Voice of the Prophet

A friend in high school told me that his little brother, eleven or twelve years old, sat bolt upright in bed one night and said, "The populace is exploding into bushels of wheat." I've always thought the boy must have been visited by a prophetic voice, a deep call echoing out from a mountaintop, choosing to speak through him. Why else would someone normally fixated on Sandy Koufax say something biblical like that? He was probably preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and had heard about Joseph, the Dreamer...how he predicted the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine. Still, it was an unexpected turn of phrase for a boy whose previous experience of famine had been limited to finding the cupboard bare of mallomars.

In my experience, a sure sign of a prophetic visitation is the uncanny sensation that the words coming out of your mouth must have been said by someone else first. That's how I felt when I recently heard myself say, "Mortality is the mother of compassion." It seemed that I had known this all along but had somehow forgotten it. I ran to the computer to see if that was really mine or if I had inadvertently lifted it from Emerson or Thomas Merton by way of Frank Zappa. I did not find it. Where did it come from? I knew I could not have developed that idea out of whole cloth. It was as if it were in the public domain, available to anyone who found it rummaging in the back of the coat closet. I knew it was true because it didn't surprise me. Like all wisdom teachings, it winked conspiratorially at me as if to say, "We both know this is an old joke. Feel free to use it." But I have to say that receiving a complete sentence that sounds like you would expect to read it on a scrap of white paper after gorging yourself on shrimp lo mein, that was something. It got my attention.

But what did it mean? What did I mean when that sentence flew like a bird of paradise unannounced out of my mouth and into the world? Both the word mortality and the word compassion tickle the soul. You don't hear either of these words the way you hear the words pillow or toothpaste. Just drop mortality like a stone into the lake of association and it will ripple out to remind you of your mother, of Virginia who died recently of covid-19, of yourself some day when the tremors in your hands decide to migrate to other parts of your body. Then, toss compassion into the mix and you will think back on your time working as a Hospice chaplain, to your encounter with dying and the way it changed you, working so hard to stretch yourself to meet Daniel and Regina and all the others on their way out. But that isn't it. It's something else.

It's the discovery of the universal truth of mortality, not the specific losses I've known. It has something to do with impermanence, the lifespan of a rainbow or a firefly. The miracle of a rainbow fades while I'm looking at it. A firefly lights up in the night sky in early summer for a fraction of a second, then vanishes. If I go out to the back of the house after dark where the peonies luxuriate during the heat of the day, I see June bugs leaping for joy. I witness their dancing and chattering. But fireflies and peonies and mothers don't live forever. They die and are transformed into new life deep in the earth. At Hospice, I had this gift for engaging with that transformation, for envisioning eternity.  It was sometimes comforting to the patients. I believed absolutely and still do that death is not the end and I was sometimes able to pass that along to the dying. But I was not yet filled with compassion for our impermanence. All of us, those deemed essential and those who go unnoticed. The universal, undeniable fact of it. Mortality had not yet mothered compassion in me. It had not yet nursed me in the pathos of our common fate. It has taken the pandemic to deliver the milk of the human condition to my doorstep, reminding me of what I have always known but had long forgotten.


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com