You cannot hide from the Light

We may not recognize the Light; because, what do we know?

This article is a follow-up from last Wednesday

If you find Darkness in the midst of Light, don’t back off

At the beginning of last week’s article, I mentioned how I was shown the answer to my prayer asking God to guide me to become one with Him. I was so terrified by the vision of the masks that I began to run away from everything that resembled God. It took a whole year for me to even start praying again. I obviously understood the vision somewhere deep inside. However, the primordial fear that it sprung didn’t allow me to discern it or keep asking for guidance to what for years had been my life’s quest. During my university years, I had read and studied deeply Freud and Jung’s personality theories, but this was no lecture or academic discourse, this was my life. It took me seventeen years and an emotional meltdown to deeply understand what it meant and to begin seriously working on it.

This experience was my burning bush in the middle of the desert, and my reaction was to not accept the task presented to me: taking myself out of Egypt and the tyranny of my conditioning.

Being back in Caracas was hell

I had left Caracas at sixteen and returned at twenty-four a very different person. I had gone to therapy for years, I was awakened by culture and deep thinkers, I had been in a loving relationship with the most incredible girl in the world, and I was back in my father’s house. What in the world was I supposed to do next? I had been given a glimpse of greatness and then thrown in a dungeon.

I started to work in the afternoons with a friend in a carpentry shop, I also worked as a teacher in a favela helping to integrate dysfunctional kids who had never been in a conventional school to enter primary school. On the weekends I tried to surround myself with beauty and art going to classical concerts, museums, and theater plays. But the fuel to keep my determination to follow God, which was the two times a week four hour classes with my mentor, my writing, reading, and prayer were gone. My books had not arrived for maybe one or two months, and by the time they arrived, my aspiration towards God was gone; it had been replaced by a profound dread and a heavy heart.

Every other day I called my loving girlfriend, trying to get the fuel and find a way to get back to my life in the States. One day I called Stuart, my mentor, on the phone and lay my situation on him. He said very little. He advised me to choose a book from my library and read it with the intention to find guidance; preferably a biographical work – he said. I started to look through the hundreds of books I had received, and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton stood out. This, to-be-Trappist-monk’s biography, he told his story to enter the monastery in the middle of the II Great War.

I devoured this book. I laughed and cried, I was amused and had many ‘aha’ Moments. He described how the monastery was a path towards God and everything was designed for the novice not to escape his own misery and be confronted with all his/her contradictions. I was hooked!

I came to think that I was just too weak to follow Christ in the world, I needed a community of like-minded individuals and the structure to complete my mission. He wrote something I would find out in time, when you go away to a monastery, you bring the world with you.

To make a long story short, I mentioned the intention of my new intent to my girlfriend and said I had to try it out, we put our relationship on hold. However, I kept calling every other week. Then, for the first time I went to a retreat, then another, and another. After six months, every single Saturday I was with a small group of like-minded explorers, and we read and discussed scriptures and the monastic life. In a year, and many weekend retreats after, I went for my first complete week retreat. It was then that I had the vision of the dark hole and the voice of Jesus inviting me to jump and trust.

You cannot run from Enlightenment

I had asked for guidance, and He had given it to me; I was to undress my Self from all that I was not and completely trust the Spirit that guided me. Even today my body remembers the response to the vision experience, it is awe in its most fearful dimension. We are constituted by innumerable traits and personalities that help us go from childhood to adulthood; they are useful and needed for socialization and coping with life, but when you grow up, they can become a straight-jacket. In retrospect I know the vision was showing me what was going to happen, but then I did not know how attached I was to my constituent personalities, but something inside me did and pushed me, and it sent a high-volt shock through my spine.

When I left the retreat after the Darkness-Hole vision, I was so emotionally shocked that I ran from the vision as fast as I could; I sped with the car to the point that I burst a hose and overheated the engine. I had to stop and wait for help. Remember, back in 1986, mobile phones were not common, and I had to ask cars that passed by this untraveled road to give word in the next gas station that I was stranded and send a tow-truck to assist. I was 15 kilometers from anywhere. I could not sit or be calm in any position, and I had to wait for a couple of hours for someone to come and help me. A true prefigure of what I was to live in the following year.

