Separation

When Galaxies Collide

Hubble Telescope (Stars are forming in the light blue areas!)

Indulge a flair for grandiosity for a moment. The physical world is, after all, a mirror of the spiritual one, and we really are made of the stuff of the stars. Anyway, it occurred to me this morning that a new relationship between two people is a lot like the collision of two immense star systems.

“Trapped in their mutual orbit around each other,” NASA’s report of one such meeting says, “these two galaxies will continue to distort and disrupt each other. Eventually, billions of years from now, they will merge into a single, more massive galaxy.”

When these two pools of light come together, clouds of luminous dust form at the edges of the joining and filaments of energy are sent out in every direction for hundreds of thousands of light years—truly an echo heard down the ages. The shape of each system changes as new forces exert their pull. Worlds cease to exist, vaporized under the intense pressure. New stars are born, the dark sky lights up, and eventually the two unite into a larger, still more radiant whole—or do they? What if the core of each star system remains whole, even as it enters into some new symmetry with the other that, from a distance, only appears to be a single shining entity?

The thing about galaxies is that their light and substance are concentrated at their core; that’s where the attractive forces are strongest, the brilliance most incandescent. People are like that, too: at the core of their being resides the soul, that eternal source of light and life from which spring spiritual energy, deep knowledge, great wisdom. So when two souls venture into close orbit, one with another, strong forces begin to act on them, energy is created and released, new realities and insights form even as old ideas and habits are given up, and all those who are near them are affected. And at the center of their relationship, the individual souls remain, even though from a distance it may seem that a larger, brighter reality has come into being.

I was thinking about all of this because of a conversation with a new friend, who said she realized she had been looking for love in all the wrong places (with due respect to Johnny Lee): relying on others to make her feel loved, sacred, beautiful; when all along those things had to come from inside her own being. The thought resonated with me as I realized that I, too, had been relying on others for validation, that my sense of confidence was rooted, not within me, but in others’ reactions to me. Maybe one reason I have missed Amelia so much is that, despite my own sense of inner strength and resources, still I had come to rely on her for my sense of my own value—a reflected reality instead of one that shines from the inside.

All of which brings one back to those deep issues of purpose and identity: Who am I, really? What is my purpose in the world, and my value to myself and to others? And where does love really stem from?

The thought that came up was to look at all the blessings in my life and to reflect that those evidences of divine love are a part of me, and came my way not because of anything worthwhile I’ve done or because I look good in a business suit (which I do, by the way…) or because I have a sense of humor (some…a very few…people think I do). No, blessings come because that’s what God does; He loves me, as He loves all His creation. If the One Who made everything loves me, then maybe it’s OK for me to love me, too. By the same token, when I have been most angry at Him, trying my very best to push Him out of my life, He has refused to budge. He even found a way to tell me, straight up, that I could say whatever I wanted and He was not going to go away, because He understood my fear and my rage and it was all all right. But that’s another story.

Without pretending to have any answers, it nevertheless seems true that when this kind of confidence becomes a part of one’s inmost being, and all the doubts about one’s own worth or capacity have been replaced with reliance on a loving God as the source of one’s being, then relationships can develop from strength to strength; and from a position of strength each helps the other to develop, delights in their progress and also one’s own, and each has the chance truly to discover and realize their full potential. Each has a brilliant core of light which can be shared and, ultimately, united into something greater than the separate parts.

Or so it seemed this morning. It was something like that.

“Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.” Bahá'u'lláh

Six Months

I was doing pretty well today until our old Hospice's grief counselor called to remind me that it's six months today since Amelia passed. Now I'm feeling some grief. I won't call the turkey back!

And so I'm letting myself feel this for a little while. Too bad, really, for my office work. But I went back through some pictures, including this one of Amelia looking out at the Sedona mountains from her practitioner's office. There are others: of her smile, laughing at some joke even though by then everyone knew she only had weeks left, of our arrival in Sedona full of hope for her treatment, or of her drawn expression as she stood looking off into space, pondering no doubt her next stage. I've had to stop a few times.

