The Desire for Answers

Ever watch Penn and Teller?  Or the late Ricky Jay?  Or any other stellar magician?  They amaze us because they do things that defy our mind’s addiction to understand on terms that make sense to us. 

If asked to define “human nature” in five words or fewer, my candidate would be “The desire for answers.”  

It is a desire indispensable to human growth, since it energizes self-understanding.  “Who am I?”  “What does it take to be a healthy parent?”  “How must I change my life to snowboard every day of the year?”  

That desire can also turn deadly.  Consider the danger of presuming that what an answer means to us is what it should mean to everyone else.  

And perhaps more harmful is not recognizing that any answer we have is at best incomplete.  The limit of human intelligence is mystery.  Even miracles are just things we’ve yet to understand. 

Our neighbor of more than 20 years died recently at 83.  She had long lost to Alzheimer’s what is commonly considered her mind.  At her funeral, the cover of the program displayed the expected lovely photo with dates of birth and death.  The surprise that brought a smile to my lips was learning that my neighbor died on her birthday.  

If your mind at this moment is anything like mine was upon getting this news, it may be turning a slow summersault in search of a satisfactory answer as to how that synchronicity might have occurred.  

Fluke?  Serendipity?  God’s quirkiness?  A part of her not quite so absent as we mortals thought, giving us a little wink?  Too strange to even think about without getting a headache? 

It would take a brain a lot more Dr. Spockier than mine to have an answer worth wagering serious plunder.

But that doesn’t stop me from having an answer.  

I find mysteries like this delightful.  I get to make up a story.  One that fits what I consider the spirit of the universe: playful, loving, deep. 

More gnarly is my attempt to make sense of my beloved’s suicide.  That’s because the question I’m trying to penetrate is: How does Mother Teresa come to take her own life? 

Dear, my beloved, was among the most steadily life-affirming, joyful beings lots of people ever met.  She mentored and mothered many, often solely by her presence.  “I’m kinder to everyone in my life simply because I knew her,” is a common refrain I hear.

For those she touched, Dear easily made their list of folks least likely to kill themselves.  My younger son said, “If this can happen to Dear, nobody’s safe.”

Even being swallowed by the ever-deepening quicksand of depression for more than a year, Dear never felt a victim.  This wasteland was a test she was willing to endure.  Yet, increasingly, she found herself without what endurance requires: the ability to focus one’s attention.  For her, this resulted in, more than anything else, the disappearance of God, the polestar of her existence, an unwavering presence since birth 70 years earlier.  

She said to me, “I know I love you.  I know I love our children and grandchildren.  I know you always have my back.  I know we live in great beauty.  I know I exist in the lap of Divine Mother.  But I don’t feel any of it.”

The pain of that separation transformed how she pursued her life’s purpose: to use every experience as a vehicle to grow her conscious union with the Divine.  

“I’m empty.  There’s nothing left of me,” she said.  

Whatever more she was to learn from this teacher needed to happen in another realm.  Her commitment to surrender herself to the Infinite Essence, the deepest call of her heart, never wavered.  In the end, all she had left to surrender, she felt, was her physical shell.  

“I must go,” she said.

This story, while reflecting my intimate participation in my beloved’s illness as well as the nearly half-century of our romance, is born of my own desire for answers.  

That desire is the natural extension of a passion to experience what Yogananda called the skyful of happiness that displays all the stars of the universe.  In a word, God.

To that end, I have been, always it seems, creating an ever-evolving inner story of what life is about, and how the universe works.  A story that resonates in my heart, my intuition, even if acting in harmony with it will take a lot longer than this incarnation. 

That story (the core of which is that everything is a gift helping us realize our true nature as a manifestation of God) is the lens through which I view my beloved’s life and death––since it is the lens through which I attempt to view everything.  

With use, that lens gets more refined, more penetrating.  The story it reveals gets deeper, more expansive.  I’m fascinated to discover the story about Dear I tell a few years from now, as loss and new life take me even more places I can’t imagine.  

It is liberating to consider that until my consciousness is a skyful of happiness that displays all the stars of the universe, any story of mine will be incomplete.  Ah, but from that limitation is born the promise of future sacred adventures, a promise powerfully made in those words that have stirred hearts since the dawn of time: 

To Be Continued