A Ghost Story

Now that I'm on a part-time footing at my church ministry, I haven't even been through the doors since Jan 26th, when I did my last service under my FT agreement. I'm doing roughly one per month until further notice. But because my attention has been mainly elsewhere, it feels so over now, like I'm a million miles away, instead of three blocks.

I had forgotten something in the office, or I needed some material--I'm not sure which. On an evening around dusk, I rode my bike there to get whatever it was I was missing. 

And I discovered that the strangest thing had happened to the place.

The place has transformed into a thriving, diverse sort of ….village, with the church itself at the heart of it. There were so many kids, some were playing baseball (on a team complete with uniforms), some were in a kind of cadet program (ambling about in smart dress uniforms). Familiar elders, some dead, some living, were walking together under trees talking earnestly and discretely in pairs and small groups. There were food trucks around. A band was playing somewhere. Many ages, many activities--rich, vibrant, diverse, colourful, yet everything somehow belonged here, a single organism  in the twilight, just doing its collective thing. 

I went into the church, which was having some sort of evening service which had not started yet. The place was packed. I sat at the back as I tend to do when I'm not leading a service. Lights were dim, and there was the sport of hushed expectancy that one feels when a curtain is about to rise in a theatre. But I felt I should not stay, that what was to come had nothing to do with me, and rather than feel utterly alienated, I left before it started.

I made my way back to my bike, through thronging clusters of folks, and now--as in the church, as on my way to the church--I realized not a single person recognized me. They were not unfriendly or avoidant. There was eye contact, some nods of welcome, but not a single flicker of recognition. I had a sudden flash that it felt the same as when I had first arrived at this church 23 years ago, a stranger. Not unwelcome, just not known. In my end is my beginning.

I was a part of this once, I wanted to shout at them. I didn't make all this happen all by myself, but I sure was part of what led to this flourishing. You're here because it's here, and it's here because I was here. Goddam it, why does no one recognize me? The feeling was not wounded pride, but terror--seeing the world like Clarence the angel makes George Bailey see it in It's a Wonderful Life--a world into which you've never been born, and your single absence has made it utterly different. 

"One person's life touches so many others..."

Was I really here all those years or was that all a dream? I mean, the years I remember spending there felt real, just as this utter strangeness and stranger-ness felt real. Oh, wait...

And from this dream, I woke to soundless dark. It was only the sound of Susan's breathing next to me that made waking reality take shape again--our bed, our ceiling, our curtains wafting, my own heart beating. Life.

The psychodynamics of life transitions are not to be taken lightly, no matter how busy you get, how driven-forward you're required to be. They remind you that everything comes to an end, even you. And that no matter how intimately tied to things you feel, it all has to be let go of eventually. No--you won't be remembered specifically. But you will have been of use, and part of the unfolding web of life that connects past and future worlds. 

The church and the school where I'm chaplain had obviously merged together in my unconscious. I was a ghost in both, seeing it as the departed--if consciousness persists after death--must see the world. Full of familiar places, people, and full of what you can see has grown out of what you knew and who you were. You look at a house and you think--"Hey, that was where I used to live. What are these others doing there?"

When you visit such places, they are called 'old haunts' and they are called that because what haunts them is you. Life has moved on, evolved, and it is only you that are stuck in, fixated on, an idea of the past. Which no longer exists, though it still seems real to you.

The Bardo can only be depicted as a kind of virtual reality, as in this VR experience of Lincoln in the Bardo

Maybe the Zen Buddhists are onto something with their notion of the Bardo-- a period between one life and the next, in which the unskillful can become stuck as ghostly spirits, and never merge with Eternal Love. The skillful have a certain amount of time to come to terms with the fact that they are indeed gone from this world. And when they do, they are released from despair and self-blame, ready to be born anew. 

A prayer:

Oh Thou, maker (and shaker) of worlds within and without,

May I release what has been, that I may be reborn in what's to come. 

May those my life has touched and enabled, flourish as they will.

May I know true entrusting.