Some transcendent moments knock us to the ground; the veil that hides that holy face is dramatically split. It may last only for an instant, but it remains with us as sacred memory, a holy vision of terror and strength. For me, these moments have been moments of great emotional elation and moments of great sadness.
The first, an emotional high. It was my daughter Sarah’s wedding. It was like all the facets in the home of my body were turned on, full blast, and every experience entering my body ran the full range of feeling between ecstasy and terror at the same moment.
Sarah decided she wanted a down payment on a house rather than a traditional wedding. Only immediate family was in the church that morning, so there were no distractions in my heart. Every word from the celebrant’s mouth, every smile from my daughter’s face, every chord from the organ’s belly, every sigh from the family’s yes, every internal motion in my body’s beating soul played me like a violin on its best day. I burned with joy.
Flashes of feeling and intuitive insight folded in on themselves. As if I stood on the threshold of the mysteries of mysteries, I experienced myself witnessing the wedding of earth and sky, of the first man and first woman, of God and man on the altar that day. I was standing at the center of the universe and seeing, clearly, far beyond the horizon of what was taking place there that morning. I was lifted into a transcendent moment and I had no words to speak it.
Transcendence opens up. The veil is lifted; the wall tumbles down. Archetypal beauty and truth and love pulse our body like a fire hose. Like Peter at the Transfiguration, on top of that holy mountain with Jesus and Elijah and Moses, we long to put up a tent and remain, transfixed, on sacred ground, never to let go of the experience of it.
I felt like I had looked into the belly of life and been infused with an energy and a wisdom not my own, but God’s. But, just as Jesus took Peter by the hand, Life took my hand and led me back down the mountainside and into the only life this mortal is destined to live, my own.
In my other grail experience, the ground shook again, this time for our country. Transcendence opened again; the veil was shattered. The holy ground upon which we stood was littered with death and an ideology gone mad. For a moment in time, on 9-11, the World Trade Center, along with the Pentagon, became the center of the universe, an intersection of powerful positive and negative energies that vaulted into explosive fire and unimagined chaos.
It was a communal moment, a moment of archetypal mayhem and death and intolerable misery, coupled with moments of archetypal beauty and love and truth. We looked over the wall that separates us from these archetypal realities, and from one another, and we joined hands in silence. The accounts of that day, the stories of those we lost, the stories of those who rushed to help, the stories of those who were left behind – these stories are now our anthem.
Love showed its face in our having weeded through every piece of rubble of the WTC by hand. We did this to remember and to honor every single person lost. This helped all of us to feel we were participating, there somehow. It helped us to feel we had done everything we could for those persons desecrated by that senseless attack.
Beauty emerged from that order, from our getting back to the foundation, to the ground of this now hallowed tomb, so there could be a new start, while never forgetting what happened there. We could not start over until we got back to the most personal we could be with it, until each one of us felt consecrated by those holy ashes.
Those fallen buildings are metaphor for all the falling outs that occurred that day – our loss of innocence, our naïve theologies, our entitled isolation from what had always happened “over there.” It was a clearing out of everything we took for granted and, yes, a communal trusting that something, something, would emerge from those ashes that would, indeed, make us stronger in those broken places.
Until we hit that archetypal wall and were forced to look over it — not be satisfied with just leaning against it — we couldn’t grasp the truth or the vision of how to move on. Those archetypal seeds of love and beauty and truth we experienced that day have to be carried by us back into our everyday world, on this side of the wall.
Hopefully, we can call on this vision and use it, now, to move on. Hopefully we can use this newly focused energy and power, now and tomorrow, for all our walls.
We each carry within us memories of healing moments. Images flood my soul of my daughter Sarah’s wedding day with its hugs and laughter and tears; images of firefighters going into the burning WTC, and firefighters, mourning their dead, digging through those hallowed ashes. I carry other images of loving moments and words that healed me in the past. I call on these. They are pieces of transcendence; traces, too, of an imminent presence that blesses my soul.
The ancients believed that the Center moved. The Center of the Universe was anywhere (or anytime) divine energy and human energy converged. I stood at the Center at the heights of emotion with my daughter’s wedding and at the depths of emotion with the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Both of these experiences released more light in me, released more consciousness into my being, and instilled in me a vision of transcendence that will remain with me into my old age.