My life has been, actually, quite full of the future, and I had forgotten this milestone, so complete was my focus on today's needs and some of the happiness I've found over the last couple of weeks. Let's pause to thank the grief counselor one more time....

I took flowers to my little Amelia last Sunday, kind of a rainy nasty day, but I wanted to go and it would be a while before I could go again. As I placed the blooms on her resting place, sadness assaulted me one more time--no form or shape, just lamentation. But it passed, and I talked with her about the woman I am getting to know, asked her advice, thanked her for her help.

Because she has helped. One night, I was at home, about 9:30 in the evening, and I started to say a prayer for my new friend, who I knew was facing some difficult challenges--probably right then, in fact, and she thought so too when we spoke the next day. As I began the prayer my eyes strayed around the room, finally coming to rest on the picture taken the day of our son Husayn's wedding. My vision narrowed down, tunneling in on Amelia's dear face--an extraordinary feeling, and wholly involuntary. The thought came into my mind fully formed, almost as if it had traveled up my visual "pipeline," that Amelia and my new friend share some of the same qualities of character: they are alike in their strength and determination, their compassion and caring for others, their insistence on honor, truthfulness and trustworthiness. I knew this was a gift from Amelia, this insight that explained part of why I feel so at home in this new friendship. Why I feel it is all right to move into the future, however haltingly at first.

I thanked Amelia then, and again at her graveside, and again every day since for this fresh evidence of her generous spirit and her love. It's six months, sure, but she is not really gone.

"Robe her in the mantle of Thy grace, bright with the ornaments of the celestial Paradise,...heal her griefs with the balm of Thy reunion...." --'Abdu'l-Bahá

Unworthy

Moonrise over Sedona

Here’s a riddle: Who is man, in the vast scheme of things, that he might be considered worthy? Or: What person is truly worthy, as the dictionary defines it:

Worthy: having worth; valuable; estimable. 2. Having adequate merit; meriting.

And the root word, worth:

Worth: that quality or sum of qualities of a thing rendering it valuable or useful; value…2. Moral or personal excellence, merit. Worth implies intrinsic excellence, importance.

From one vantage point, there is no one who is worthy. We are all on the same footing before God: helpless, negligent, unworthy. “Who…am I that I should dare to stand at the gate of the city of Thy nearness, or set my face toward the lights that are shining from the heaven of Thy will?....I blush to lift up my face to Thee, and my longing hands are ashamed to stretch forth toward the heaven of Thy bounty.”

By what possible stretch of the word might I have been deemed worthy of Amelia? What value had I that could compare with her courage and strength, her tender, unfailing concern for others—and for me—or that could match her noble, regal, radiant spirit? How could I possibly merit the gift of all her years, or been deserving of her tears when, in almost our last embrace, she lamented as if her heart might break that we would soon be parted?

Or, although to a much lesser degree, she of me? As I came to value her more, virtues came forth in me, as well. In our early years here in America I was oblivious, but when Amelia decided to advance her education, for example, thank God I understood, and so I worked hard to help her achieve her goal: hours reading her assignments and then discussing them with her, hours editing her papers or, sometimes, writing them to her specifications, since English was so difficult for her to master; and then all over again as she pursued a master’s degree. And this was just one facet of our lives together.

How we delighted in each other, whether we were consulting on decisions to be made, or finding ways of showing each other how much we cared, or observing our wonderful boys, or just laughing together at the things life brought us; how much we both developed as we learned truly to value each other as the wonderful, fallible souls we were!

The riddle takes another twist when we add Bahá'u'lláh’s statement on the intrinsic excellence of man:

“…From that which hath been said it becometh evident that all things, in their inmost reality, testify to the revelation of the names and attributes of God within them. Each according to its capacity, indicateth, and is expressive of, the knowledge of God….Man, the noblest and most perfect of all created things, excelleth them all in the intensity of this revelation, and is a fuller expression of its glory.”

