All Soul's Day and my brother, Ron

My brother has left this world and is now a saint in heaven. I woke suddenly in the night and was up for a while. I learned next day this time coincided with his death.  I remember  years before hearing my mother’s voice and seeing my mother and father reunited when I closed my eyes in the taxi,  on the way to the plane. I'd been called to come to Ottawa as my father was on his last legs.  When I had  arrived  there, I learned then that the time of my ‘vision?’ and “hallucination?”, in the taxi on the way to the airport, was the exact time that he ‘passed’.
I remember long ago my ex  wife,  an identical twin,  collapsing with pain at the same instant her sister took ill thousands of miles away.
My brother was a believer,  all his life, once a powerful Christian involved Baptist youth groups and   the Billy Graham movement. Later he rejected organized religion because of church politics. He nonetheless maintained a faith in something more.  Today, he would be called ‘spiritual but not religious’.  Before he died he did not know what awaited him. Yet when I spoke to him of my transcendent dreams of our father at a river leaning against a tree waiting for him to cross, he said that he too had many dreams like that of Dad  these last few days.
I loved reading the neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander’s recent book, Proof of Heaven.  Dr. Moody’s studies of people who had near death experiences was particularly illuminating.  I’ve always liked the bardot idea of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with a cast of characters agreeing to play a life together each of us taking different roles, explaining that uncanny sense of deja due and the feeling sometimes that I’ve known a person before but in a different role.  Reincarnation is the norm of the Old Testament and remains present in the New Testament of the Holy Bible. When Constantine made Christianity a state religion the references to reincarnation were played down but they still remain, not in a backwards sense but in a forward developmental way.  Life seems to have this learning aspect for me like the kindergarten analogy so poignantly made by Dr. Scott Peck
My native friends believe that their relatives are living alongside them in a parallel world. Certainly String Theory allows for both God and the Multiverse.  I have no sense of finite.  My consciousness is dynamic.  I might well be ‘saving the appearances’ but its equally consistent to posit infinity.  I loved Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he says “To Dream that is the Rub”.  For death seems to the external observer little different from sleep yet the questions arise in the subjective sense.  It comforts me to know my brother has not ‘ended’ but rather ‘passed’.
He remains alive in the fondest memories I have of him. He was my protector as a child , my best friend and through out his life my greatest inspiration.  As a child I remember him making me grilled cheese sandwiches, I thought him so very smart and wise and mature being able to manage the magic of hot food.  He was like my mother and father when I was young.  I couldn't even operate the stove. Later I watched as my brother faced and surmounted the greatest of challenges.   Always he kept his sense of humor.
He had an amazing curiosity about the world around him. He was a scientist too and a businessman. His eye for nature and sense of timing was unsurpassed. I will always cherish that about him as it helped him capture the best of  birds and animals and flowers and outdoor scenes in photographs.  He was happiest with his family and next to that with forest, lakes and streams.
I feel him near as I ‘ve so often felt the nearness of those I’ve loved and lost. They are lost to me for now but I pray and hope that we will be reunited in heaven. I loved the Robin Williams movie," What Dreams May Come" and Mark Twain's,"Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven."  My mother taught my brother and I to pray on our knees to Jesus.  As we slept in the same room as children,  I heard his prayers to Jesus as he heard mine.
Loving my pets who have died, wonderful dogs and cats, I believe too in Rainbow Bridge. I imagine my brothers dogs, Tartan and Rain, bounding towards him as Dad takes him in his arms and hugs the great man his son has become. My mother, humble and kind hearted would wait for Ron to turn to her and then the two would hug, mom's eyes tearing as they did when she was brimming over with joy.  Mom and Dad and Ron and dogs barking and bounding around them in circles.That's what I see.  It’s what I have to look forward to too.  That, and the glowing brighter than bright light of Jesus.
And we walk to the light.  My aunt and grandmother and grandfather and uncles and friends and all of us reunited moving as a family and community into the arms of the Great Shepherd.
