(1) . . . Starving, infected, abandoned, and forgotten, you have no one to hold your hand in these last few hours on this planet.
You reach for the earthen cup in which you left a mouthful of water to slake your burning thirst. As you reach, you remember how hard you fought to claim this cup from another slave, a countryman of yours. To whom did it rightfully belong? It doesn’t matter any more. Just as you start to sip, you see a centipede, swimming, struggling, drowning . . . in this little bit of water at the bottom of the cup.
Instantly it strikes you. How absurd this all has been! At this crucial moment in your life, you are finally out of the cup, no longer struggling like this centipede to survive; you are free . . . free at last! Equal to your masters – no, far beyond them, for they, as you have often seen, are still struggling for the measly drops of pleasure in those miniature worlds of theirs. With one great and final laugh, you toss the cup as far as you can out of your hut and die, released from bondage, jubilant.
(2) . . . But your son himself turned to you and said, “I am glad to go – to be rid of your stupid religion and stinking shop. I told them to burn it.”
Stunned and speechless, you slowly turn to go . . . back to the empty shell of your town. As you turn, however, you see a face you recognize in the crowd of ex-slaves, freebooters, and hangers-on who always follow temporary success. This man . . . you’ve seen him, frequently, many years ago. Then it comes to you. He was a client of yours, a petty merchant, who borrowed from you and was never quite able to repay. You dunned him and pursued him until he abandoned his business and disappeared. You barely regained your principal, but the interest was lost.
You lost interest . . . but your client probably never lost interest in what had been his livelihood, his family, his former standing in the community, and in you, his nemesis. Now you and he are equally homeless and degraded by another interested party – God.
“God is Just!” you exclaim. What you took has been taken. What He gives He reclaims – in equal measure, and without profit, for nothing can be said to make God, the Owner of all, richer than He already is. “Justice has been done,” you murmur to yourself. And suddenly the peace of ultimate understanding floods your heart as you walk away. A life of acceptance and contentment has begun.
(3) . . . Finally, your deceit was discovered by an old witch; she denounced you as a fraud. Now you survive on the margin of society, in ignominy and filth.
When your morale is at its lowest ebb, and you are sitting at the door of your hovel, far from the homes of others, a dog comes limping to you and whimpering, with an infected paw. Given your knowledge of herbs and plasters, you are able to treat it, and so gain a companion in misery. Little by little, you see other small examples of suffering you never noticed before, so busy were you with ‘getting ahead in the world’.
Mice and sparrows, foxes and hawks, goats and yaks gradually teach you a whole new set of values, grounded in compassion, patience, and humility. Decades pass in service to these humble creatures, and their mute gratitude becomes palpable enough for you to realize that you were never as happy as you are now, on the outskirts of society and respectability. And then, finally, in your last days on earth, even the villagers and their children regard you as a saint, for your heart has grown to embrace them all while seeking nothing for yourself. And you die with a wisdom and serenity you never imagined possible for a soul as sinful as yours was.
(4) . . . Your wife has returned to her parents, bitter and scornful of your lack of manhood. And now your mother tells you through her tears: “When you were still little, I boasted of your beauty to another woman – a sorceress, as I was later told. Perhaps she cast an evil eye on you, and this is her indelible curse.”
The next morning, while packing your bag and a roll of bedding, you announce to your family that you are leaving on a pilgrimage. Where? Who knows? Who cares? And off you go.
The first week is bewildering, the first month is exhilarating, and the first year is exhausting. But by the time you reach Bodh Gaya in India you are a veteran traveller. Young and strong (except for that embarrassing secret that ensures your chastity), you peregrinate from one temple to the next, through the breadth and length of India, followed by Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand.
Forty years drift away like a dream. By now, the memories you have of your parents, your village, and that life-altering curse are nothing but a wisp of mist in the morning of a distant land. You have rubbed up enough against this world to know how threadbare and flimsy it really is, and the great Beyond beckons you with all its beauty, power, and fathomless compassion. Somewhere along the way south, on the Malay Peninsula, with the dust of the road in your eyes and stiffness in your joints, you pass on peacefully, like the echo of a whisper amid the mountains of the Eternal Mind.
(5) . . . The bear recognized the danger you pose, and is heading straight for you. You shot once, but missed. There will be no second bullet. You too are facing your final moments on this planet.
Despite your terror, you see the muscular magnificence of this beast. You have dined on the flesh of his relatives, even as he has just tasted the flesh of yours. You and he are equals; he has his terrible beauty, and you have yours. The Terrible Beauty of the Spirit in all things floods through you, and you cry out in the greatness of your terror and the beauty of the Spirit that gave Itself so freely to you both.