Man has the greatest value of all, then, the greatest worth. Is this not the basis for the notion that we “deserve,” in the very best sense, the good things life has to offer?

So: on the one hand, none of us can ever be worthy, while on the other, who is there that might be called worthy except each of us in our station has the human creation of an all-loving Creator, Who in His mercy and grace has placed us at the apex of His creation?

Therefore I deserve but am unworthy of love; of happiness; of all the pain and uncertainty which lead to deeper understanding; of delight in the company of another, of the music of her voice, the light in her eyes, and of her touch that brings serenity to my soul and roots me in this world. Yet all of these things I have experienced. What miracle is this?

I think it is the grace of God, and He shares the secret key that reconciles these seeming opposites in a prayer called the Tablet of Ahmad. It lies right near the end of the Tablet, easy to overlook: “These favors have We bestowed upon thee as a bounty on Our part and a mercy from Our presence, that thou mayest be of those who are grateful.”

I am not worthy, except perhaps in some vast cosmic sense; but I am grateful.

Women and Men

A sometime visitor to this site sent a very special email yesterday that has had me thinking all day today.
This sweet lady wrote about how, after the passing of her husband, it is the first time in years that she hasn’t felt the need to put someone else in the family first, that she doesn’t need to compromise now or give up what she would most like to do at any given moment; and then she worried that using the rest of her life to see, do and experience sounds selfish. Missing the companionship of her husband, still she knows she did the very best for him, during their lives together, that she could.

Her comments came together in my head with a passing remark of another friend, to the effect that maybe it’s easier for women to do without men, but much harder for a man to be alone. And I’ve been thinking about my own experience, of feeling so bereft and alone without a partner. Here are some of the thoughts that have come up.

I’ve not done research about any of this, but it seems likely that a great many marriages involve an unequal sharing of the burdens of daily life (a firm grasp of the obvious, you’ll say!). I say this without judging: we are so much the product of our parents and the models we see around us, and in most of those examples it is the woman that does most of the hard daily work around the house. So when a man has difficulty following the loss of his wife, on a basic level it can often be about all the things he just doesn’t know how to do: cook, launder, shop, clean up, iron his own shirts, and so on. Might not, then, a lot of these men actually be looking for another unpaid maid?

The woman, on the other hand, is now free of the drudgery. No wonder she can sometimes get along better, comparatively, than a man, especially since she knows how to do so much basic stuff that men, for various reasons, never learn to do. For the first time, perhaps, the woman can find her way clear to explore who she really is, what capacities she possesses that she might only have glimpsed through all the years of marriage.

Our marriage with Amelia, for a lot of our years together, was like this pattern. I blush to think of how much I took her for granted, how little she complained, how patiently she embraced our life together; and how very grateful I am that, at the end, she forgave me those mistakes. It is true that she took real pleasure in putting others first; there were only moments, very occasionally, where she questioned or lamented her circumstances, and she balanced all this with an ardent determination to expand her own inner resources and capacities through education and spiritual discipline.

But in the last years of her life here, something wonderful happened. I think it was because of our faith, really, and its emphasis on equality between women and men. As she faced the possibility of her death, and we both tried to come to grips with this unthinkable thing, we became much more candid with each other—why waste time, after all, if it’s going to be measured in mere weeks or months? And that candor, only occasionally with an edge, forced us to talk about, and think about, the tasks and responsibilities of the house, of our work, of our family; and gradually we made changes. Of course, there was also her fading physical strength that made routine things simply impossible; and there was the extraordinary support of my employer, which enabled me to invest time in supporting Amelia and picking up things she was no longer doing.

What was touching was the fact that some of these things, which really she needn’t have been doing at all, were hard for her to let go: the cooking, for instance, or driving me to the train or paying the bills. I guess for her to stop doing them represented small defeats, even if they were chores she didn’t especially like doing, and thank God I understood that, so we were able to talk about her feelings and, gradually, to get her to see that she had already done enough. She began to feel that her time for those tasks was past, and that I really was happy to take them over out of love for her, and out of gratitude; and the realization lightened her burden considerably. People would sometimes be surprised that I would make a point out of holding a door open for Amelia; but what they didn’t know was that her courage and undiminished love had created in my own heart such tenderness and admiration that I did these things out of love, yes, but also out of respect for such a magnificent spirit.

