A Mystery Silently Waiting To Be Solved

By Jan Crawford

I met a woman I’ll call Grace at a conference for lesbians with disabilities in the mid-1970s. As Grace wheeled herself into the group of 25 women whose discussion I was leading, I was impressed that her wheelchair was as tech-outfitted as your average spaceship and that she controlled it with the one finger she could use. The rest of her body was collapsed and horribly twisted. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the physical pain she must have been in. And the question quickly passed through my mind: how could anyone survive in a body that decimated?

Within moments, however, that thought was completely overshadowed by the force of her smile and presence. I was astonished to see and feel how much joy could pour out of one human being. It was almost like being temporarily blinded by another driver suddenly turning on their bright lights as they approached on a dark road.

I asked each person to take a few minutes to say whatever they wanted to say. After about half the participants had spoken, a very frightened young woman in tears said she had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. There was a gentle silence in the group as we all responded with support and concern. And when it was Grace’s turn to speak, with her continuous beatific smile, she turned to that woman. It seemed to be heartbreakingly difficult for her to make her words comprehensible. After several minutes of struggle the woman who was assisting Grace told us that she was telling the young woman, “It will be all right.”

It would be arrogant of me to assume what Grace or anyone else was feeling, but I felt I was witnessing one of the most generous acts of love I had ever seen. It has taken me many decades to understand what I now believe Grace may have been manifesting and teaching us. And that is true only because, in these final years of my life, I have experienced glimpses of a dimension of reality where joy, an ease of being, more compassion toward oneself and others, and a sense of timelessness are as natural as the sun rising every day.

For me and many others, those glimpses seem to be primarily related to years of inner work. However, they can arise at any moment under any condition. For example, people often speak about these realizations spontaneously occurring when they are deeply absorbed in nature. For one man it was the joy he experienced during the birth of his child. And we know music or great beauty of any kind, especially if we allow ourselves to be completely permeated by it, can expand us beyond those conditioned-limited selves.

They can even occur during overwhelmingly difficult times. My late friend, raised Mormon, fled into the first church she saw, a Catholic church, horrified that people in the streets were “celebrating the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki” during World War II. What she experienced on her knees before a statue of Christ changed her life forever: she became a Benedictine nun.

Such moments, whether in a lesbian disability discussion group, a West Village sanctuary or listening to music are opportunities we can cultivate and celebrate no matter how difficult that may sometimes seem. In his book, The Book of Life, philosopher and scholar Peter Kingsley describes how much we sacrifice when we do not acknowledge what an opportunity this life could be. If people only recognize how fragile this short-lived gift of human life is, they would all get together and plan to live consciously and honorably and not fritter their time away in making war or money. But they won’t because they can’t. And they can’t because this is one of the best kept secrets—that people are not yet human. And human life is the mystery that’s silently waiting to be lived.

For me, St. Luke’s sanctuary has been a place of great comfort and occasional revelation in my meditations. Particularly in my more revolutionary days, I never imagined that I would be a little old lady – who had been a breath away from death several times – sitting in a park feeding and enchanted by the birds. I am grateful that I seem to be getting not so much what I thought I wanted in this life, but clearly what I needed. There is great pleasure and even amusement as I recognize that part of what I needed was to be more human in the sense of allowing the struggling part of me to relax and allow my true nature to just be. And paradoxically, I also needed to be less human, less unconsciously identified with the concretized assumption of what a human being is.

For each in our own way, these days I often wonder if our attempts to solve the mystery of what life is and what we are, is one our most urgent opportunities and challenges. Perhaps it is even why we are here?