body and then laying Him-Self on top of me saying that He would ease the pain. And for that moment in the morning sun, the pain lifted and I was in total Peace.
Know Me the words echoed in my mind … and there was indeed No “me” to be found.