And so over those years, even when her strength was still good, we strove for a more equal sharing of responsibilities, a more equal valuation of our time and our priorities. That was when I learned to ask her what she would most like to do, what it would make her happiest to do with an afternoon; and she learned not to deflect the question, but instead to tell me the answer, and then doing those things brought us both such satisfaction. Indeed, we both learned things: I the skills of the home that I had so carefully, if sometimes unknowingly, avoided acquiring; and she, to accept her true value, to articulate her feelings and preferences, to let go of things I could now be doing. In this way, we both grew.

These thoughts are not being written to say how great we were. Rather, the hope is to illustrate how sweet it can be, and how useful, for a couple to share equally in what life brings, and what it demands. My shame is that it took the threat of death to force the learning; my gratitude is that it happened at all, and that now I can make a richer contribution to a shared life with the new partner God will eventually send.

When you stop to think about it, living today requires us all to be heroes, unless we give up or are simply overwhelmed by tests. And I think that is especially true of women: the whole system was made, after all, to favor people like me, not like Amelia. When I think of how Amelia’s fortitude called forth such feelings of tenderness as I had never known, how much happiness I derived from showing her how much I admired her, then I have to think how wonderful it will be when we all finally learn to see each other through those eyes.

The Question of Guidance

From Mt. Desert Island/Maine

One of the things I’m learning about fear and desperation is that they are great motivators. Who wants to keep feeling this way, if there’s any chance of an alternative? So here’s what happened this weekend.

I had been feeling really down all weekend, worried and fearful over losing this special new friendship that has enriched the days so greatly over the last six weeks. Never mind that the fears were baseless. Never mind, in fact, that fearing the loss of something can be the surest way actually of losing it. I knew these things but felt powerless to stem the rising tide of anxiety inside my confused, tired mind.

Desperate, I turned to prayer, begging God fervently to give me understanding, to guide me out of the maze of my emotions toward a place of calm and serenity. I read, in one of the prayers, these words: “I love, in this state, O my Lord to beg of Thee all that is with Thee, that I may demonstrate my poverty, and magnify Thy bounty and Thy riches, and may declare my powerlessness, and manifest Thy power and Thy might.” In the quiet moments after the prayer I reflected on what I knew of God’s power and might. The ocean came to mind—vast, deep, powerful beyond comprehension, and in its depths, a great calm. And I remembered the wind, a force that can move great objects, that dances effortlessly over vast distances, untroubled by any obstacle. These were qualities I wanted to reflect in my life, not the fear and anxiety that seemed to have taken control. But how to accomplish this? The thought came that somehow this, too, was something He could do; it was not by my effort alone that it would come. Here was, at least, a moment of peacefulness: somehow the answer would come.

Hours went by. Knowing I had to keep busy, I had the idea to begin researching the book Amelia and I had so often discussed. Some time ago I had found a book by a fellow diagnosed thirty years ago with multiple sclerosis; thinking it might be similar to the one we had envisioned, I bought the book and today, for the first time, dipped into it to see what voice the author used, how the book was structured. Time passed, constructively.

And then tonight I began gathering together Amelia’s books and papers. The book to be will include passages and concepts that she found helpful in her struggle with cancer. One book I knew she had liked very much, Closer than Your Life’s Vein, I could not find. For some reason, I kept looking; forty minutes passed, and then I found it. Sitting down to begin what I thought would be my academic exercise in research, to my great surprise I found instead the guidance I had been asking for so earnestly these past several days.

The author, Henry Weil, begins his work with a discussion of the emotions. He asserts that we do not, as so many today contend, have positive and negative emotions; we have spiritual and material qualities. Our feelings are the indicators God has created to tell us whether it is the spiritual or the material side of our human nature that is controlling at any given moment. Fear, anxiety, self-pity—these are all reflections, Weil writes, of our material nature; they are material qualities.

