I can remember many years ago when I began a concerted effort to erase the word “God” from my vocabulary. And not only from my written work: in daily conversation, using this word “God” often led to nothing but misconceptions and arguing. It seemed to keep any of the real fruits of the spirit from blossoming; and this is what I cared for above all. To use it, especially among my young peer group, was to alienate people from one another, and it often led to the worse types of unkindness. But I also felt that to speak of “God” was intellectually lazy, insofar as many invoked God’s name as an answer to the problem, rather than the question or impetus par excellence. Furthermore, by then I was old enough to see how those who used the word most often really had no idea what they were talking about. They used “God” as a way to impose their worldview on others, or to pander guilt-trips, or to nourish their superiority complexes. I wanted nothing to do with them, and it seemed to me at the time that just to utter God’s name put me in their company. So I stopped– for all these reasons and more. Quite frankly, it was the only ethical thing I could do at the time, given the world I was just then realizing I lived in. I still live in that world; and so even now I am as careful as possible not to be in the company of those who are not careful with their words. And yet, evangélion simply means “bringer of Good News,” and one cannot remain with one’s youthful reservations forever…
Of course it was never quite as cut-and-dried as abandoning a word. While disillusioned with the rote forms of worship and the boring forms of talking about God (I was raised in a Lutheran church), I was not inattentive to the workings of grace in my life as they continued even after I began my effort to speak purged of that ominous signifier, and to head in a direction that had already been imposing its will upon me– that is, the direction of poetry. I’m speaking about a time in my life when I was sixteen or seventeen: already my mother had been diagnosed with melanoma, and I was in the middle of my own battle against cancer, my lymphoma. Through the chemotherapeutic haze, and then after I was “cured” and my mother had passed away, I saw how the community around my family (including many wonderful folks from church) helped to lift all of our spirits with their prayers, gifts and kind words. I saw how my father’s attitude toward my mother, toward our family, and toward life itself was transformed by the ordeal of our illnesses. And at her death bed, when my father and I held her two chilled hands, and gripped our own free hands together across her legs, I felt the strength of a bond of love between the three of us that nothing could ever destroy, especially not her death. For nothing can take away the legacy of love: legacy is always, immediately, reality. As I wept and wept on the hospital couch of room 421 that October night, 2003, my father clarified the scenario for me when he, also crying and rubbing my back, said with an obvious sense of uncertainty, “Tim, it’ll be alright, we’ll be okay.” Despite the fact that I was the one huddled up like a baby, I knew right when he said it that inside of me something very confident was burgeoning, something that made his words of condolence almost disappointing in their disavowed doubt. But of course we were going to be okay! God was with us, wherever we had next to go. All we had to do was believe (and this, I tell you, is no more difficult for us than breathing!).
Fast forward a few years to 2006, my first year in college, to another life-changing event. This one was condensed to one short week, and to this day I wonder if anything that intense will ever “dawn” on me again. It marks the beginning of my adult life as such. I had been very sick for about a week, perhaps purging something ugly and deep (and of all things to be reading between sessions of vomiting, there in my hands was Atlas Shrugged!). As my sickness was departing, I visited Barnes and Noble and read Saul William’s book Said the shotgun to the head for the very first time. Well, it was as if one veritable Shotgun of God had gone off in my head, and the reverberations sent me out to teach something with an unheard-of spontaneity of heart. I was both oblivious of everything, absolutely without concern for myself, and yet fully aware of every passing sign, feeling, and intention all around me. While I cannot describe the level of understanding that came over me that day (and again today?), I knew that it was a sudden rapturous enlightenment, something felt only deeply in the bones. It could not have been feigned: I tasted of Buddhamind, Love itself had taken hold of me. You can read what I wrote that initial next morning here, on my old xanga page. I have yet to complete or revise the major document that came out of this episode– a poem of about 80 pages that deals playfully and joyfully with God, life, spirit, nothing, etc. But this moment of dawn came with its pains, as with childbirth. I all but stopped eating and sleeping to focus on prayer and writing (Matthew 4:4). Needless to say, I was scaring the hell out of my family and my girlfriend Maree. I was acting exceedingly strange and definitively “not myself.” My words and my demeanor were sending the ones I loved crying from me, even though I knew that I had not simply lost my mind, and more importantly, that my words were flowing forth from a place of impartial love for them and for all beings. Truth be told: impartial love can hurt. Perhaps that alone dawned on me, is still dawning today…
