MYSTERIES
This post is about mysteries of communication and healing. I’ll begin with the story of my only out-of-body experience. It occurred while I and my partner Bob were vacationing on Monhegan Island, Maine, where we rented a cabin from our friend Barbara. We had just srrived that morning and spent the day unpacking and getting groceries. That night, heedng the bladder imperative, I went to the bathroom. There, suddenly, I sank quietly to my knees. My mind was up somewhere in the air, observing with detachment my body, but my senses were not involved. I wasn’t alarmed, just wondering why that body was on its knees. Then Bob came, pulled me up, and helped me back to my bed. We both went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Something told me to tell Bob, “Open the windows.” It was a mild, rainy night; he did.
A little later we were still both awake, which was unusual, since we usually slept well on the island. “Let’s go to Barbara’s,” I said. So we went out in the rain, knocked on her door, and luckily found her still awake. Hearing our story, she went to the cabin with Bob and turned the gas refrigerator off. Meanwhile I flopped on a couch in her living room, and that night Bob and I both slept, or tried to sleep, at her place.
The next morning we all returned to the cabin, and Barbara called a handyman over. He confirmed her suspicion: the gas refrigerator’s motor was caked with a slow accumulation of carbon and emitting carbon monoxide. He scraped off the carbon, and all was fine. So monoxide was the explanation of my out-of-body adventure.
A close call for Bob and me, and my only out-of-body experience ever. What prompted me to have Bob open the windows, and then to suggest that we go to Barbara’s? I don’t know, but both actions helped us survive. And I was now more convinced than ever that experience can come to us other than through the senses. I have argued this vehemently with atheist friends who cannot conceive of experiene other than through the senses. Having heard accounts of near-death experiences, where someone comes back to life and tells what happens after death, I am convinced that I am right.
Even perception through the senses can have mystery. Long ago, when I was teaching French at a Catholic university, I had a student named Patrick who took a trip to Europe. He told me afterward of going to Italy to see the Padre Pio, a renowned Capuchin brother who would surely in time be made a saint. He got to see him, and after one glance at his visitor the Padre said, “You are not in a state of grace.” Which was true; Patrick had not been to confession while traveling. How could the Padre tell? I have no idea, but tell he could. And posthumously he was indeed made a saint.
Communication can overcome the barrier of language. In 1999 Bob and I traveled to Europe with our Monhegan friend Barbara. In Florence, hearing from Bob of a shop that sold marbled paper, Barbara wanted to go there, so she could learn more about how it was done. She hoped to do it and sell it in her gift shop on Monhegan. She and I went, having little command of Italian, and knowing that the shopkeeper spoke no English. But Bob had told us that he had a French wife and spoke French, so I cøuld translate. The shopkeeper was glad to answer Barbara’s questions, which I translated into French, and I then translated his replies into English. But after a while he could understand her questions without my translating, though I still translated his answers for Barbara, who learned all about oxblood (sang de boeuf), obtained from butchers and needed in the marbling process. Thanks to the shopkeeper’s information, back on Monhegan she began making beautiful sheets of marbled paper that she could sell in her shop.
Another example: My friend Lilith, whom I first met on Monhegan, had a new career after her kids were grown and she and her husband separated: she became a healer. When she came every autumn to Monhegan, she had a list of islanders with chronic aches and pains whom she treated: no miracle cures, but they felt better afterward. I got to know her, and she told me how she had become a pupil of a famous Zapotec woman healer.
Lilith went to Oaxaca, Mexico, knowing little Spanish, and aware that the Zapotec healer had no English. When she saw the woman, they needed two translators: one for Zapotec into Spanish, and one for Spanish into English. But by their third session, Lilith told me, they could dispense with translators; they understood each other perfectly, and Lilith learned a lot from the woman. And when Lilith came away from their sessions, native people approached her and, thinking her a healer, too, begged her to heal them. But Lilith, being at that point a mere pupil, did not attempt to do so.
The previous two examples of communication can perhaps be explained scientifically, so here is another story that, in my eyes, escapes the realm of science. My friend Gary, hearing an interview in New York with the Dalai Lama, was very impressed by His Holiness’s answer, when asked if he could love the Chinese Communists, who had done him and his people so much harm. “It is very difficult,” said the Dalai Lama, “but yes, I love them.” This so impressed Gary that he resolved to go to India, where His Holiness lived in exile, to thank him in person for his ability to love his enemies.
He managed to go, and before he met the Dalai Lama, he had another extraordinary experience. Attending a great public meeting with a famous guru, he sat in a section reserved for foreign visitors. When the guru arrived, he walked down an aisle right beside where Gary was sitting. For a moment their eyes met, and Gary felt energy passing from the guru into himself. No miracle resulted, simply a transfer of energy.
I am not aware of any scientific explanation of such a phenomenon. I have heard stories of healers and holy men touching supplicants, so that healing energy can pass into the supplicants. Imagination, say skeptics, or the placebo effect. If you think something or someone is helping you, you do in fact feel better — for a while.
Long ago I visited Lourdes and saw the wheelchairs, crutches, and canes discarded by people miraculously cured. It’s hard to dismiss all those healings as temporary and imagined. I think that some phenomena are beyond the grasp of our rational minds and not to be dismissed lightly. They may be rare, but I am not inclined to doubt them.
There is room for mystery in our lives. It is all around us. We come from mystery, and will return to it. And that is solid fact.
© 2021 Clifford Browder