But here’s the key: we do not diminish the material qualities by suppressing them, inherently a negative act. Rather, we strive to manifest spiritual qualities, a positive action that serves to redress the balance. By opposing the material qualities with force, trying to quash them, we actually reinforce their power; we must take positive action, and so move to a new equilibrium. The causes that elicit fear and anxiety are often our recognition that we cannot control what the Bahá'í Writings call the “accidents of life”—illness, financial setbacks, death—and our unwillingness to surrender our sense of control, however illusory it really is. These tests are to be endured; they are sent by God as part of His plan for our development. “To the sincere ones,” 'Abdu'l-Bahá writes, “tests are as a gift from God, the Exalted, for a heroic person hasteneth, with the utmost joy and gladness, to the tests of a violent battlefield, but the coward is afraid and trembles and utters moaning and lamentation….Likewise, the pure gold shineth radiantly in the fire of test.” Ultimately, tests are given us to help us become noble, refined, able to manifest the power of God instead of relying only on the small measure of human power we might possess.

The similarity between these descriptions of, if you will, the “wrong” response to tests and the behavior with which I have been leaning on the patience of those I love, was too close to ignore. Eagerly I searched this heaven-sent book for the answer, and there it was: the opposite, in spiritual terms, of fear and anxiety, is to offer praise and gratitude to God for having sent these tests. Does not one rejoice in receiving a gift from one’s beloved?

Realization dawns that an apology is owed to friends and family: I have been speaking to them out of the depths of this misery, when we could have been sharing the joy of new beginnings, the happiness that comes from knowing God is, indeed, with us and has showered us with His blessings—whether in the form of tests for our growth, or of the many gifts He has sent. I hope their patience with me will last a bit longer!

Peeling the Onion

“If either of you decides not to explore a relationship any longer,” he asked, “what would that mean to you?”

“Loss,” I replied.

“And how do you feel about that?”

“Sad. Sad about losing a chance to be with someone so special. Afraid.”

“Why are you afraid?”

“Because of being alone. I don’t want to be alone.”

“What does being alone mean for you?”

“It means being alone in the house. Being alone through the night. Not being able to share with anyone. Sure, I have two great sons and the privilege of some dear friends, but it’s not the same. Sometimes it feels like there’s just no point in doing anything: why make the effort, what is there to get excited about, if nothing can be shared that way, if there is no one who wants to share their life or their experiences with me?”

“’What’s the point,’ you say. Is that like, what’s the point of living?”

“Yeah. Sometimes it all feels so flat, that there’s nothing to get me going, nothing I’m interested in. No purpose”

“But living, life, is about purpose, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“So what is your purpose?”

And there it was, the hard question: once we got through all the outer layers, there in the therapist’s office yesterday morning, it turned out that it all, this new phase of life, is at bottom about purpose. What is my purpose in life?

I had thought we were going to talk about relationships, about the issues that come up when you begin to think about that next important step in life, after losing your partner. The dance had begun for me and it was tearing me up inside: anxiety, sleeplessness, self-doubt—all the really fun stuff. But he started trying to find out where those emotions and the stress were coming from: “Follow the emotion to the thought, the belief,” he said. “Stress often arises when our experience differs from our belief, our thought about how an experience should be; change the thought, you change the emotion. You believe you should be connected now, and you’re not; all that has changed, and the connection you enjoyed for 30 years is gone now, it has evolved into something else, something new. So where does that leave you now?”

So as we spoke, it became clear that my fear of loss is very strong right now, having just lost Amelia; that anything that looks like a loss feels like another death. But really, it was about purpose: my purpose for the last four years was to be Amelia’s caretaker, and now that’s over. Who am I, and why am I here? And the really hard part is that before those four years, my purpose was to be a husband, father, worker, provider—all kinds of things, but things that really exist on the surface. The demands of the day, together with the toughness of the essential questions, had all conspired to keep at bay the moment when I would have to ask who I am and why have I come here.

