Some days it seems as if the dark forces have won.
A friend sent me a document from the Department of Defense website that reveals a full-spectrum propaganda/information management program, aimed at…us. I don’t understand how our little boats of truth can survive the resources and personnel directed against us.
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A loved one has kidney damage. A loved one has heart damage. A loved one is going for surgery. An elder’s heart simply burst. An elder fell. An elder now walks with two sticks.
I pray for everyone continually and I remember the days when we rolled around in health, heedlessly, barely noticing, as if we were pressing grapes without measure into an endless vat of wine.
Now that past is past.
Loved ones who are young look pallid, with a yellowish glaze across their cheekbones. I look, hoping they will not notice, for evidence of living capillaries, for the blush of life.
They have grey-blue shadows, under their eyes, that that never go away. Their cheeks are hollow.
I pray all the time. Now that I believe a great harvesting of human life is underway, a great shaking-out of the human project, I have no more excuses. I feel that our current conditions have been brought about so that we are in an X-ray moment spiritually, in which we cannot be lukewarm or equivocal.
We must choose this day whom to serve.
Joshua 24:14: 14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
I have to write what I have longed not to write; what both good Christians and good Jews have advised me never to write.
I have to write it now because what happened to me, that I do not discuss, has comforted me and instructed me and guided me in this terrible time.
Who knows; this story may comfort you as well.
####
Some years ago, I was writing a book about female sexual and reproductive health. I was scared to complete and publish it, since that would mean that I would have to speak publicly about female sexual biology and physical desire, which were at that time still somewhat taboo subjects. The theme of my book was that the sexuality of women, and their gift of fertility, were sacred treasures, and that these should be treated by society (and by women themselves) with great respect, and not degraded or debased.
I was afraid I would be attacked for bringing these issues into daylight and speaking about them frankly (I know that my former fears about this in today’s much more brazen time now sound quaint). But I was so very fearful that for the first time in my life, I suffered a writer’s block.
I was immobilized.
I happened to be in Portland, Oregon. I was wandering along a charming shopping area, 23rd Street, downtown. It was a cool, wet day. That vibrant Northwestern drizzle, green and misty, was a fragrant veil against my face.
Victorian houses lined both sidewalks. Stores offered handmade chocolates and tie-dyed cotton skirts. Cafes with fresh-ground coffee, gift shops with scented soaps, all beckoned.
On the basement level of one of the Victorians, a wooden sign read: “Counseling”.
Having nothing better to do, and thinking that a random chat with a stranger might ease my inability to write, or at least that it could not hurt, I walked down the steps.
I was in an unmemorable hallway: standard-issue chairs and beige carpeting. I sat in a chair and waited. The door opened; an unremarkable woman gestured me into her office. I found myself in a space as bland as the waiting area had been.
The counselor was about forty. She looked like a mom who had gone back to work. She wore an Oregon-standard suburban-lady outfit: leather clogs, khaki slacks, a bright cotton sweater. Her shoulder-length light-brown hair showed a feathering of grey at the temples. Her pleasant, open face was bare of makeup.
She gestured me to sit on a little grey couch. I glanced at the credentials framed on her wall: an MSW license. There were cozy pillows, the splash of color in a Mexican rug, and — that was it. There was nothing else suggestive or unusual there. I don’t even remember her name.
I explained to her my writer’s block, and she responded that her method used hypnotherapy. I was comfortable with this, as my mother is a sought-after past-life regression therapist. While I am agnostic (as is my mother) about whether what her clients experience are actual “past lives” or simply the immense narrative power of the subconscious mind, I knew that various people had used that methodology to get to the heart of their concerns quickly.
Certainly, as a writer, I recognize that the subconscious mind is nothing to belittle. It holds both terrors and riches. I also knew enough about phobias (writer’s block is a phobia) to know that my subconscious mind could indeed hold the key to why I was unable to face the blank page, and that it could possibly show me what I needed to do to move past that immobilization.
The counselor explained that she would put me into a light meditative state. I was comfortable with that as well.
I closed my eyes.
“Ten, nine, eight…” She counted, in a quiet, soothing voice. She had explained that I was to walk down a staircase and count with her, silently, with each step. “Seven, six, five…” I was to count with her until I reached the bottom of the staircase.
I did so.
I was surprised to find myself descending rough golden-white stone steps, hewn as if by coarse chipping. The flat risers of the stairs blended in curves, not in squared edges, into the stone walls that flanked them, as do the Herodian and other ancient steps unearthed by archaeologists. The steps were exactly like the ones I had walked down in the Old City in Jerusalem, where I had lived for a couple of years as a child, and then as a teenager.
“…Four, three, two, one.”
I was at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice, now distant, explained that I would see a door in front of me.
I faced a rough-hewn wooden door, held together not with nails but with leather cords.
“Now open the door and tell me what you see.”
I opened the door.
#####
Before me a man in his early thirties, sitting on a rough wooden bench.
I was now in the room with him.
The two of us were in a crude, stone-walled workshop, like the simple, ancient workshops in the Old City that are still in use, half hewn out of the hillsides’ golden rock. Deep shadows pooled in the corners.
The man was seated at a worktable. I saw that it was held together by wooden dowels, not by metal nails. The man wore a simple robe, made of light brown fabric closer in texture to hemp cloth or to burlap than to modern woven cloth. The edges were uneven, unhemmed. He was barefoot; the floor was made of packed dirt — the golden sandstone dirt of Jerusalem; and I saw that his feet were dusty. The soles of his feet rested on the golden dirt of the floor. The frayed edging of his robe, his feet, the table’s surface, were all dusty. It was the dust of premodern poverty. He was obviously poor.
I understood glancingly that I now was in a meditative, or hypnotically relaxed, state. It was as if I had left my conscious awareness far above, and had dropped to a much deeper level, below normal cognition; it was as if I had reached a deep well of awareness inside my being, full of still water.
I gazed at this being in astonishment. I knew exactly who this being was.
I knew that he was Jesus.
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What I saw was incredible.
But it was also terrifying and upsetting.
My reactions were completely split. My awareness was torn in two.
My subliminal mind, where I was mostly present, was overjoyed. I had never been happier in my life. I was in the presence of my best friend, whom I did not consciously know, but whom, subconsciously, I thought I had lost forever.
Hot tears welled from under my closed lids, and spilled down my cheeks. I was crying as if I had waited my whole life to cry like this; as if these tears had been in me, dormant, forever.
But even as my subconscious mind was rejoicing, I could far above me feel my conscious mind — my personality, my biographical self, my ego — freaking out; appalled; twisting about like a hooked fish, in a desperate effort to escape.
My conscious mind was horrified.
I am a Jewish lady.
This was the wrong person.
This was not whom I had wanted to see.
