Sunday Sermon

Do I start at the beginning or just throw you into the deep end, take you right to the night when they didn't know if I would live or die? There were many gory details but also acts of love and selflessness, people coming to my rescue, some literally sitting by my side for days, weeks,  months--  All the stuff you would expect with a good hospital story.  

I could tell you how I had open heart surgery and the pain medication wouldn't take so I screamed for days, my sternum sawed in half and the morphine useless. I could tell you that nine days after that (minutes after a kosher meal of spaghetti and meat sauce) I started to bleed internally. They were unable to stop it, and so I bled out of my ass for forty hours (I was bleeding to death, a feeling of desperation and terror like none I have ever known), receiving massive transfusions (twice as much blood as I had in my body) and the doctors unsure whether I'd survive. 

I could tell you how my insides were so damaged I could have neither food nor water for weeks, getting all my nutrients and hydration through my arm. It makes you insane to not be able to drink water for that long and I started to have fantasies about ginger ale that were more powerful than any of the sexual ones of my adolescence. I could tell you that I was so perpetually nauseated that I couldn't lie down, and so I sat up in a chair for fifty straight days, knowing that at the age of forty-four my life as I knew it was over. Addiction had destroyed my body, my career, my heart.

But I don't want to tell you any of that. 

What I want to tell you is that those sixty-six days in the hospital were the single greatest thing that ever happened, and did for me what I had always been unable to do for myself, which was sit with seemingly unbearable pain and do nothing! I had no choice. There was no one and nowhere left to run to, and even if there was I had been sliced from neck to navel and literally could not move. 

The only way out  was death and that wasn't in the cards, so instead I learned the great lesson of my life-- That not only can we survive our tragedies but be blessed and transformed by them.

This transformation was not immediate and the first months and years were hard but with time's wisdom I became an ally to myself. Twelve step meetings were involved, various kinds of therapy, I bought a bicycle and exercised and re-established a relationship with my body. I wrote a daily check in to a group of men reporting on my struggles, but more than anything I think I had simply burnt through so much shadow that the only thing left was the land of light. Not a pure and blinding light, but some version of a horizon I could walk towards.

The alchemists were right but their theories are realized in the spiritual world not the material. The psyche, the soul, the inner life-- That's where the lead of us waits to be turned to gold.