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The light shines in the darkness

The light shines in the darkness

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The last “Reflections” post that I wrote for my congregation in Florida was about the death of our dog, Emma, a week before Christmas. I’ve re-posted it and you can find it on my website. There was one aspect of that experience I didn’t write about but want to explore a bit, and that’s the meaning of her death.

Just after arriving in New Mexico early last November, we were stunned to be told that Emma had a malignant tumor. In the following weeks she handled and responded well to chemotherapy. But then one morning she became sick and deteriorated rapidly. It didn’t seem related to the cancer, and we will never know exactly what happened.

That afternoon, we went back to the clinic where she was being treated, thinking we would then take her to an animal hospital in Albuquerque where she would spend the night. Instead, we discovered that she was in much worse condition than we realized. Her vitals were not good, she couldn’t walk, and most upsetting, she didn’t recognize either of us.

With her life expectancy due to the cancer only a matter of months, we knew that Emma’s life was coming to an end. We had the veterinarian euthanize her there in the office. The first shot put her to sleep, the second stopped her heart, and she was gone.

“Gone.” Gone? Gone where? It’s a strange turn of phrase. As a pastor, I’ve been present at people’s deaths on many occasions. I’ve watched other pets die. Recently, I’ve found some new ways to think about this experience, which comes to all of us and to everything.

“He’s in heaven now.” “She’s gone over the rainbow bridge.” Those images are helpful in our struggles with loss and grief. But we don’t press them too hard or too far. It’s just so difficult for us to accept that someone or something we loved and cherished no longer exists.

What happens when we die? We know the physiological event but what is the experience? The prime human experience that ends with death is consciousness, or awareness. There are, of course, ways of losing consciousness that don’t involve dying, but such experiences are often described as “death-like.” Sleep has been called a “little death” by sources as diverse as Homer, the Buddha, the Quran, Edgar Allan Poe, and George R. R. Martin.

Yet dying always means the loss of awareness of the world around us. And the living experience this, as well. When I realized that Emma did not recognize us, I felt that she was already “gone.” And when her eyes closed and heart stopped, it was her aware interaction with reality that had come to an end. From the world’s perspective, and ours, the story of Emma was over.

“Who am I?” is the most important question to ask according to many philosophical and spiritual traditions. In the religions of south and east Asia, the pursuit of that question, a practice called self-inquiry, is often seen as the path to spiritual enlightenment. Such an inquiry is not an academic pursuit, but a deeply personal discovery and experience of our true self. According to the modern Hindu teacher, Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry is “the most sacred of sacred.”

The deceptively simple answer to that question, according to these traditions, is that our ultimate self is awareness. Awareness knows and precedes all our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences. It is our sense of being, our ultimate knowledge of our self, our fundamental “I am-ness.” And when that ends, so do we.

But it doesn’t end, and that is where we can find intersection with the biblical religions of the west. Asian tradition says that our awareness is really a manifestation, an incarnation, of the one Self, which the Bible calls Spirit. It is the presence of God within us and all creation. It is the Spirit that moved over the waters in Genesis 1 and the Spirit that was breathed into the first human in Genesis 2. It is why, when Jesus dies on the cross in John’s gospel, it says he “gave up his Spirit.”

Spirit, our conscious awareness, is what unites us with all people and even all creatures. It is why we are all, ultimately, One. But as individual manifestations in the world, we are also separate. And, according to English spiritual teacher, Rupert Spira, overcoming that separation is our deepest desire and experiencing that overcoming is the meaning of love. My awareness meeting another’s is what we mean by love. It is most profound in our deepest friendships, yet it happens in other relationships, as well, even with a dog.

I described Emma’s death above as the ending of her story, and to me that seems a better metaphor than thinking of her “going” somewhere. I don’t expect to see Emma again anymore than I expect to find a good book, which made me sad when it ended, continued somewhere else. Yet the Awareness, Spirit, Love, I experienced in Emma is still all around me: in my husband, my family, my friends, strangers I may encounter, and in any number of conscious creatures, including our dog, Lana.

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Death’s “sting” is its incessant reminder of our seeming separateness. But separation in formal existence is transcended in awareness, in perceiving our real self to be the Light shining within us and in all those around us. It is the Light, John says, which “darkness cannot overcome.”

We may experience the Light go out in those we love. It will eventually go out in each one of us. But that Light is nonetheless eternal. It has been shining since the first moment of creation. We know it in every loving moment. It is the joy of existence itself, knowing that it shines within us and through us, in everyone around us, and in every atom of creation.

