Postcard from the kingdom of reality

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’ (Luke 17:20-21)

There we were, four of us, walking a corridor in the kingdom of reality.

Truth be told, only three of us were walking. My mother rode in a wheel chair as I pushed, rolling across the skyway between St. Mary’s Hospital to the clinic just north. Dixie walked beside me as we followed a stoop-shouldered 80-something in sneakers, a blue sport coat and a white shirt open at the neck.

Our destination was an orthopedic surgeon’s office to see if my feisty 95-year-old mother could have one more back surgery to free her from pain, without the drugs she preferred not to take.

Entering the elevator, our guide turned and said, “I retired in 2012, but I couldn’t get this place out of me.” He’d been an anesthesiologist here for decades. Now, he keeps people like me from getting lost.

I suspect his smile reassured many anxious hearts in the surgical suite over the years, even as it heartened us as we stepped from the elevator toward the surgeon’s office to learn what the next chapter held for Mom.

She’d set up a challenging itinerary: Monday, going through her files and making sure her computer was working; Tuesday, the surgeon and whatever referral might be made; Wednesday, the bank, the lock box, the funeral home and an insurance agent, all to make final arrangements which she has no intention of needing for years if not another decade. Longevity is in her genes, iron in her will.

Emotional? Yes. Draining? You bet. Overwhelming, strangely, no.

At each step, questions and conversations interspersed with moments of checking out how we each were feeling and what we needed, revealing no great stress.

Each stop, each step followed the next and the next and the next as if ordered by a gentle hand bearing us forward in the flow of an abiding sense of ‘this is how it should be;’ all the while assuring us that this is what life is, and if you take it with honesty, humor and with good and gentle companions, you step into a great flow of … well, it certainly felt like love.

This love was not only within us but all around like the air, surrounding, enveloping and meeting us in the faces of those with whom we consulted about everything from aching backs, to bank accounts, to wills and trusts, to funeral caskets, vaults and insurance policies to pay for it all.

We were carried in a stream that required nothing more of me than to attend to the next thing with patience and care, fretting not about what might come after.

I knew … this is my place. This is where I was intended to be by the Mystery who made me. These are the people I was meant to know and love and trust, and by doing this—surrendering illusions about other lives I might have lived—I was releasing myself into the love that flows from eternity to eternity, beseeching me to let go and be one with this Love as it flows through my little moment of time.

It takes a long time, I think, (certainly for me) to tell your ego to shut the hell up, lay down your defenses and trust that Love. When you do it will tell you who you really are, what your heart truly needs and what you most need to do—like that retired anesthesiologist in his tennis shoes.

The place got into me, and I couldn’t get it out, he said of St. Mary’s Hospital. That’s one way to look at it. Another is, this is the place that Love’s eternal flow found him and set him free to be, well, the soul he was always intended to be.

Whenever this happens, wherever it happens, God smiles and welcomes us into the kingdom of reality.

David L. Miller