On August 3rd 2010, after 89 years of good living, my maternal grandfather passed away peacefully. He was my last grandparent to die. As my family prepared for his eminent crossing over, I spent a weekend meditating on lineage, death, and forgiveness.
When I started the journey on my meditation pillow of dropping into the loss that lay ahead of my family and me, I realized that for all of the intense emotionality and generous affection of my family, my grandfather was an enigma to me. He was the father of eleven, a devoted Irish Catholic (assumed from the number of children, I suppose), a naval officer in WWII, and eventually a Circuit Court Judge. As a child, I remember him mostly as the lingering smell of cigar smoke, the kaleidoscopic color of his high-waisted golf pants as he moved through a crowd. I remember his sly and infectious laugh. Now an adult, my grandfather has become more to me than those early impressions.
My mother, Maureen, is the oldest of her ten siblings. In the years after my grandparents divorced, our house became the gathering nexus. Being an only child, I often melded into the background as my mother and her younger siblings would discuss family happenings at our house. Over time I witnessed many of the emotional outbreaks elicited by the heartbreaks a family endures: the losses, the lies, the things that seem beyond repair. Once I was a teenager, my mom started to share openly with me about the alcoholism, the shattering betrayals and deceit, the mental illness that pressed up against the real love that wove each person in our family together.
As I sat on that August ridge in the Colombia River Gorge with fellow mediators, I filtered through all these memories, trying to find the prayer inside my heart. What I found surprised me in a way. Starting from such a personal place, I hadn’t expected to go where I went, but then again, isn’t that why we sit and meditate? What rose out of my longing for reconciliation and the encroaching grief was a meditation on suffering and forgiveness.
My grandfather’s passing became the entry point for a deeper understanding of the human experience. The melodic crescendos of the Sufi chants I sang with my fellow meditators opened my heart to my grandfather. I prayed for the healing his suffering, not just the pain my grandfather created, but also the pain he experienced and the pain of the lineage he carried. As I let go into the sound, my prayer grew. I prayed for the healing of all the suffering I have caused, the wounds that are slow to heal. I felt the enormity of this hurt and opened my salty eyes to see the candlelight at the center of our circle brighten. Again the momentum of the chant pulsed faster. The magnitude of prayer grew. In trance-induced, broken-open awe, I prayed for the suffering of the world. All this beauty, all this love…why do we choose to turn away from it?
And then the heaviness I see in the world every day, the despair of living while the Earth dies, enclosed on itself. The chant sang itself: I made a choice. I will love without fear. I will forgive and not hold back. I will keep praising the beauty of existence. I will do this for you, heart of the world, and for your reflections, which I see in every face.
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Living River Blog is a chronicle of my path along the banks of life and my submersion into the deep waters of personal inquiry. Through my contemplations and writing, I reflect on the sacred process of transformation that exists as the wellspring of all true healing.