Long story short, I ended up in the emergency room, where my stream of consciousness insight into the workings of God and the universe landed me a stay in the psych-unit. The next day I was transported to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and was released with a diagnosis of bi-polar and schizophrenia (after a rather crazy overnight stay, during which I swear to this day I heard the man on the radio say, “Well everyone, today was the big day: all seven wonders of the world have fallen”; my father was asleep by my side that night). Later, reading the work of Stanislov Grof, I learned that I had had what he calls a “spiritual emergency” — a very tender time that can easily be misdiagnosed as the onset of something bad by medical professionals who have no way of “detecting” it. Needless to say, the doctor’s reactions, along with my family’s, made me doubt the real status of this event, and sent me into a giant pit of confusion. I regressed back to childhood; I asked my step-mom if I was autistic; and one night, with my head buried on his lap, I asked my dad what we were watching on television. “Basketball,” he said– a game we had played together our whole lives, his and my favorite sport. But the thing was: I knew exactly what I was watching. I knew full well that I wasn’t autistic. And yet I was asking, and watching myself ask, perplexed as could be. I was never trying to fool or hurt anyone. Truth be told, I don’t know. Really. All I can is: something was being fulfilled…
Of course, this giant pit of confusion was also a part of the event, and necessary. I only took the meds they prescribed for about two days and was back in school by the following week. But I was magically back, gratefully back. Nothing has ever felt the same. In the days and weeks that followed, my passions cooled and I got some much-needed rest; but I knew that a fire had been set, and there was no question of pursuing it further or not. After all, it had pursued me, as God’s Love is wont to do! In a certain sense, every word I say henceforth is a footnote to that experience, which is why I say it was the beginning of my adult life; but at the same time, I have come to know that sense of exuberance and joy countless times. I might even say that it’s become normal, become practical, become the very life-bread of my existence, even if it is not as flashy as it was for that one week. Which makes sense: impartial love does not boast in its actions, lest it hurt someone it loves. At any rate, I say with full confidence that God was leading me on in that “emergency,” and that He has continued to do so through all the thousands of emergencies since then that have felt like that first one. He saw to it then that I was surrounded by the most loving bunch of people on the planet: my father, his new wife Susie, and Maree. To this day, I owe these three everything for their patience with me and for their love. Without them, I’m not sure I would have “come back,” especially not without the direct command issuing from Maree to do so. Perhaps everything I do is ultimately in honor of that, of that simple but pure gesture of human love. It meant and will always mean everything.
Nevertheless, the truth is this, and now I know it better than ever: I came back to save everyone. Which only means one thing: I did not come back from that emergency, no more than I survived cancer, for my own well being, nor for my own proclivities in love. I came back because love itself needed me, because it needed me to keep speaking. What infinite grace, what powerful hands of the Almighty, that I am preserved solely for the sake of Love, alive solely on the hope that my measly little life might kindle in your heart some of the Love that God always already has for each and every one of us! This “God” that your heart and my heart and each heart is! And so let me hasten to add that my situation is in no way unique. We are all “still alive” for this very same purpose, to fulfill this very same duty to love and to be loved, and to give thanks all along the way. To say hello to one another and to realize: we are all already saved, if only we live love…
