LOTS OF TEARS ALLEVIATE THE FEARS

Five degrees this morning and a brilliant sun happys my heart as I sit at the Coffee House on Washington Street to write this. What can I say? Now’s a good time to tell another true tale of the wounded heart in recovery. Okay... I know... the heart is not the seat of emotional life. It’s the limbic system, isn’t it?

Let’s call him Trip. He was a professor of Russian and Far Eastern history out at Eastern Washington University in Cheney when I met him. Born a Mormon, he had become a Buddhist when I first encountered him. Later, after an encounter with a Father D’ioro, an evangelical priest in the Catholic church, Trip became a practicing Catholic, his wife’s long time faith.

Trip was a serious Buddhist. He transplanted his family to South Korea at one time in order to study under Buddhist masters who live in mountain caves there. Trip didn’t do anything halfway, and no matter what faith he was working in, he was what others would call a spiritual man. Spiritual people exist in all religions and non-religions. Even atheists have been known to be spiritual. Spirituality is a state of emotional and psychological awareness that anyone with an open mind can achieve. Read the works of Jung and Joseph Campbell to understand what spirituality might include. At the level of religion, you might say that a fundamentalist in any religion is a rigid person of law while a liberal religious person is a person of spirit. Moses versus Jesus.

From my point of view, Trip was an enlightened or spiritual man or, as a Jungian might say, a fully “individuated” person. He came to my aid when I was in need and through him I experienced many new insights on my own path toward “individuation” or enlightenment. The first couple of years after my third divorce were the most transcendental days I’ve ever experienced. At first I was in dire straits. I truly was in suicidal pain.

One day I ran into Trip at a restaurant in Cheney. Trip had only recently become a Catholic, and he reached out to me in my pain. He suggested that we meet in the vestibule of the Catholic church in Cheney every morning for six weeks and meditate or silently pray together. I was into prayer at the time. Trip faithfully met me every morning that six weeks, and we prayed or meditated silently side by side in a pretty chilly St. Rose of Lima vestibule. Afterwards, we’d talk a bit about my pain and the insights that were coming to me. He was wonderful, and I loved him and his whole family.

Eventually I was living like a monk in a huge old farmhouse on Trip’s land six miles outside of Cheney and spending every morning reading spiritual things, like the Psalms and like John Bradshaw’s books and tapes about family troubles. Many a morning and in counseling, I broke into deep sobbing. I read Jung too, went to counseling and twelve step meetings, attended the local Lutheran church and prayed a lot, all the while working my evening shift as a machinist at a Spokane job shop. Immediately after the divorce, I worked for fifteen months as a nurse’s aide at a local nursing home.

One time I went with Trip and his wife to an evening church service that was like nothing I’d ever seen in a Catholic church. They both were slain in the spirit that night. I watched this man of towering intellect allow himself to be tapped on the forehead and fall backward into the arms of waiting attendants. Returned to his seat, he invited me to go up to the altar, but I wasn’t about to do that. Still, the experience forced me to consider the fact that very intelligent people can allow themselves to participate in irrational events. Of course, he was not so irrational as to deny the truth of natural selection.

Trip also invited me during this time to attend Wednesday prayer meetings in the basement of St. Rose of Lima church. He and a few others gathered every Wednesday at 7 to sit around a table and read Bible passages, comment on them, or sing hymns and songs. Each person would suggest what he wanted to read or sing as they went around the table. It was a small group and very definitely not like other Catholics I’d known. These were evangelicals.

One night, maybe the third night I participated, one of them suggested we sing this song about “take me to the water’ or “bring me to the water”. That’s all I recall about the song, but it portrayed a man who felt very poor, lonely and afraid. Someone who has lost everything. After about two refrains, I completely identified with the feelings of the lost, impoverished man and broke into tears, I mean real gut-wrenching tears. I cried so hard I could barely catch my breath. I was bent over in my chair and the snot and slobber was dangling from my nose and chin down to the floor. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Suddenly, all of them gathered around me to lay on hands and pray over me. I cried for a long time while they prayed. I felt completely cleansed by the tears. They all went back to their chairs. Then a man called Charley from across the table recited the words to me: “Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?”

I recognized the scene from a movie called “Rachel, Rachel”, which had starred Joanne Woodward, when “they” swoop down on the wounded person to bend them to their religion.

Calmly, with a little anxiety, I said, “No.”

Immediately Charley made as if to get up and to come around the table to pray over me some more. It was silly. Then, beside me, Trip quietly said, “No, Charley,” and they let me alone.

And so I escaped the clutches of Christians once more, but I learned a great deal about myself and how deep my wounds were cut into me. And my respect for Trip soared to even greater heights. Had they prayed over me again, I’d felt nothing but contempt for the lot of them. I wrote several poems about my time on that plot of land where I could watch coyotes run across the meadows and where I walked and ran the dirt roads and prayed and read and listened to tapes in the little monkish bedroom with a mattress on the floor and my Kaypro computer to write on.

Within two years, Trip was dead of lung cancer. His memorial service was packed, and they made a celebration of it, balloons and individuals sharing good thoughts at the lecturn about his life and belting out some pretty happy songs.

I lived on his land in his old farmhouse until several months after his death, then I cleaned up that old farmhouse and moved into the city of Spokane, Washington where I still live. I wrote the following poem as he lay dying in his home not far from mine.


THE VOICE OF SUCH A FRIEND
for Lynn T.

He's dying up there, a scant fifty yards from here,
My home, where I compose this note to myself.
Fifty yards over scab rock and through pine trees,
Fifty yards through the tall, yellowing meadow grasses
Which bend today under an autumn rain outside my window.
I imagine snow drifting the land between his home
And mine. Soon it will fall the days and nights
Until distinctions blur and a memory of land is all
That remains. What clever metaphor of death, ever so well written,
Can replace the sight of his strong figure,
Walking on the summer grasses between his place and mine
Or the memory of his voice which informs the void between
These lines? At this question, I lay down my pen and walk into
The meadow where I stand to listen as silence fills all like snow.