There is a prayer that goes in part: “Oh God, by the light of the Holy Spirit you have taught the hearts of the faithful/ grant that in the same spirit we may be truly wise…” This recalls the celebration of Pentecost 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus, when the Holy Spirit visited the apostles as they sat huddled and afraid in the Upper Room. Without reading or meditation, they were given an inside vision of God and the truth about existence, so much so that they burst forth from their hide-away to spread the word in spite of every form of persecution. Such is the impact of the knowledge of God that we not only do not fear death, but do not fear a very excruciating death. In the prayer above, we ask for this holy knowledge. Given the worldly fate it brought to the Apostles, we might guess that to ask for such knowledge is insane.
Still, I have added that prayer to my regimen as one of my favorites. Knowledge, after all, is what drives us all, whether it be knowledge of engines, of our political opponents, or of cosmic truths. The later has always been my primary objective, and so, like an explorer who must suffer starvation, misery and often death to satiate his desire for discovery, I lightly accepted the possible downside to knowledge. And just as young adventurers must learn, accepting the price should not be taken lightly because someday, sooner or later, it will be exacted.
So the first major payment – I am certain there will be others – was demanded recently in a very curious way. We had just returned from a two-week pilgrimage to Spain and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had focused nearly all our intentions on the wonders of the Holy. We were slipping back into our routine with a hike in a nearby park when very intense chest pains stopped me in my tracks. After several minutes they began to diminish, which is when my wife went to her iPhone to search for the reason behind the symptoms. With upper center chest pains radiating to arms and shoulders and jaw, the quicky i-doctor said it could only mean one of two similar things: pectoral angina or a full-on heart attack. In either case, it was a matter of the heart, and one doesn’t mess around with an ailing heart. Even so, I waited nearly one month as the pains continued before contacting the real doctors.
As it goes with older people who have insurance, one thing led to another and then to the nuclear scanning machine that demands an injection of radioactive material and costs a fortune. This was done twice, once at rest and once after a heavy work-out on the treadmill. Oddly, by the time the tests were done, I had already concluded that the pains were not of the heart but from digestion issues. A few days later, I was told that odd irregularities were detected, but nothing of a fatal nature. I was advised to see a cardiologist non-the-less, who will want to do more things no doubt, but I’m done with that. It seems that I can push away the fear of a near-future death from heart failure and perhaps live long enough to discover the joys of dying from stroke or cancer.
But all that is almost exclusively of interest to me. More importantly, what came to me during that month between the onset of pains and the tests was an agony of unexpected emotions. While my conscious self was resigned to the “fact” that I would have to undergo major surgery or perhaps even die and soon, something within myself and beyond my control was not. It worried, it was astonished, it could not believe; it dragged me through a nightmarish twilight of anxiety as weird and uncomfortable as a bad psychotropic trip. How could this happen to ME? How could such horrors ever come to disturb the wonders of ME?
Oddly, these soundings from my interior were the best things that have happened in a long while. They showed how meaningless nearly everything outside of family, Spirit, and life itself was; and more, they proved the shallowness of my faith, and also the potential power that is in faith. I had never questioned the eternal nature of the soul, but the stark contrast of this belief to my animal fear made this belief more pronounced. It also highlighted – in spades – the essential necessity of this belief in our lives. This was an obvious sign that I had more work to do. Still, it showed that gaining higher ground was not only possible but natural, for this higher ‘self’ existed within, around, and beyond the animal fear. Deep inside I knew, as we all know, that the better part of us shares in the eternal quality of our Maker. To bring this reality time and again to the conscious self is essential for dying a good death. I am certain this can be done. Thus is the value of crises.
A day after the test results, we set out to La Crosse, WI, to participate in what is being called the Eucharistic Revival that will culminate in a huge gathering in Indianapolis this July. For us, the event began with a walk across a Mississippi River bridge that took us from Minnesota to Wisconsin, moving ever eastward. As we walked and the chest pains came and went, I was told that this day, June 7, was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What a coincidence. It also happened to be my birthday, a calendar-driven symbol of birth, continuity, and inevitable death. As we moved closer to the building where the speakers for the event would be, we saw a friend standing on a corner where we were supposed to turn. She said hello and wished me a happy birthday. Behind her was a priest who heard her and exclaimed, “It’s my birthday, too!” Odd as this might be, this was the first person I had ever met in my entire life who shared my birthday. Our friend asked that he give me a blessing, which he did. He first dipped his hand into a small container of holy oil, which is used for blessing both the newly baptized and the dying.
‘Make for yourself a new heart,’ the Bible tells us again and again. ‘The law shall now be written in your hearts’ Jesus claims. It has always been about the heart, about our deepest self, and how we must come to realize its connection to God and eternity, our deepest reality. To ignore this call to live from the heart is to live in constant disarray, our happiness dependent on every moment that fate and fortune throws our way. Even if we get nothing but the best, there is nothing to stop ultimate defeat, the loss of everything that depends on the charms and things of this world.
To make a new heart, we must experience in full the pain and uncertainty that this world brings. I don’t believe that there is any other way to wake us from the dream -world cocoon we have created from our routines. There is nothing routine about death and dying. We are not safe here, and no routine will save us from the annihilation of our cocoon. But we are made for the eternal, and sometimes we are shown that this is true in the most imaginative ways. Sometimes it happens that we find that our birthdays are linked to a sacred heart that can heal our own; and sometimes we get a surprise visit from an angel who shares our own birth and offers us rebirth into a world without end.