For a whole year, I stopped praying, stop reading the Bible, stopped doing anything that I was doing before… nothing to make me come closer to Him whom I had been seeking for years. I spaced the calls to my girlfriend in the States, maybe because I was ashamed.

Things carried on as usual, since life is a stream that does not stop for anyone; I met this violist from the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolivar, which was the flagship for the Symphonic Orchestra Youth Program in Venezuela. I was lost and wanted to run as far as I could from my old quest, and anyone was a good excuse to do so. So, I began a relationship with this kind violist and did not say anything to my girlfriend in America; something in me was afraid to completely let go.

So, what was my response? I burned my vessel so I could never go back to my old life.

One night I called a mutual friend in Fort Lauderdale and told her I was getting married in Caracas so she would tell “the love of my life” how cheap and a heel I was. I hung-up that call and cried myself to sleep. I broke her heart and had destroyed mine.

If you are falling, dive.

This quote from Joseph Campbell is one scary idea, but something in me knew it was the right course of action. Because life is like a stream that does not stop for anyone, we always get second, third and fourth chances… we keep returning to the primordial moment to make a choice that will push us forward. So why not plunge into it?

If you don’t make the choice, something inside you will and it will keep pushing you until you do what you must: make a decision. That is the same force that pushed Raskolnikov for justice after the despicable murder, in the unbelievable novel of Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment. Do take responsibility for your choices, because in the end, your life will push you to do so.

I didn’t “dive”, I resisted my predicament. When my relationship with the kind violist came to an end, as was bound to happen, I was left alone again. Another beautiful woman, a veterinary doctor came into play. She moved me and inspired me; but I said NO. And decided after a year of running from my fear of the consequence of choosing to follow the example of Christ and become one with God, to confront it and go on a retreat again.

It wasn’t bravery, in reality I had a terrible time that whole year, I could not live with myself.

What lessons do I derive from all this experience?

Because in my university years, I followed the calling of adventure and worked as diligently as I could at it, I reaped meaningful fruits, one of those was a relationship I could have not even dreamed of. Everything seemed oriented towards goodness and a meaningful existence. Of course, I did not deserve it, I was not truly grateful for it, I did not know how rare it was, so I was not ready for it.

I destroyed the most beautiful, rare and precious experience of my life up to that moment. Then, I was not grateful with life, especially for misfortune and adversity, I did not recognize how meaningful and precious they could be… and foolishly I resisted them. I can be a monster, I know it. I can spit in the face of a marvelous happening and not even realize I have done something so disgraceful. So, like the fool I was I shattered it to pieces.

I watch the series of the life of Jesus, The Chosen. When in the series, Jesus meets Judas it is quite a moment, we know that Judas is going to betray him. However, this character in the series is someone I can relate to, he wants to do something meaningful with his life, he is talented in different ways and when he hears Jesus speak for the first time, he knows he wants to follow him “to the end of the world”.

A dear friend and I share and comment on this series, she asked me: do you think Jesus knew when he met Judas that he was the one that was going to betray him? My response was, “We are all Judas”. I, like Judas was moved, I wanted to be one with God and help the cause of the world to advance, I was given everything to do so, and I betrayed it all… I could very well have been Judas; I had done the wrong thing for the right reason and betrayed the love of my life.

Because of this period in my life, I know we are all capable of horrendous deeds. I also know that nor the seeking disciple nor the horrid person is who I was. So, I try whole-heartedly to keep my hands open and my heart in receiving mode; and as best as I can, not judge others or any situation, and silently be grateful in spite of all the damage I have caused to me and to others.

In my imperfect way, I keep at it, working to pull myself out of the hole I got myself into when I jumped and started to pull off the faces I had become a grown up.

COMING UP NEXT WEDNESDAY

Death is the ultimate teacher.

Death mask by Nuria Blasco Simon @Pintrest