Today is All Soul’s Day.  Samhein is the time of Celtic Festival when the harvest is done and the cattle are brought down from the summer pastures.  It’s a liminal time when the worlds of this life and the after life are closest and souls pass easily between.
We thought my brother would die earlier this fall as family gathered a couple of times in uncertainty. Now I know my very smart brother uncannily chose the easiest passage.  Canoeing together he’d time the crossing for the safest shortest passage.  Other canoes would be floundering in wind and waves but he’d bring us to shore safely.  He was a consumate boatman as my father was before him.  No wonder I ended up a blue water sailor with such examples.  I have no doubt he will journey across the space between.  Alternatively the time was chosen for him.  This meeting of letting go and coming together.
A friend called me the night he died and invited us to attend Compline with her and her son. So there I was again in the most beautiful Christ Church Cathedral, where I was once baptized by Dean Peter and Bishop Michael and  where I had so many times prayed on my knees.  This time I listened to the chanting and recited the Lord’s Prayer in community.  To myself I  talked quietly to Jesus about my brother Ron.   I prayed for his peace.
His loving wife Adell, that day,  had told me that he was sleeping mostly.   He was taking more morphine for the pain.  We all knew the end  was very near. I’d been with him the week before when he told me all he wanted was his family near. I watched  hold the hand of his one true love, Adell. They had known and a life time of the deepest love.   Their love was a Song of Songs/   I remember when Ron met Adell he was transformed and the two together radiated.  His life took on meaning then.  I remember Adell as a beautiful but very strong girl and the two of them as inseparable from the beginning as they were at the end.
My nephews, his sons, Graeme, Andrew, and Alan,  are the very finest of  men.  I can only admire them.  I wonder at the power of genes seeing so much in them I've seen in cousins from Canada, the US and from Scotland.    They were born with this innateness but the love, education and examples of Ron and Adell have brought out the best. I love them dearly.  
When last I visitted brother and I talked for hours in the night of things we’d not spoken of since adolescence or younger.  Always woven through the fabric of his very existence was his love of Adell and his love of family.
It’s All Soul’s Day today.  How fitting.  Again, typical of my brother’s exquisite sense of timing, the skill that allowed him to capture just the right moment in a bird’s landing with his camera. All Soul’s Day is the Christian festival that commemorates the faithful departed.  I look forward to church tonight.  Tonight I will sing hymns of praise and give thanks for the greatest of gifts, my loving brother Ron who was so kind, so good, so wise.  Thank you Lord Jesus.

Loss at Christmas

It's coming up Christmas.
I was woken from sleep at 3 am. Nightmares.  Again.  Wet pillow.  Tears.
I was reminded today of a woman who had the courage to refuse an abortion and how she was hounded for years after and abused terribly till she was no more.  Everyone who tried to support her was attacked viciously.  I feel I've come close to pure evil again and was strongly reminded of this today.
I found myself missing a lawyer friend, Dugald Christie. We sat in church and talked about God, love, ethics, morality, society on drives to the jail where he got  me doing pro bono work.  I was blessed to know him.  He was killed.
I learned of another patient who died today. HIV and drug addiction.  I talked with him of his whole life.  So many fine chapters in that blessed book. These last few pages were miserable and his death is a kind of blessing. I'll miss him.  Another patient hung himself earlier this fall. He'd been turned away from the hospital and refused services.  We did our best in the community but it wasn't good enough. We have no resources and we are punished for caring.  Our thinkings is wrong because we're not looking at things from the perspective of profit and these people simply aren't profitable.
There's more talk of euthanasia for the elderly.  Legalize marijauna, give them cake, have everyone stoned and it's Matrix and the Holocaust all over again but now we'll all be 'high' so it will be okay.
I feel so alone at times.
I miss my mother and father and aunt and grandparents.  They're dead and I'm old and it sometimes seems so sad.  I pick myself up and pray and pray. I meditate and I try to exercise. The pain gets to me more some days.  I'm blessed beyond belief but I grieve.
Loss is loss. There's no getting around it. I miss people who have gone.