To return to my narrative, about a year later my father was diagnosed with cancer, and one of the most painful types there is: pancreatic. I was still an “undecided” major at college and took the semester of Fall 2007 off to be with him in his final months. This was also a time of deep spiritual growth for me, not necessarily due to an overload of personal study, and perhaps due to the very opposite. I was spending almost all of my time with him or with friends, sometimes meditating, sometimes discussing the ideas of Eastern philosophy and Ken Wilbur, sometimes watching Planet Earth. Whenever I was driving, I would repeat a mantra supposed to bring good health (“Om Shri Dhanvantre Namaha”) and spin my mala beads in my lap, hoping (perhaps a bit superstitiously, I admit) that it would bring help and healing to my dad, or at least to me. In the meantime, I watched my father undergo an almost total transformation from who I remembered as a child. My mom’s death, and then his life with Susie, had already softened him quite a bit; but the idea of his own death brought a halt to the mind that had been dedicated for 25+ years to being a stellar electrical engineer and department manager at Rockwell Collins. He fell in love with a book called Conversations with God, which he said answered many of his questions about the relationship between science and spirituality. (I never read it; despite the fact that he was handing it out like candy to all his family and friends, I knew it was not for me.) He and Susie also read Ken Wilber’s account of his struggle with his own wife’s cancer, Grace and Grit. And so while all of this was an immensely difficult time for us, I felt all along like we were being guided by some unseen hand, like it wasn’t an accident or simply a bad turn of fate. Strange as it sounds, these were some of the best months and moments of my life, sharing tears with my father, seeing this amazingly courageous man face up to the harshest pain without complaint. And then to see him tear and dissolve when he realized that no cure was going to be possible. I didn’t write too much at this time, but when I did, it was usually dedicated to someone, and most often to my father. I wrote to understand myself, but also to bring understanding and comfort to him. It was my long-form of “We’ll be okay,” my own rendering of the Good News.
In the end, I’d never felt as connected with my own personal responsibility and obligation to the living as I did on January 3rd, 2008 and the days following immediately afterwards. Perhaps other men feel the same way when they lose their fathers: now it is time to take it all upon oneself; now, your shoulders are the broadest that there are. For anyone who knew my dad, those are some broad shoulders to take handle of, much broader than my own! But his presence goes with me– my Father’s, I mean– just as his gravestone inscription says (Exodus 33:14). Again, this is not some hypothetical conjecture. I’m telling you this with absolute certainty. My Father goes with me wherever I go.
Where I went after that, however, was no glorious and pretty place. Between these traumatic events and college life at the University of Iowa, my drinking and pot-smoking habits went up considerably (including the addition of regular cigarette smoking). Furthermore, I was torn between what I felt was my duty to myself (which required much time “alone”) and the social activity that I also needed and enjoyed so much. I never felt orphaned, first because of my step-mom, Susie, and second because of the wonderful community of friends that was around me, even if our activities together weren’t always the best thing for my mental, physical, and spiritual health. But this half-decade had truly thrown me back upon myself, me who had always been independent to begin with. I now entered every “social” situation with a new-found sensibility of how it was really affecting my spirit or, in many cases, keeping me from it. And slowly I learned how to navigate both interests. I threw myself into my studies and designed my own major, entitled “Pneumatology: study of the Human Spirit.” This allowed me to take all the courses that I wanted, and so I was able to include courses on trauma and death (which I took the semester of my return), anthropology and literature, as well as all the many religious studies courses, independent studies, and writing workshops that I was diving into headlong. While the balance between public and personal was often difficult for me, I knew that my heart and spirit resided in my work, for if there is one activity that I can do “by myself” that keeps me in communion with God and all of those I love, it is this: reading, thinking, and writing. Of course, for me this forms a continuous bond with all of my living, all my daily speech and conduct, all my love. Today, I can read and write and think at full capacity wherever I am, no matter who I am with. With a little help from sobriety, and a lot of help from God’s guidance, I will continue to do this, and rejoice in it for you, all the way until the end of days.
