THE PLACE WHERE LOST THINGS GO
"Where do we go when we die?" my late father would often ask me as I'd struggle to find an answer adequate enough to rival the considerably substantial question he'd routinely pose.
The best I could muster was that we go to the same place as all those missing socks we can never find once they disappear but he wasn't buying it.
"Come on. Where do we go?" he would continue, pressing urgently for an answer to test where I was at spiritually in my convictions, but alas, I had no answer for him.
I suspect he already knew the answer. But the question remains forever branded in my mind and as I sit here on this Easter Sunday, I wonder if perhaps it was the same question Mary asked when observing the body of Jesus in his tomb of rock in its seemingly finite state.
Searching for resurrections is, of course, a natural human instinct and I've talked to many people over the past year who tell me that they believe they've seen signs and symbols of a person's presence beyond the grave be it a butterfly fluttering its wings amongst the buddleia in a garden or an especially bright moon in the dark night sky.
It comforts the soul to think that the spirit lives beyond the body and appear in multitudes of ways that helps to soften the seemingly absolute nature of the loss of those you've loved.
I remember discovering a crumpled up piece of paper in my father's office not long after he'd died which had a draft message to my mother that read to me as if it had just been written there and then in that moment. Perhaps not quite a resurrection as such, but a potent reminder of a life that was forever accessible to us. Just so long as we knew where to look.
The place where lost things go.
One of the great comforts for me in the past ten months since losing my dad has been finding endless annotated scribbled commentaries, quotes and references inside esoteric books from his vast library. Any time I feel a need to connect with him I can simply pull out one of them from his numerous shelves and find an Obi Wan Kenobi-like instruction to direct my focus from anxious grief to enlightened grief.
Two of his favourite expressions in his later years were "everybody dies, but no-one is dead" and "no-one gets out of this life dead" and I draw great strength from such pithy wisdom as I process the loss, not just of him but of all the precious people in my life who are no longer here amongst us in the world of appearances.
As someone who has always felt a strong affinity with Christian culture but without being a believer as such, it was always interesting (to say the least) having a father who was an unconventional Buddhist practitioner to provide an alternative approach to our shared spiritual dialectic. Some people when they choose a alternative path of faith or faithlessness make it always seem a binary choice in their minds and never turn back to look at the religous culture they were raised in. I always found my father was incredibly mindful in paying his respect to the architecture and music that Christianity inspired and was a devoted attendee of evensong.
"I don't think Tibetan music is up to much. Christianity has nothing to worry about there," he would laugh, even though he would regard the Tibetans' Buddhist canon of sacred texts to be the most precious jewels in existence and ultimately the secret to truly escaping the existential trap.
And though he greatly enjoyed reading the works of Christian scholars such as Thomas Merton and John O' Donohue and could (if pressed) find a meeting point between Christian mysticism at its finest and his beloved Dharma he preferred for the most part to keep the two paths separate.
So here I am, left with a somewhat contradictory spiritual approach to the great question.
On one hand, if I take into account the Buddhist idea of totality then no-one has been lost. Then again, when succumbing to the more conventional, dualistic Western notion of losing someone, I am forever looking for signs of where to find him again.
That place where lost things go.
Happy Easter!
Digital Renegade
April 9th 2023