Ineffable

My last essay was my sermon. It’s been a month or more since I preached. As an infrequent preacher, the responses from those that felt touched or moved by my words is powerful.

I don’t know what people that didn’t care for it thought, because they just pass by the receiving line. So all I really hear is really positive. As I poured a lot of thought, energy, and love into my writing, the positive reaction is very encouraging.

I had been reading Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind around the time that I preached. It is a book that looks at psychedelic drugs as treatment for mental illness, the parallels of the transcendent interconnectedness of the drug state, and the meditative state, how our minds close down in adulthood for the sake of ‘efficiency’, exploded open by drugs or practice.

I think being buoyed by the positive energy of the readers and listeners, coupled with a heightened awareness of the mystical placed me in a receptive place.

It was the Tuesday after I preached. It was mid-March in Michigan. That means the grass was a sickly yellow, flattened by the winter snowpack. Nothing green was in sight as the winter dormancy carried on. In other words, the scene wasn’t what you would expect to have a transcendent experience. I had had breakfast, and I was standing in my bedroom, getting dressed and looking at the scene before me.

It was then that I felt so amazingly loved by the world and everyone on it. And just as I thought, ‘Wow’, I had the major shift to ‘I love everyone and everything in the world.’ I was awestruck in that moment, and I sat on the bed and looked out at the sickly yellow grass and saw astonishing beauty, and my love flowed. ‘Even him?’, to that one who has harmed so many in our country. Even him. Wow.

A month has passed, and the awesomeness has faded somewhat. The process of understanding the experience, and making meaning from it continues. I know right where the feeling is, and I go back to it like a talisman, and I feel it just as plainly.

I’ve spent the better part of the month thinking about love. I’ve been thinking of my loved ones, and that amazing expansion to ALL of the loved ones in the mystical experience. I’ve been thinking about people that I love, and still love, even separated by space, time or boundaries. For me, in my pondering, love doesn’t have an off switch. I’m careful about saying, ‘I love you.’ I don’t want to make others feel like they have to say it back to me just because I feel love for them. I’ve spent most of the month wondering how I was going to put into words the experience I had which really cannot be expressed by words. Ineffable.

I’ve been thinking about the dystopian despair, fear and cynicism that dominates and dictates our culture, and how we interact. I reflect, and experience anew, this astonishing love that disrupts all of that: I will not despair, fear or be cynical when being loving will change all of that.

I know where I was mentally, merely two years ago, where I couldn’t feel that I could love myself. It’s a feeling that I will remember, and contrast with a feeling of love pouring forth in extravagant portions.

The poets have said: ‘All you need is love….Love is all you need.’

Love to you.

Harold