With your arms raised and your head held high, you release a cry such as you have never heard before and will never hear again – a Universal Shout that is neither Yes nor No, but utterly Unfathomable.
When you regain your senses, you find yourself standing, alive, and the bear has disappeared. Sobbing, you rush to find your nephew still breathing, and also barely alive. Stumbling and sobbing with terror and the incantations of your ancestors, you carry him through the woods to the herbs and healing hands of hope and home.
(6) . . . You need some peace, to think, maybe to pray, but nothing comes but tears. If only your partner would shut up and die!
Then it occurs to you that, while both of you are losing blood and will soon be unconscious, your partner is dying in excruciating pain, while you are in relative comfort, and yet would murder him to keep that comfort to the end. How selfish you have been!
So you begin to talk, to soothe him, despite his screams and obscenities, and your own fears. You remind him of how you both dedicated yourselves to courage and stoicism when you joined the service. You recount the many adventures you have had together, and how many times before this you improbably escaped death. In the end, no one escapes death. But many do avoid an ignoble death.
Then you describe what noble death is like – the calmness, the clarity, and the peace in it. You mention Socrates, Cato the Younger, and other heroes of renown. From there, you go on to recapitulate the beliefs that you and he share – in the immortal soul, in eternal reward for having done what is eternally good, and the Eternal Good Who is God. Ultimately, nothing matters besides Him.
As you speak, your partner cannot help but listen, and his cries give way to whimpers, and finally he lapses into silence, breathes fitfully for a few minutes, and dies. And before your spirit ebbs away into that same darkness, you think one final thought – that you could not have chosen a better way to leave this world than to hear yourself utter the most beautiful words you have ever heard.
(7) . . . Then you are violated so often in so many ways that your life has no meaning for you. Everything in your existence is cause for shame and anguish. So when your mother finally leaves you on the side of the road, what pain have you been spared?
You think to yourself, “Now I have no one, not even my mother. I am truly worthless.” A black pit opens up under your soul, and you yearn to ebb away into its finality.
But then you hear, as clearly as a human voice besides your ear: “No, not so. I am your Lord; I loved you even before I made you . . . and I made you for this. I gave you all you need to love Me; the rest is useless. Everything I have given those around you has made them love Me less . . . so what they have is less than what you have. You have the gift of wanting nothing more from this world – the greatest of all My worldly gifts. Be glad, then that you love Me as I love you, with a Love that consumes every sorrow, sickness, and sin. For they are nothing beside Me. And if I am all you have, you have it all.”
The light in your heart after hearing that voice soon becomes manifest, evoking first respect and then veneration by those who come to know you, and you leave this world purified, beloved, forgiving, and forgiven.
(8) . . . Either way, your precious chance at happiness is ruined, permanently. There’s a bridge across the river where this pain of failure can end. There’s no other way.
The night before it all ends, your mother comes into the room and sits beside you as you lie in bed rigid, tragically determined, and sobbing inside. She asks you what is wrong with you, and you refuse to answer. “I won’t leave you here until you tell me,” she says.
After half an hour of resistance, you succumb to her pleas (secretly glad to), and tell her everything. “I could see this coming, but I was praying it wouldn’t,” she says. “What you did was wrong, but you know that more deeply now than any words of mine could tell you. And you are not alone. We too are at fault.
“Your father and I saw you hanging out with a bad group of friends, and we simply hoped you would grow out of it. So we were wrong too. But our God is gentle and forgiving, and He always finds a way for those who trust in Him.
“Here’s the plan. We’ll move away from here – far away – and you can have your baby where no one knows you, and then we’ll see how you feel, and what our new community is like. I just want you to know that we will always truly love you, try to find what is best for you, and help you even when you do something foolish. That’s what parents are for, darling; never forget that.”
You never forgot, and forty years later, your daughter is your best friend and a constant source of solace. You cannot imagine any greater joy than to have someone like her in your life.
(9) . . . The chances for your grandson twenty years from now are equally bleak in this, one of the poorest countries on Earth. And despair floods your heart at the unfairness and futility of it all.
Just then, the cellphone in your pocket vibrates. You hold it to your ear, like a seashell . . . and suddenly it hits you. This technology, with its trackless depths and changing moods, is the sea, and you are drowning in it. No wonder you can never be happy; it’s like drinking the water of the ocean. There is too much of it, and the salt in it will never quench your thirst. This is where your feelings of lost chances and hopeless dreams have been coming from for all these years. This is the real root of your poverty.
You look around, and for the first time, perhaps, since you were a child, you see the marvellous beauty and endless fascination of your world on the fringes of the sea – on the shore, where you belong. And with an upsurging shout of joy and comprehension, you heave that phone as far as you can throw – back into the ocean your ancestors successfully crossed nearly two thousand years before.
The GOD You Already Know 