On a cold Illinois January night, my father breathed his last breath. He passed peacefully at last, but there had been several days of fitful anxiety and moaning, as he seemed to be struggling with all the remaining strength of body and will to forestall his final human passage. My sister and I felt helpless to ease his suffering. We read Psalms, played soothing music, stroked his head, and thanked him for his life of toil that provided for our comfort and security. We whispered our prayerful assurances of his peaceful destination as we encouraged him to let go.
I struggled to understand why my father would cling tenaciously to such a dismal existence that seemingly offered only pain and suffering in the end. As I prayed and meditated on this troubling puzzle, the answer came — because it is his known reality. As is our human tendency, my father clung to a known reality, a painful existence, rather than surrender to an unknown future.
There have been times in my life when I’ve made that odd, incongruous choice as well. There have been times where I’ve thwarted my own progress by putting my faith in the visible realm, and denied the onward impulse that would take me to new possibilities of living. Yet, this is the demand of our spiritual journey; the heroic call to leave familiar terrain and cross the perimeter of the known life into the promised land of the spirit-filled realm. This can feel like a death, and it is. It is death to a belief that we are only a body-mind. And we fear death, and we push it away and deny its value in the cycle of our life. Yet Jesus, who was a master of life, reminded us that, a seed must die and fall to earth in order to yield new life. Like Jesus, we must have a view of a resurrected life in order to embrace the loss of the tangible life at hand. St. Francis was just as plain in commending “dying to self” as a precursor to the birth of our eternal nature.
As I ponder my Dad’s difficult transition, I realize that we would all be better served by practicing dying instead of clinging to temporal conditions. St. Paul’s notion of dying daily has new meaning for me today. If I am a sincere student of Truth, I must be as interested in releasing the false notions about life as I am eager to appropriate new pearls of wisdom. It is the laying down of ephemeral notions of self and life that makes it possible to see what is real and lasting. Otherwise we face a devastating form of identity theft, in which we are complicit by allowing our sense of self to be given over to our career roles, or social status or other people. While career, relationships, and our physical bodies are all aspects of who we are in the world, there is a steep price to pay when these facets become major support beams in our life. When a job, or a relationship or level of health becomes a pillar of our self-image, our whole world can come crashing down when one of these is damaged, diminished or lost. Perhaps you have experienced this sobering reality first hand.
A few years ago, my life took a turn that left me feeling stripped of my identity. Circumstances required me to step away from my ministry career and pursue other work for a few years. Because I had defined my very identity and vested my personal value in this role in the world, I battled the creeping feeling that I was losing myself in this transition. I fought it, denied it, argued with it, and resisted it with all my energy, as if my very survival was at stake. I had become so mired in the illusion that what I did was who I was that stepping out of my career was like stepping off a cliff. For a time I was in free fall, grasping for understanding that would make sense of this loss, and allow me to reengage my energies and gifts in the world. It was indeed a death experience. Who I thought I was, was no more and I grieved deeply for many months.
Even though my intellect and spiritual beliefs could rationally counter the thought that I was more than my career, I did not know it at the depth of my being. While I held the notion that I was a spiritual being, I had not embodied this truth as self-knowledge. A superficial belief will not withstand the great winds of change and my sense of self was shattered when the proverbial rug of life circumstances was pulled from under me. I had laid up treasures on earth in defining myself by my work, and without a storehouse of awareness of my Life in God, my conditional self image was robbed in the night. With time and an intention to reach “the promised land” of life after loss, I moved through the grief process. Gradually, I was able to release the old forms that had defined me. As I let go of these self limiting ideas about who I was based on roles, I began to notice a greater sense of my essence, the inner qualities which are not bound by roles or forms. As I immersed myself in the Truth teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and contemporary spiritual teachers I gradually began to recognize myself more and more as a Being, not a mere doer or haver. Over time, I went from seeing myself as a man who had been changed by the loss of a career, to the changeless Self behind that story. With that awareness, I was able to engage in new work, even mundane tasks, with equanimity and presence and found myself living a new life beyond loss. This experience revealed so powerfully that the hidden purpose and power in all great change or loss is transformation. Clearly the great compensation in a loss of identity is that it drives us deeper to where we can discover the true self beneath the roles and labels that masquerade as us.
It has been my experience that the more I can identify with the changeless spiritual reality that is my true self, the more gracefully I can navigate the world that is in constant motion beneath my feet. Every bud and emerging shoot that breaks forth in the spring landscape came through requisite season of loss and dormancy without losing awareness of its ever-present life force. Seasons of change and loss do not deny or diminish this essential life force in us either.
So it is that transitions in life can lead to transformation, but there is a mandate. The resurrected life demands a faithful practice of letting go; to be like the aerial performer who releases the trapeze as he nears the approaching swing that offers him his next ride. Across the chasm of uncertainty, looms the seeming risk of loss, but those who advance to the next level will hazard the leap, believing they will be caught and carried to a greater place and truer awareness of self.
We do not know when we will breathe our last breath. That reality makes each breath precious and invites us to live each moment as if it was our last. It need not tempt us to conserve what should be expelled; rather we thrive by exhaling faithfully to make room for the next life giving breath. There is no more viable way to live. Breathe in deep faith, release doubt. Get to know the you that cannot lose nor be lost in any transition. We can let go knowing Spirit is always there to catch us and raise us up to new life.
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