Buster Gets Mystical

Buster has, of course, been home sick all week, and it’s given him a lot of time to think. Noting that he only fell under the strep bug after all of his many commitments had been met between September and January, he has been pondering the mind and the body. And the funeral of our friend last week, has clearly also been weighing on him.

“The doctors said Jane must have had cancer for 8 or 9 years,” he mused the other day, “and yet she had no pain, no discomfort, no idea she was sick until she was told about it. And then – once she was diagnosed – she died within weeks.”

“Maybe that was the gift,” I suggested. “Maybe Jane’s time was her time to go to God, but instead of suffering and enduring the chemo and the rest of it when her children were small and needed her to be fully available to them, she was graced with no pain, no illness – she was spared all of that.”

“Maybe,” Buster agreed. “Or maybe your mind plays a part in all of that. Tell someone they have cancer, and suddenly, they die. Tell me I can’t afford to get sick, and I don’t.”

I gave him my copy of Larry Dossey’s book, Healing Words : The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, and directed him to some stories within the book that explored the whole concept of illness not being able to claim you if it remains unacknowledged.

Being sick, he didn’t bother reading it. But he continued to ponder.

Today, while cleaning up the mess he has made by essentially camping out on the sofa for three days, I found scrap paper with some of his thoughts scrawled on them, and I reprint a few of them here, with his permission:

So many secrets lie dormant in the human mind – so much untapped potential, perhaps because humanity is unwilling to believe that there is so much more than we can imagine.

If one believes, truly believes, that illness cannot touch one, do they stand a better chance of remaining healthy? Significantly so? Maybe it can go further than that. What if by merely believing, we could heal ourselves or even walk on water, like Christ?

If you taught a baby, from the day of his birth onward, that he could never be sick, never grow old…could walk on water…if that baby never received any other message but that all of these things were possible, would it be true for that baby? Would it unlock something we have unlearned?

In the Garden of Eden, supposedly there was no sickness, no death. Maybe there was water-walking, until whatever the event occured that became our Original Sin. Maybe the Tree of “Knowledge” was just a bad metaphor, or a distortion of the serpent. Instead of gaining knowledge, Adam and Eve lost the understanding they had that allowed them to conquer illness. And Christ is about restoring that knowledge.

We talked about this over supper tonight. I like seeing the boy trying to work it all out, and wondering, and looking beyond books and everything he’s been taught – I don’t mind him treading the deep waters, as long as he keeps sight of the horizon. I know the Lifeguard can see him! :-)

I quoted a Vespers antiphon that touched on the theme: “God planned in the fullness of time to restore all things in Christ.” Restoration is what we’re promised – and who knows if the restoration of what Buster calls “secret knowledge” is part of that.

“Jesus was all about teaching us how to advance in our humanity and our spirituality. And he was both God and Man. Flesh and Divinity,” Buster said. “And maybe he was teaching us, through his physical actions, he was also showing us what humans could do – the extent of it – like walking on water…”

Yes. Jesus said, “if you would have eternal life, you must eat my flesh and drink my blood…” maybe the Holy Eucharist is about much more than just what we think of as Communion. Maybe it’s about restoration of everything we had but lost in that break-up that occured in the Garden of Eden.

“It must have been a terrible break,” I mused. “If, as you are suggesting, humanity lost that much intimacy (walking-on-water intimacy) with the Divine, we have had 2000 years of the Eucharist and we’re still pretty broken, still far from being restored. Hardly nearer, at all. We are still broken and flawed, selfish and blind. And sick.”

Buster shrugged. “What’s 2000 years to the Eternal God? ‘A thousand ages in your sight are as an evening past…’ isn’t it great to know that God has kept the faith with us and that Christ is with us, in the Eucharist, till the end – that his own blood flows within our veins, for a time, touching our mortality with his immortality? What would the world be like without the Holy Eucharist? And how much more can we learn from Christ in that form, with that closeness?”

Peter, we remembered, holding on to Christ – that intimate – was also able to walk on water, until he allowed his fear and humanity to overwhelm him. Even that close to God, he was overwhelmed. Fear overtook him. Yes, that is a tremendous brokenness.

We’re not breaking new theological ground here, of course, and I am sure some are reading this and thinking “egad, what are they doing, here, exploring New Age goofiness and heresies?”

Nah. We’re just talking. I’m just enjoying watching a 16 year old think on it all. He and his brother both have a habit of occasionally peering into the clouds and wondering at all that is great. They knock me out.

But they’re both pretty eccentric, too. I mean, we have this heavy conversation and five minutes later, Buster is plunking on a banjo (his wind is still not there for the sax) and flipping the mp3 (or whatever) from Bela Fleck, to Tom Waites, to double-entendre (and gross) songs by “Chef” from South Park, and he’s leering in his best Jack Nicholson voice, “deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall…”

Parenthood is such a gas.

Here’s the Dossey book, if you’re interested.

Buster gets mystical