There is a prayer that goes in part: “Oh God, by the light of the Holy Spirit you have taught the hearts of the faithful/ grant that in the same spirit we may be truly wise…” This recalls the celebration of Pentecost 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus, when the Holy Spirit visited the apostles as they sat huddled and afraid in the Upper Room. Without reading or meditation, they were given an inside vision of God and the truth about existence, so much so that they burst forth from their hide-away to spread the word in spite of every form of persecution. Such is the impact of the knowledge of God that we not only do not fear death, but do not fear a very excruciating death. In the prayer above, we ask for this holy knowledge. Given the worldly fate it brought to the Apostles, we might guess that to ask for such knowledge is insane.
Still, I have added that prayer to my regimen as one of my favorites. Knowledge, after all, is what drives us all, whether it be knowledge of engines, of our political opponents, or of cosmic truths. The later has always been my primary objective, and so, like an explorer who must suffer starvation, misery and often death to satiate his desire for discovery, I lightly accepted the possible downside to knowledge. And just as young adventurers must learn, accepting the price should not be taken lightly because someday, sooner or later, it will be exacted.
So the first major payment – I am certain there will be others – was demanded recently in a very curious way. We had just returned from a two-week pilgrimage to Spain and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had focused nearly all our intentions on the wonders of the Holy. We were slipping back into our routine with a hike in a nearby park when very intense chest pains stopped me in my tracks. After several minutes they began to diminish, which is when my wife went to her iPhone to search for the reason behind the symptoms. With upper center chest pains radiating to arms and shoulders and jaw, the quicky i-doctor said it could only mean one of two similar things: pectoral angina or a full-on heart attack. In either case, it was a matter of the heart, and one doesn’t mess around with an ailing heart. Even so, I waited nearly one month as the pains continued before contacting the real doctors.
As it goes with older people who have insurance, one thing led to another and then to the nuclear scanning machine that demands an injection of radioactive material and costs a fortune. This was done twice, once at rest and once after a heavy work-out on the treadmill. Oddly, by the time the tests were done, I had already concluded that the pains were not of the heart but from digestion issues. A few days later, I was told that odd irregularities were detected, but nothing of a fatal nature. I was advised to see a cardiologist non-the-less, who will want to do more things no doubt, but I’m done with that. It seems that I can push away the fear of a near-future death from heart failure and perhaps live long enough to discover the joys of dying from stroke or cancer.
But all that is almost exclusively of interest to me. More importantly, what came to me during that month between the onset of pains and the tests was an agony of unexpected emotions. While my conscious self was resigned to the “fact” that I would have to undergo major surgery or perhaps even die and soon, something within myself and beyond my control was not. It worried, it was astonished, it could not believe; it dragged me through a nightmarish twilight of anxiety as weird and uncomfortable as a bad psychotropic trip. How could this happen to ME? How could such horrors ever come to disturb the wonders of ME?
Oddly, these soundings from my interior were the best things that have happened in a long while. They showed how meaningless nearly everything outside of family, Spirit, and life itself was; and more, they proved the shallowness of my faith, and also the potential power that is in faith. I had never questioned the eternal nature of the soul, but the stark contrast of this belief to my animal fear made this belief more pronounced. It also highlighted – in spades – the essential necessity of this belief in our lives. This was an obvious sign that I had more work to do. Still, it showed that gaining higher ground was not only possible but natural, for this higher ‘self’ existed within, around, and beyond the animal fear. Deep inside I knew, as we all know, that the better part of us shares in the eternal quality of our Maker. To bring this reality time and again to the conscious self is essential for dying a good death. I am certain this can be done. Thus is the value of crises.
A day after the test results, we set out to La Crosse, WI, to participate in what is being called the Eucharistic Revival that will culminate in a huge gathering in Indianapolis this July. For us, the event began with a walk across a Mississippi River bridge that took us from Minnesota to Wisconsin, moving ever eastward. As we walked and the chest pains came and went, I was told that this day, June 7, was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What a coincidence. It also happened to be my birthday, a calendar-driven symbol of birth, continuity, and inevitable death. As we moved closer to the building where the speakers for the event would be, we saw a friend standing on a corner where we were supposed to turn. She said hello and wished me a happy birthday. Behind her was a priest who heard her and exclaimed, “It’s my birthday, too!” Odd as this might be, this was the first person I had ever met in my entire life who shared my birthday. Our friend asked that he give me a blessing, which he did. He first dipped his hand into a small container of holy oil, which is used for blessing both the newly baptized and the dying.
‘Make for yourself a new heart,’ the Bible tells us again and again. ‘The law shall now be written in your hearts’ Jesus claims. It has always been about the heart, about our deepest self, and how we must come to realize its connection to God and eternity, our deepest reality. To ignore this call to live from the heart is to live in constant disarray, our happiness dependent on every moment that fate and fortune throws our way. Even if we get nothing but the best, there is nothing to stop ultimate defeat, the loss of everything that depends on the charms and things of this world.
To make a new heart, we must experience in full the pain and uncertainty that this world brings. I don’t believe that there is any other way to wake us from the dream -world cocoon we have created from our routines. There is nothing routine about death and dying. We are not safe here, and no routine will save us from the annihilation of our cocoon. But we are made for the eternal, and sometimes we are shown that this is true in the most imaginative ways. Sometimes it happens that we find that our birthdays are linked to a sacred heart that can heal our own; and sometimes we get a surprise visit from an angel who shares our own birth and offers us rebirth into a world without end.
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