God is, I am

For my children on the sudden passing of a 24 year old friend--

        Your (original) Aunt Cathy was 'taken away' when I was fifteen and she was 12.  I have never recovered from that passage, and that is the message (for me).  That was (if my figuring is correct, and I have avoided thinking about certain aspects of this until now) in December 1962.  Before that I had unquestionably accepted the precepts of St. Paul's Episcopal Church that had been my upbringing and several times weekly focus (Edna Bakley was my youth group leader, and the organizer of the "living nativity scene" that ended in the death of the little girl cast as the angel).

        Thereafter, I found that traditional "Protestant" religion, and "Christianity" in general, despite the purported focus on death (and as I read recently, worship of an ancient device of torture) was absolutely unfulfilling in terms of dealing with someone close to you actually dying.  The whole bit about heaven and hell was exposed as little more than a children's game of behavior modification.

        It took me years to reach equilibrium in terms of finding and accepting some more functional belief system. A "seeker," I went through many possible alternatives, including fratboyism, nihilism, atheism, escapism, alcoholism, agnosticism, potheadism, existentialism, skibumism, rosicrucianism, longhairism, coupleism, familyism, and more.  Suffice it to say that your Uncle Richard, who was more closely connected to the actual mechanics of our sister's passing (the driver, he spent 6 months after the crash in a hospital bed) has, to my knowledge, never come to an equilibrium (your uncles John and Jim never bought into St. Paul's to begin with, and neither have they found anything else, besides Physics, which seems a cold comfort to me).   

        My confusion wasn't all about god or religion, of course.  In the process many of my other unquestioned beliefs were shown as illusionary as well.  For instance, I had been brought up to consider myself White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), so it was something of a shock for me to learn that my background was actually German Jewish and Catholic Irish. I also came to redefine "middleclass" and "normalcy" to be more closely related to mediocrity than achievement. I still am struggling with the concepts of career, marriage, and fatherhood.  Yet I have established a strong framework of beliefs about "what it's about" that works for me.  "Faith," to use that much abused term, I have come to understand as more telling, more important, than "truth."

        My "Eureka" moment I can trace to a revelation that came to me in the midst of a psychotic episode in 1978 (yes, it is probably significant that this was after your birth, which had been a yearslong very difficult and ambivalent pursuit--though it's possible that I am incorrectly assigning this date to this revelation, as thinking clearly about my history of psychosis is not something that I have been anxious to pursue, especially now, when it has again become a fearsome issue of attack from an ex-to-be). 

        Here's the scene: I was lying in a hospital bed in a private room in the state hospital, heavily medicated.  Having recently arrived, I was totally lost and confused, struggling to understand who and where I was and why.  There was a light directly overhead, focused on the pillow, controlled by a switch on the wall that I could barely reach from the bed.

        In turning that light on and off, to lie in the spotlight and in the darkness, I became aware of the undeniable presence of god.  God was in the light, in the darkness, in the electricity, in the wires, in the walls, everywhere. I had the absolute power to flick the switch and shut off the light.  God was still there, even in the darkness, but if it seemed more efficacious, or less painful, I could turn off the light, turn away from God. Or I could turn it on, even without a switch.

        Probably that seems silly or trite in this retelling, yet I certainly would not wish for you to require a similar experience to "grok" the truth and faith that has remained with me from that moment through many trials.  I have tried to explain to you before the absolute fact that "What you believe is true."  The subtext, of course, is that regardless of any denial, everyone believes in something. It is imperative that you deliberately choose to believe in something that is positive and works for you rather than against you.

        For me, it is undeniable that spirit is oneness.  It is moot whether God created man, or man created God, but it is evident that life is at once separation from, and required passage back toward, the One.  My belief is that Tim is on respite, that his spirit, his soul, unless it has already completed the coursework necessary and thus graduated and surrendered the illusion of individuality, will at some point take on a new body in this earth to complete further work toward the goal of ultimate reunion.  And so it goes.