I miss Jesus. I think of him being killed by Herod and Pontius Pilate and Peter being crucified upside down by Nero and stupidly I'm reading about William Wallace tortured and quartered by Edward Plantanget.  These are the real morality tales.
I should be reading about birds and flowers.  I think adults who have children have a buffer, they get to read all the fairytales over and over.  I miss the fairytales.
I don't have answers or solutions.  Mostly questions.  I dare not ask why anymore. Mostly I just ask, where?  'Where are you Jesus?'
The great lie of the secular world is that atheists are foisting the notion that theists are killers but the only religion of atheism is communism. Russian Communists killed 80 million people in very few years. Chinese Communists killed 120 million people. And I just came from Cambodia where Cambodian communists, the latest generation of atheist government, killed 3 million in record time, 4 years, more than a third of the countries population of 8 million.
I swore on a Bible today.  I liked that,  It felt good under my hand.  In a break I read psalms.  They were comforting as they always are.  Still I'm sad.  So very very very sad. But this too will pass. It's just a hiccup. I could take a drug, smoke some grass, have some wine, not 'feel', 'numb' myself out. I tried that years ago after the divorce, after being held hostage, the life threats and the deaths, so many, back then. HIV and suicide.  "Man up!!!"  "Shake yourself out of it."
I remember the shame and embarrassment I felt kneeling and crying in the hospital corridor when the boy died despite all I did to save his life. He died because he stopped taking the medication that was keeping him alive and here I am years later, still crazy after all these years, trying to stop people from taking drugs that are killing them.  Will I ever float down stream?
I sat with a colleague and felt his fear at the threat of being hounded in retirement. He's scared about the babies he delivered. He did his best. I know. He's the best doctor I know but we're not perfect and now there's so much money to be made by destruction. No one's into creation. It's out of vogue.  Bankers even bid on insurance against collective suicides they've engineered for power and greed and we're pawns in the insanity of politics.
I'd rather be in a storm at sea alone than in the crush of media hype hysteria. First they built enough bombs to kill us all a hundred times over then they were supposed to stop that and needed a whole bunch more money to clean up the mess they made and then some of that clean up didn't work and Syria has gassed its people and it's no long global but regional and we're supposed to make sense of it with all the false prophets and misinformation.
Trust me I'm a politician.  Trust me I'm a reporter. Trust me I'm a government representative. Trust me I'm a lawyer.  But if I say 'trust me, I'm a doctor', everyone thinks that's funny.  Weird and twisted humour this planet earth has.
I probably should walk the dog more along the river where I take pictures of the beautiful birds that live there year round.  I could lie on the beach.  I could sit a lot longer in Rome churches with the smell of incense and the place of worship.
I'm an ecumenicalist.  I believe that all spiritual seekers are on the same path.  I pray to the 'saints of all religion' and believe that Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Jesus all were further along the path than their followers. I see these spiritual men walking out at the front where God is calling to his son and all his children, to come home.  And death is that home for me but I can't get there till I love this gift of life to it's fullest. And I don't feel I'm living life as lovingly or as meaningfully, gratefully or graciously as God would have me.
The irony is I'm as likely to meet Spongebob in the afterlife.  Divine Comedy is what it is.
I'm kind of slouching towards Bethlehem.  I've got way too much attitude. I'm dragging a whole lot of luggage that's negative and resentful and poor me.  I'm so full of lust, sloth, gluttony, greed, and downright stupidity that I can't feel the wings of eagles or be lifted up to my Lord in Heaven.  I'm a slug wallowing in the dirt, hiding in fear a lot when I should be a kid in sandbox throwing the dirt in the sky.
I want to dance without pain, sing without hoarseness, laugh till tears stream down my cheeks.
I want Jesus.
The basic story is God was born man and killed by man. What could be simpler as metaphor.  Now I have to believe that God resurrects.  There is life after life and life after death and my family who have died, my friends who have died and my patients who have died are still alive, not just in my memory but where I can meet them again, like long lost friends, like high school reunions and comings home from distant lands.
