Religion is for people afraid of going to hell; Spirituality is for those who have already been there. — Said around 12-step recovery meetings
It took me a long time for me to get that. I was a committed atheist, raised in a communist home. My father, a seaman who wanted to drink himself to death to escape his immigrant father’s wrath and beatings, sobered up in a Soviet port. A former Catholic altar boy, he switched churches, with Marx as God, Lenin as Jesus, and Stalin as Pope. Unfortunately the Communist Party only stoked his anger. His prison term for “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence” confirmed for him that he was the threat to authority he wanted to be. His eighth heart attack killed him at age 62; I believe he died of untreated rage. Often aimed at me, although he never hit me as his father hit him. In that I found healing.
Mom remained loyal to the Soviet Union long after she left the Party, bitterly blaming the CIA for corrupting Gorbachev. She died at 76 on the operating table for heart bypass surgery. A week after her death I was getting ready to practice my saxophone in my ground floor San Francisco Mission District flat. It was a warm and sunny day, a still day, and I made sure the doors and windows were shut tight to spare my neighbors the one riff I could ever come up with trying to improvise.
Suddenly there was a rush of wind in the room, rattling the window and doors and papers. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and without thinking I said out loud, “Mom?” And as suddenly as it began, it was over.
Like Dad, I had turned to alcohol to hide my fear and anger, getting drunk for the first time the week after he was arrested; I was 13. While rejecting the communist movement, I became a union official, devoting myself to the working class, following in that part of my father’s footsteps. I sobered up at age 50, but it took a somewhat insane year of 12-step programs, therapy, affirmations, and getting honest with myself and my sponsor, for me to move towards spirituality: for the first time feeling that I was part of the human race, connected and not alone any more.
I realized that atheism took as much faith as religion, and was as equally unprovable. No one has ever come back from death to tell us what to expect. It took truly letting go of ego, of the illusion of control, to begin to attain the spirituality, the connection to the human race, the end of fear and anger, that I had missed all my life.
That transition also opened me up to things I might have rejected out-of-hand before. Was that a visitation from my mother’s spirit? I’d like to think so. I don’t really believe in spirits, but I’m now open to the possibilities. I’d like to think it was Mom coming to say Goodbye. I’m glad my last words to her as she went into the hospital were, I love you
I’ve read that the body loses a tiny bit of weight at the moment of death, and religious people say it’s the soul on its way to Heaven. Or maybe it is energy going to join Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. Or none of the above. I had an aunt who was a practicing psychic, calling forth and talking with the dead. I never had an opportunity to participate and observe, but my mother did and later refused to talk about it. Whatever was going on, I do know that my aunt was not one for fraud or deception or making money, so whatever it was must have seemed pretty real.
The truth is we have no idea and cannot imagine what death is to the person who has died. We sleep, but we dream, our brain actively at work. Deep meditation the same. Even, I imagine, in a coma there remains a connection to the world of the living. It’s sort of like infinity: because everything we know and experience has limits, boundaries, it is impossible for most of us to grasp infinity on other than an intellectual level. The universe is expanding….into what space? So with death we make up stories about growing wings and flitting around the clouds playing harps. Or going to a place of fire and demons.
I had always turned to nature for relief from fear and stress, hitch-hiking with Lower East Side teenage buddies upstate New York, or south to the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Ostensibly we were budding herpetologists looking for snakes, but it was really about escape from the mean streets, from our families, from fear and anger.
In nature, although I could not have then articulated it, I found powers greater than myself, where I didn’t have to be in control to protect myself.
When I sobered up at age 50 I had all kinds of trouble with the god stuff at meetings. I wouldn’t even say the word at the beginning of the Serenity Prayer. It took a year to realize that there are powers greater than myself – the desert, the ocean, the jungle, for instance. If I approached any of them with my will in charge, on my terms, I was likely to get hurt, or worse. I’d had several bad self-will-run-riot experiences already. Sobriety, and spirituality as I understand it and as it works for me, leaves me open to knowing that things happen in this world which I do not understand, and that’s all right. I don’t have to.
I am connected to people now, including many whose politics are wildly different than mine. They are still good people even if they voted for Trump or Clinton, and I know I can call on them if I need help. All my life I went to nature and now, living on our desert acre outside of Tucson, I am living in nature. I sleep outside on the back patio much of the year, hearing great horned owls hunting and, at moonrise, a coyote jamboree that never fails to bring a smile to my face. I fill the bird feeders in the morning and Kaitlin and I sit on the porch (“veranda time”) to watch the doves and quail and rabbits, along with third-generation cardinals and curious migrants, feed, and scatter with a great woosh when a hunting Harris’s hawk flies over. I have learned so much from our critters, but that’s another story. Tune in next week! When I die I am to be cremated and my ashes mixed with bird seed and scattered on our bit of land.
At age 80, with coronary artery disease and multiple myeloma – an incurable and aggressive blood plasma cancer — facing death sooner rather than later, I try to live by Joseph Campbell’s words: We cannot rid the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.