In sum, my college experience after my father’s death amounted to a perfect mix of despair and delight, sociality and isolation, debauchery and purity. I’d long ago intuited the “need” for self-voidance, and while reality had dealt me enough death-experiences to know that there was no avoiding this voidance, college gave me the chance to pursue this as an adult in every way imaginable. Drugs, including psychedelics, played a part in this; but so did their supplement, works by Aldous Huxley and others. Drinking played a part in this; but so did the poetry of Jack Spicer and Paul Celan. Mediation played a part in this; but so did the words of Sri Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi. Of course love played a part in all of this, romantic or not, foolish or not, wasted or not. And all along: vast expanses of time filled with uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness, and every breed of feeling helpless and alone that one man can experience. I am not ashamed to admit that it took all I had in me to not give up, and that this time in my life (which extended quite a ways after graduation, and in part up to this very day) was filled with what I can only regard as mistakes, misconceptions, and missteps. But all along, I was sustained by my desire to write and by the duty I knew I had to live up to as a survivor: I had to do with the legacy I inherited from my parents everything I could for the cause of Love. Of course, only now can I articulate it that way; but I believe that this was the underlying factor that kept me from jumping out of my window some nights. The worst thing we can do in life is fail to heed the call to exist, even if we do not know where that existence is headed or what it is making of us. To this very day, I do not know “whither”; and yet, as always, whither itself runs.
And so here I am, again, kneeling before the altar of God, which I tell you unequivocally and without hesitation is the whole of existence in all of its aspects, attributes, avatars, and auras. Am I still afraid to use this word, “God”? Yes and no. But now when I use it, I know for certain that I am not “defining” anything, certainly not setting any restriction on its meaning. I know that I am and conduct only the fruitfulness of the Spirit. Those who put their stock in arguments will have their arguments. Those who need a reasonable “proof” of God will pursue their (a)theistic ontologies. Those who need God as a guarantee of their unloving motives and as the justification for imposing their own beliefs on others will continue to lie (see Revelation 22:11). And those kind people who can do without any mention of “God,” well, let them go on being kind, never doubting, and never thinking twice about not mentioning Him (thank God they don’t!), since the Art of Kindness is all that any talk of God is meant to each us. Because the truth is, “God” is not a word. “God” is the “name” of and behind everything that is being said insofar as it relates to, or can potentially relate to, everything else that has ever existed, or will exist. For me, “we relate to one another” means “God exists”‘; and so wherever we relate to one another, there God is (Matthew 18:20). Put it as simply as you like: where there is love, God is there, and where there’s no love, there’s no God. This simple axiom, I hope, simplifies whatever dilemma you might have over the usage of this “term.” In my eyes, understood this way, in God there can only be growth, for any liar can be immediately recognized and called out; and that growth can only be the growth of impartial love in the heart, even when it is terribly difficult. Trust me, you will know it when it is working and it will be unavoidable. Do nothing drastic about it, just listen. It is that Higher Voice within you. But we must choose to listen to it, vigilantly. And almost immediately, we can rejoice, give thanks, and move forward…
One can try to run away, one can try to avoid it, and hell, one can even try to die, but existence itself embraces us from before and beyond everything, including the grave. And this embrace has only one characteristic: love. Obviously, from all that I have just told you, this love is not without its suffering; in fact, Christ proclaims to us that true and impartial love for all beings suffers everything for the good. Those of Buddhist inclination will note an exact parallel in the Bodhisattva vow. I write this piece today, kneeling at the altar of God, to confess to you and to my God that I desire to, I will to, and I will will to, suffer everything for the good. No more now than during these trying times of my past do I know exactly where this long-suffering love is leading. But once again, whither runs, and any of us can chose simply to run with it– to “surrender to love” as my good friend Adam often puts it. But who among us doesn’t need reminders, and daily ones at that, of the need to suffer for love impartially, of the need to surrender totally to what existence is bringing to us constantly, to open ourselves to one another as wide as possible without sacrificing our own sense of decency and conscience, and to be patient through whatever is demanded of us, to see everything through to the end with courage and an infinitely forgiving heart? Yes, we all need to remember God…
Today I stand before you, with a realization that is both timeless and yet revealed only in this moment: I write (live?) because that is how I remember God. That is how it has always been and how it will always be. I have said much, and I have much left to say; but all in all, I can only say the “unsaid” itself– in remembrance of God, done in the remembrance of Him. I can only offer myself up as a kind of mirror for This, or perhaps (with God’s grace and help) set an example of what is possible, of what it can mean to remember God, or rather, to remember that God remembers you. He always has, always does, and always will. God does not forget us, no matter what tribulation we are going through; and He loves us more than we could ever imagine ourselves being loved. Truly, He is everything in this sense, because He loves, and existence is love. And in another sense, He is very simple. For I am He– and after all, I am nothing very much!
