Run and Return

I was surprised when I went to the local hospital for an endoscopy that the chirpy, cheery nurse told me to take my pants off. It’s indicative of the tendency to become compliant in the face of scrubs and cold metal instruments that I actually did as I was told. It was only after I found myself standing in the hall in my shirt and hospital gown (open at the back, also as instructed) that I realized I’d better check that they knew which procedure I was there for. It reminded me of an incident many years ago when a gynecologist, raising the level of his gaze, recommended that I have my front teeth capped for aesthetic reasons. To be fair, the nurse was not operating out of some misguided sexist agenda. She was just overworked after two years of understaffing and dealing with covid protocols. She had arrived at a point where her native optimism was no match for the stress and she apparently no longer knew which end was up. After we turned the corner on that misunderstanding, we got along famously and enjoyed sharing our dismay over the state of the world, in particular the hospital’s malfunctioning elevators. I had to climb two flights to get to Endoscopy. It seems that the elevators were temperamental but, even worse, when they did work, there was no one to inspect and sign off on them. Not enough elevator inspectors. “No one wants to work anymore,” some random staff member groused, dragging his politics kicking and screaming into the stairwell.

The doctor’s exploration of my upper GI tract included something called a balloon procedure. I realize this brings to mind small children running in Central Park or memories of your father puffing up his cheeks to inflate balloons of many colors, tying them off in a stretchy knot and rubbing them on his pants to make them miraculously stick to the wall, but this lighthearted account of my day trip to the hospital is not entirely honest. In fact, the experience brought me all the way up to the gates separating this life from the next and had me peering in to see what might be on the other side.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I’m the kind of person who spends a lot of time at the gates on the borderline. Not because I’ve been ill. Quite the contrary, I’ve enjoyed remarkably good health. It’s not morbidity. It’s curiosity and I am not a cat. I’m very interested in the Big Story beyond my own small story, which explains my work as a hospice chaplain. Almost everyone I spoke with during that sojourn with the sick experienced an end-of-life tug-of-war. On one end of the rope was the wanting to stay alive, continuing to be Joe or Jane or Susie, busy maintaining the separate self. On the other end was a quiet yearning to cross the line, to be embraced in a reunion with the wholeness of things. All faith traditions are centered on this deeply human back and forth, the pendulum that swings between Separation and Reunion. In Kabbalah, they say that if you think you’re on to what God is, you should recoil from whatever small and inadequate notion you’ve arrived at. Run and Return, they call it and it begins at birth. In this life, I exist primarily on the atoll of separation, as I imagine you do. I am sometimes running in fear from the continent of wholeness, sometimes returning to it fleetingly.

Spiritual practices give me a place to inhale a whiff of reunion in the midst of the separate everyday. Wordsworth called this “Intimations of Immortality.” In Judaism, we say that shabbes is a taste of the world to come. No work, no striving. The same can be said of meditation, and of love. I learn from love what non-duality might be like. I practice. In the meantime, I climb whatever flights of stairs materialize before me. I contend, where possible, with tired nurses and out-of-order elevators. Trying to stay lovingly separate a bit longer. Trying to remember to change the oil, check the tires, keep this old Dodge Dart from rusting out. I hang on to the string on the balloon as best I can.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.