Posts
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
