Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi
Post Scriptum, Post Mortem, Agnosticum
From the 7th Hole - Dream Sailors
[It’s May 20, 2016, not long after my dad passed away, and I’m golfing with my friend Ian on the Canal at Northview. Ian’s waiting for me to hit the ball, but I’m typing on my iphone, thinking about my dad’s hope that in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife, he’d play baseball with his family and friends. The long, winding road lies downward on the left and leads into the blue sky, but I’m deep in the shade, thinking about roots.]
From the 7th Hole
Dad, you’re the only one I know on the other side who never professed to know what’s on the other side. So tell me now, if you can, is there anything to see? Are you mute as a block of uncarved stone or is it just that you can’t hear my question, there at first base, amid the chatter of the infield? Either way, I slide the club from my bag, and swing.
Dream Sailors
In Fall 2019 I had a dream that started with me hovering over a small crowd on a jetty. The crowd was slowly moving onto the gangway of an ocean liner. Several young men in white T-shirts moved shoulder to shoulder toward the gangway. They reminded me of photos I’d seen of sailors returning from World War Two. I could see that one of them was my dad (who died three years ago) and that the others were his brothers.
Following the personalized logic of dreams, my dad was all of a sudden right in front of me and the rest of the setting had disappeared.
My dad and I were always rather formal, and shook each other’s hand when we met or parted. Yet this time we hugged. The nature of the hug was extraordinary, as if his heart was pure love, which he projected through my heart. I have never felt anything like it before or since. Love from body to body, embodied, yet happening somewhere in the ether of dream.
I was talking on the phone to my sister later that morning, and I told her that this hug was what I imagine she means when she talks about the love of Jesus. Unfortunately, I have never experienced this love, perhaps because a counsellor took advantage of me at a camp where the other counsellors played similar tricks and also tried to convert the campers into Christians. After that summer I couldn’t touch another male, even my dad, without recoiling. The idea of loving Jesus was, and still is, connected in my emotions to what the counsellors said and did. My mind says one thing — the past is the past — yet my emotions say something else.
In any case, what struck me so hard later that afternoon, after I talked to my sister, was that my dad’s hug was a good-bye hug.
I still wonder about this extraordinary hug. Was it the last stage of a fifty-nine year individuation? Was it a final letting-go of my father’s judicial-apron strings? Or, was it a message from the ether? Was it telling me that he still existed, that he loved me with a love that transcended the body, and that it was possible to make contact with a departed soul? And was the entire scenario — the crowd, the gangway, the ocean liner — also a hint that he was now off on some nebulous journey with his brothers? Were they off to play hardball in the galaxies of faraway worlds? Would I too get to play?
We tell ourselves stories, and we dare ourselves to blur the line between fiction and fact.
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Next: On Time
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