Praying for the Miracle of Incarnation

Last May, around the time the Blackthorns bloomed, I began having strange problems with my eyes. There were patches of color in my field of vision and there was a strange feeling of fullness in my head together with a deep weariness of body and of spirit. I finally drove to a nearby medical clinic where I was put in an ambulance after first the nurse and then the doctor recorded the highest blood pressure readings they had ever personally seen.

For days, the doctors at the small rural hospital where I was struggled to find a cocktail of medicines to bring it down. Nothing seemed to be working well. There was talk of sending me to Boston to see if the specialists at a larger and better resources hospital could help me.

It was not clear to me whether I was going to live or whether I was going to die. And this . . . is terrifying to write: I was not sure if I should live. Somewhere in the back of my head an accountant was running a ledger to determine whether I was a greater burden on others than I was a blessing. I had a sneaking suspicion that the accountant was also moonlighting as a blackjack dealer for some sort of cosmic casino where I was the gambler and the house always wins. The best case scenario was that the accountant was Ma’at in disguise — but even then I stood little chance of any feather outweighing my hypertrophic heart.

The nurse on duty that night reminded me of the Bardo-dwelling chiropractor in the film “Jacobs Ladder.” When it is not clear whether the protagonist, Jacob, is dead or alive, Jacob lies on the table, while the chiropractor tells him that Meister Eckhart taught that when you see demons everywhere tearing it away from you, but when you loosen that grip you see angels trying to cut you free.

The head nurse did not speak such words but from his aspect and his bearing he might have been that strong, calm chiropractor’s son, and he was playing a role like his father’s in the Bardo I was in that Thursday night —

(Or was I in the anteroom of the great hall of Teach Donn? Or in a burned forest at the edge of Fólkvangr? Or, as my friend Caroline suggested, was I a secret guest of a part Chiron’s Asklepion cleverly disguised as a cardiac ward? Perhaps these distinctions do not matter.)

When I told him that I was afraid that even in Boston they would not be able to help me and that if I were sent there I would not see the people I loved again before I died, he said he was going to talk with the one physician on duty in the hospital that night and would come back with a solution.

When he returned he said that the doctor had told him to give me a high intravenous dose of the vasodilator hydralazine.

As the medication entered my bloodstream, I felt sensation come flooding throughout my body. I could not tell if the waters that blasted through every available channel where life returning to me or death tearing me apart. Then everything went black.

(I think a part of what prepared me to navigate that black void was the experiences I had with LSD in which I had not known if I was dying or being born again or both. And that I mercifully had gone through those experiences in their totality without any well intentioned guide trying to pull me out of them for the sake of my protection.)

The fact that I was no stranger to the abyss made it easier for me to allow the dark waters of its infinite sea to carry me to its center.

And at its center were a golden Rose.

Voices sang out in the distance and I began to walk toward them. And I realized that they were the voices of people trying to sing and pray and dream me into the land of the living. There were Druids and Witches and Thelemites and Buddhists and Animists and even two Catholic priests (cousins of mine in an Irish sense of cousinhood.)

I thought of how I had never fully committed to being alive before. And now the door of death was strangely barred. So I set out on the wild road all the voices were praying into being — the road to incarnation.

I came back into the ordinary realm of my senses, and found that it and I has been transfigured and transformed. Waves of physical and metaphysical vertigo moved through me.

When the nurse returned he told me that my systolic blood pressure had dropped 70 points and my diastolic blood pressure had dropped 20 points over the course of 45 minutes.

—

A year out, I am physically stronger and more vital than I have ever been — and I am also awash with the grief of realizing the thousand small and large betrayals of myself that delayed my journey this far. Some of those betrayals continue and others bear a lingering toll. And for the first time in this lifetime I feel both the hope and the deep desire that I can come fully to life long before I die.

As a child and a young adult, lost in a world of sensory overwhelm and a culture that made no sense to me, and a body that struggled with breath, I retreated entirely into the world of the mind. In my thirties, the plants finally began to give me my breath, and my breath began to bring me into my body, and that body wanted to move. Being a descendant of tall, strong men of Kerry stock, I found that my body had a latent capacity and affinity for moving heavy things, and weight lifting began to invite me into deeper embodiment.

In the decade and a half since, I have had moments of feeling fully in this body in this world when I have been at the gym or walking alone in the woods or paddling in a kayak on a quiet cove. And I have awakened a deep intuition for how life and sensation flow in the bodies of others.

But I have resisted believing that I am worthy of being fully embodied all the time, or that my body can experience and express its own beauty and strength and vibrant health. I have trained my body in the gym in part because of the pleasure of lifting and the pride of progression — but also with my highest hope being that I could push my body somewhere into the outer range of the limits of acceptability.

But the life in me, the gift and hope of my ancestors, knows that this body is a bridge connecting them to my descendants, and that across this bridge travels a caravan laden with precious remnants of the worlds they loved. It is long past time to treat this body in a manner according that noble purpose. And that requires a belief that the organic expression that life wants to find can emerge in the fullness of its expression in the form and the experience of this body.

So my prayer becomes a prayer for complete incarnation.

And it mingles with the prayer of the Blackthorn: “mórad rún” — exalt the mystery.

From the synthesis both prayers take on a third form: may I embody the mystery of who I am, and let that embodies mystery by uplifted by the land and the ancestors that dreamed me into being and by the descendants who remember what I became in this life.