“Everything is change”

“Everything is change”

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What follows was my last “Reflections” post for my congregation in Florida, so you may have read the earlier. It deals with the death of our dog, Emma, a week before Christmas. I am reprinting it here as a lead-in to the post that follows and which continues this theme.

Everything is change, and nothing at all can be held onto or possessed. This feeling of transience is at the root of the philosophy of poverty that exists in Buddhism. But in Buddhism one would not say so much poverty as one would say simplicity. Not going without, not clinging to things because it’s good for you, but because it is actually the happiest way to live. Because nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held onto and safeguarded, and nothing can. So, the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom. – Alan Watts

Last week we suddenly lost our dear dog, Emma. She had been an integral part of our daily lives for over ten years, and then she was gone. We were emotionally devastated and disoriented.

In the kind responses I received, many spoke of similar experiences in their own lives. Often, they were surprised how long the sadness and disorientation lasted. The loss of a family member, close friend, pet, and even a cherished object can feel like a gut punch, a knife to our heart.

Such events are reminders of how much we live in mental worlds. We carry with us in our minds a map of reality, of normality. Those maps are getting slight adjustments all the time, but sometimes the change is much bigger. We turn the corner to a street we’ve been on dozens of times and are startled to see a vacant lot where we know a building “has always been.” Or we go back to our hometown or neighborhood after many years. “I hardly recognized it,” we say later, and still get a queasy feeling recalling the experience.

With people and pets the changes are harder because they involve behavior and emotional interaction. Whenever I pulled into the garage, Emma would start barking—but not anymore. At 4:30 in the afternoon, Emma would magically appear to stare at me. “It’s supper time, you know,” was the implied message. But not anymore. Routines involving spouses or parents are so embedded in us that it’s common to continue to see and hear someone long after they are gone.

“Everything is change, and nothing at all can be held onto or possessed,” Alan Watts bluntly states above. Watts was a modern-day prophet and understood well how difficult this truth is for us today. Science and technology have given us remarkable control over the world in which we live; so much so that we think of that as the norm. Of course, medicine will fix what’s wrong with me or my loved one. Of course, we will invent our way out of this problem or that.

It’s easy for us to forget Watt’s lesson which people have always known and what all religions have taught: everything is change. Ironically, it’s modern science that has made us even more aware of that truth. There are no “objects” but rather systems of forces, usually in balance but oftentimes not.

A “solid” rock is a constant interaction of atomic energy. Change may be slow but is always happening. Here in New Mexico, I walk in sand-bottomed arroyos at 7000 feet that once were on the ocean floor, millions of years ago. And the Hubble and Webb telescopes reveal an ever-changing universe billions of years old.

If change is so obvious and inevitable, why does it often upset us so much? The simple answer, I think, is love. We’ve all heard the lament about “looking for love in all the wrong places.” But our real problem is looking for love in too few places, for love is all around us.

In a recent video, spiritual teacher Rupert Spira says:

Love is simply one of the names we give to the to the unity of reality. When we experience love what we’re actually experiencing is the Oneness of reality. And even at the level of ordinary friendship, when we feel love what we are feeling is the collapse of the sense of separation, the collapse of distance. When you’re in love with someone, the distance or difference between you and the other collapses. You feel one with the other. It’s not just a feeling you’re having, you’re actually tasting reality. Reality is showing up in your experience and so love is just the unity of being.

In other words, love is the revelation that we are not separate beings but part of a greater whole. Love expands our awareness to recognize our connection with literally everything. But we experience that oneness in individual, changing forms: this community, this pet, this friend, this child, this spouse.

And that’s where the problem is: we mistakenly identify the love we experience with the form. Then we cling to the form, fearful that if the form changes or is lost, love is lost. But Love is eternal and ever-present. Which is why the Bible says simply, God is love. Spira continues:

Love is always love of the One. It’s the only love there is because love Is the absence of separation…. All love for anything is love of God, love of Unity, love of Oneness. But if we allow that love to become exclusively focused … we are really kind of violating a universal principle, and sooner or later the universe will make the correction. And it’s very painful when that happens.

Now, I think that pain and grief are inevitable. To be human is to be interconnected with the world around us. When some part of that world that we have an intimate connection with is lost, it feels like we have lost some part of ourselves, which we have. And that is going to hurt.

But our mistake is to believe that we have lost love or life itself. We haven’t. Our oneness, our unity with reality remains, only waiting to be experienced through love in some new form we haven’t yet found. God is always hiding in plain sight, waiting to surprise us in a new place, a new form, a new love.