I have been thinking lately about how much more easily I am moved to tears then I was when I was younger. I suppose there are several possible explanations for this. Here are some: (1) I could say that my 2015 bout with sepsis, which apparently is fatal in 60% of people my age, has left me more vulnerable emotionally and thus has led me to express more freely some of my deeper feelings; (2) my first explanation is somewhat contradicted by the fact that for many years I have found it hard to read emotional materials out loud to others without choking up; (3) a somewhat deeper perspective has presented itself recently suggesting that since I am, like all Humanings, a portal for Godding energy to be manifest in the world that my tears are shared with Godding. In other words, most often when I weep it is Godding weeping through me into the world. This also suggests that there is a connection between individual self-compassion and the self-compassion of Godding. James Weldon Johnson, in his poem “Creation,” witnesses the self-compassion of Godding when he writes: “God stepped out on space, /And looked around and said: / I’m lonely—I’ll make me a world.” The poet tells us that after making that world, God was still lonely and decided to make man in God’s own image. The whole creation mirrors the self-compassion of Godding. It is no wonder that Jesus would invite us to love others as we love ourselves.
Quantum physics is inviting us to understand that time is a convenient fiction. Quantum reality indicates that what we call past, present, and future exists simultaneously. There is an understanding that future reality has an effect on current reality. That seems very odd to us. We are accustomed to believing that past events have a cause and effect bearing on present events but not so willing to think that future events have a similar causal bearing on present events. If my weeping is a manifestation of the weeping of Godding then it says something about the nature of Godding. The compassion of Godding which leads to weeping is a constant reality and not just an occasional event.
Richard Rohr’s meditation for November 20, 2019 contains a quotation from a Benedictine sister that he knows:
“In every life there is a crossover moment, after which a person will never be the same again. Somewhere, somehow the challenge comes that sets us on a different path: the path of purpose, the path of integrity, the path of transcendence that lifts us—heart, mind, and soul—above the pitiable level of the comfortable and the mundane.” Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister
When I discovered the lyrics to “Anthem,” a song by Leonard Cohen, I was struck particularly by the line that says “there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I find myself wondering if my bout with sepsis is a crack that lets the light get into me and create the crossover moment Sr. Joan Chittister is talking about. This leads me to wonder if we need to experience something that cracks us open to become effective portals of the Godding Consciousness.
This also reminds me of John Donne’s affirmation that God has set the house of his self on fire, filled that house with smoke and “frightened the inhabitant therein and thus made an entrance into me.” I have on my desk this quotation from Abraham of Santa Clara, a 17th century German Augustinian monk: “The man who dies before he dies, does not die when he dies.” I feel that these are ways of describing the crossover moment and its effect. It points to the idea that the “crack” in me is because my dance with death around sepsis broke me open. The idea that the sepsis created that cross-over moment is further supported by the fact that I experienced a disruption of my usual self-awareness. There were several days after I had been discharged from the hospital when I exhibited a condition that might be described as “lights on, nobody home.” My wife was quite concerned that the sepsis would leave me with limited cognitive ability. While I was in the hospital, we had moved from the home in which we had lived for 20+ years into a condominium. There was much unpacking of boxes that needed to be done and eventually I set myself to the unpacking and shelving of books. The challenges of alphabetizing along with the physical tasks involved seemed to “reset” my cognitive abilities. Perhaps this had a similar effect on me that restarting a malfunctioning computer has on the machine’s operating system. I do feel like the whole experience from the onset of the sepsis until the renewal of my cognitive ability was a cross-over experience. I know I do not see myself or the world in the same, old way.
The call to a spiritual experience is an example of retrospective causality, we can see that when entropy gives way to syntropy, cracks will be created in entropy’s finished products. We might experience syntropy as the light that gets in when we encounter retrospective causality. Sr. Chittister’s idea of a crossover moment might refer to the time when entropy is on the verge of becoming a dissipative structure. It that particular moment, we may encounter the retrospective causality of syntropy. [See the essay “Reflections on Syntropy” which is a bit farther down in this blog under the link “Essays and Puzzlements.”]
Here are some of Cohen’s words to the song “Broken Hallelujah” which also seem to point to the light breaking in at a crossover moment:
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did—well, really—what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
This is sometimes how the crossover experience leaves me feeling. There is not so much self-critical judgment but a sense of growing self-compassion which leads me to be more compassionate towards others. I am experiencing a growth of gratitude, which is what it feels like Cohen is singing about “before the Lord of Song.”
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