Death changed all that. No escape now, in the dark stretches of the night; just me and the questions. I had arrived at this moment unprepared, defenseless, confused.

“I believe,” he said, “that God brings us into the world with a plan. He’s interested in me, in the details of my life, and He has a plan for how my life will go. Do you believe that, too?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then has that plan changed with Amelia’s passing? With this new relationship you are exploring?”

“Not really, I think.”

“I’d agree. When everything is going along well—my family’s healthy, I have some income, I’m working—then I feel OK about things; but that’s not purpose. All those things are details—important, nice details—and they kind of exist on another level. Purpose, God’s plan for my life, exists at a much deeper level. Things can happen in life, but that doesn’t affect the fact that I am a creation of God and I am walking toward Him all my life. In fact, I believe sometimes He changes the details as part of His plan for me; there’s a reason these things happen.”

We talked about the path each of us takes in life; how it’s shaped by our choices, and also by destiny. When a moment of crisis comes, the first impulse is to take a detour around it, pick up the path a little farther down. The better thing to do, though, is to resist that temptation and, instead, pause a bit. “God knew this crisis was going to happen,” the therapist suggested, “so He has something to say in it; pause, wait for Him to make clear what He wants you to learn here.”

As our conversation continued, I could begin to glimpse the work I still had to do, had never actually done before. And I could see that how I was feeling about the possibility of a new relationship had nothing, really, to do with whether the relationship was “right” or not, whether she is “the one” or not. That’s a different sort of question—an important one, but not the same. The fear of loss was making me relate to her in a way that, circumstances being different, I would not have done: a tendency to hold tighter, to push harder toward a goal neither of us has any way of knowing, yet, is the best goal for us both.

So I could begin to relax about “where are we going” and begin to enjoy “where we are today.” Take some time to let a relationship unfold at its own pace, which is really God’s pace. If we are serious about wanting what He wants for us, then we have to let Him work His will. That’s a choice we make: to recognize that He’s the only One who knows “what profiteth me or harmeth me” and, having understood that, commit to letting go, to trusting in His grace.

And then I have to do that other work in other ways: think about purpose, study Bahá'u'lláh’s Writings to see what He says about the purpose of life, about how that insight relates to me now. Let the fear subside. Think calmly. Feel the emotions that are here, in this place, now.

Surf

The surf moves constantly, never the same twice, always different, a lot like the people one meets in life. Sometimes they are dark, sometimes luminous and full of light. They may come gently into our lives or they may crash in, heavily, changing the shape of the shore; or, as seems to happen when the tide is changing, they can surprise you, looking from a distance like gentle new arrivals that, when they hit the rocks, cast up a sudden shower of spray. Each wave that breaks, whether gently or powerfully, brings something new, maybe a little wreckage they picked up out there in the distance, but always new life, too.

The woman I met in Haifa was one of the last type: radiant with light, certainly, and looking from a distance like a gentle swell that would roll in gracefully; but as she met the shore, she came in with surprising force. I remember once playing with the waves, trying to guess when and how far up the rocks they would break, and one of them caught me completely by surprise, drenching me with a sudden burst of spray that, on the windy day in question, soon had me shivering. In just the same way, yesterday she gave me some news that hit with a muffled boom and left me shivering.

I would say I was a modest rock on this mythical shore, sturdy and hard to shift, but certainly not one of those house-sized blocks of dark stone that weather storms effortlessly. I move, at least with the larger waves. There are some chips and cracks on my surface, to be sure, and highlights and shadows that the sun picks out as it moves across the sky. There are little pools on my surface, too, full of surprises: the tides have left their gifts there for passersby to discover, and generally to their delight. The thing is this: a lot of waves have come in, some caressingly soft and others with pounding force; and I am still here. The stone shows the effects; this most recent wave has most certainly changed the shape and contours of this worn old rock, coming as she did with surprising force just at the turning of the tide.

You want to watch your footing, when the tide turns.