Kneel before the altar, no matter what your suffering. Confess what you have done wrong to all people, every day. Let go of whatever ill notions you hold of other people or of other groups of people, for these are the things that breed pain in your heart. Let go of what is merely transitory and hold to what is eternal; then all your conceitedness and hesitation will melt away like dew in the spring. Forgive yourself for how you have harmed yourself and others in thought, word, and deed; immediately you yourself will be and feel forgiven. Pray for the strength to stop doing all these things that bring harm to you and your fellow man. Pray for the strength to do what “God” demands of you. Because of course there is no “God” that demands anything of you; but we are talking about that which exceeds all thought (St. Anselm’s majus quam cogitari possit), about that which is more intimate to me than I am to myself (Augustine’s interior intimo meo), and so about that which is always running ahead of us, within and without– absence and excess in one sense. And so we are talking about what demands everything of us, but in doing so, simply asks us to be our very best and better person. Personally, I can find no better word for this than “God,” even if it turns you off. Surely some will use Santayana, Avalokitesvara, or Christ. I believe that once we cede the reservations in our hearts surrounding these words, reservations which are almost always due to what someone else said or our fear of being put in the same group as those who corrupt these words in rash and unreasonable ways and for perverted purposes– once we seek the proper place of these words, they awaken like a tree already half-grown within our souls (see James 1: 19-25). However you conceive of it– or rather, don’t conceive of it, cannot conceive of it– release yourself to IT, release yourself to love and to your highest Self-esteem. For God is with you, wherever you go. Pray to Him and He will purify everything, right before your very eyes. Be quiet and you will hear Him. Believe in the love that exceeds all things, and all things will be transformed. Seek in all you do the comfort of the Lord our God — this Heart, my Heart, ours, our own.
And at the very least, remember this: the degree to which you forgive others is the very degree to which you are forgiven. I promise: we can feel a sense of the infinite overcome us, and at that point we know, not only that we are “real,” but that we are and participate in something much realer than anything that is “real.” Because when we commune in love, we participate in it not as a “part” of it, but totally, radically, each time “as if” the entire thing. I promise: to taste one moment of love is already to taste the everlasting. Oh my Beloved, I cannot slip away… I am filled with you, and you fill me forever… Thank the Good LORD for YOU!
And so, to conclude, let us be very clear about the purpose behind my current and future usage of the word “God.” The goal is not to convince anyone of anything, nor is it really even to share my ideas. The goal is to give us (myself included) a taste of the everlasting, and to encourage our hearts to maintain themselves within that space, where all is equal and good. We can feel that infinite sense of donation and forgiveness come into our hearts. We know what it means to converse with the flip-side of our “self.” We can feel the outside of the world open up smack-dab in the middle of this world, as Jean-Luc Nancy would say. And I say: “Rejoice! Existence is Love, Hallelujah!” For I believe that God has made us this way– or, if you like, that our Mind has as its highest purpose to learn to feel this way, that the whole design of “evolution” is to lead us to this “involved” point where we feel the whole of existence arising within each of us as love, where we can feel that there is no separating us from it– not even at “death” (which, I promise you, has always already come and been defeated). For He has made us to feel Him within ourselves, as Ourselves, and to share this feeling with others in a spirit of friendship, forgiveness, and compassion. Of course everything is yet to be said, but that itself is to be praised, for “God” is the very act enunciating His joy, the very movement of existence’s self-expression and self-exposition, the very “being” of Our Love. ”God” is no idea, no being, no nothing whatsoever not at all. “God” is what I am before you right now, or your self inside of you instigating this wrenching truth, just as you are “God” in what you are for me, right now and always. In God there is only receptivity to Godself: sharing, beatitude, resonance. And all of this because I love you, because we love each other, and because Love loves us with love eternal– here, right here where I stand, we alone or all together, kneeling before the altar of God.
With love,
Yours, forever and always,
Tim.