Mary was like my mom, like every mom and Jesus was like me, like every baby.  And they had friends and they suffered governments and taxes and intolerance and greed and the powers of this world.  I've lived twice as long as Jesus and my mom lived longer than Mary and all of us have been living this metaphor myth story in our own lives as the cosmic Christ is within all of us.  God is born. God died. God will come again.  The trinity of father, son and holy spirit.  The beginning middle and end, Parent, child, holy spirit. But it's not linear. It's stellar
Contemplating the Christmas story. Advent and the coming of the king.  The servant king.  The message that God is a lover.
I have no children but my brother shares the men he and his wife created with me.  They're fine men.  I was with a friend and his sons. They're fine men too. They're all moving into marriage and having families.
The cycles go on.
I delivered a hundred babies, stopped an epidemic or two on Indian villages, saved a dozen infants with meningitis from brain damage.  All those nights without sleep. All those terrible unknown diseases. Being held hostage. Being attacked, The deliriums and dementias and the teams of people, teachers and friends.  I've been blessed to be a healer among healers.
When I studied buddhism and was a disciple and yogi in my 20's I learned about right living.  I figured that what Jesus did was right living.  So becoming a healer was okay and it's been okay.  It's been good.
I'm not allowed to do that so much anymore.  I feel I've been hi jacked for other purposes.  I keep thinking of missionary work.  But then I like my things.  I 'm a fat cat yuppie who lacks any real compassion, self centered, self serving, complaining, whining, twittering and face booking with my luxury computer and luxury I phone communication devices, and designer clothes and glorious motorcycle and fast sports car.  I worry about losing this hard won hard earned bit of the Canadian dream.
But I've not had heat secure for weeks and the water hasn't been sure. Basics like electricity are never things I can take for granted in my world. This cold snap caught me off guard, fighting beurocrats with too much tax dollars and not enough real work and no real life experience to learn humility.  I've no house and the really rich think I'm rich but my riches are my dog and a fishing rod and rifle.  I 'm a survivalist.
I can live off the sea or off the land. I haven't had much faith in governments and stupid people in groups not to crucify the citizenry collectively and have us all nuked and having to defend ourselves individually from zombie groups of marauder gangs.  I fear the break down of civilization and yet I've prepared for just that eventuality.  Boy Scout motto, always be prepared.
The core fear is what Pascal described as the God shaped hole inside me.  I can't find the architect God in the wall of the building. I have to find the light within that is the source of the light without. Easy enough to say and easy enough to talk about.
But
But
I pray and meditate and meditating am distracted by a myriad of 'things' in that quiet time when I listen for the wee small voice of God.
I would know you more fully, more surely more really. Let me be like you Jesus. Let me know you but lets accept you did the cross bit and that was for all of us so I can get down off the cross, take the nails out of my hands and feet that I keep putting there and use the wood to build a house.
I loved the 150 year old St. Thomas church where Steven Bell sang and played guitar last month. Now there was some mighty fine wood.
Maybe I can sleep again. The little dog is sleeping beside me.  I pray I'll be with God in my dreams. I love when I dream of family and dogs and friends who have gone before. I love the dreams of meetings and especially love the old ladies.  I'm walking towards the light, Jonah like, stumbling and twirling and back stepping , getting swallowed by whales,  staggering, side stepping, sashaying, skipping, hopping and crawling.  Sometimes it's so slow and other times its way too fast.
Thank you God for hope. Still my fear and comfort me in the loss.  Thank you for these days to come and Christmas.  Hi Jesus,  baby God.  

Heaven

I imagine heaven as a place of light.  I'm flying and others are too. There's instant communication and no deception. Our thoughts and feelings are all true and suffused with the realization of love and interconnectedness  My family and friends are there, the animals I've love. I've walking with God in Eden naming and talking with Jesus and Martha and Mary.  Mohammed is there and Isaiah, Krishna and Socrates.  I may meet them or at least wave at them standing nearby.  I lived C.S. Lewis description of heaven, closer and closer neighbourhoods to God.  I liked best Mark Twain's description of heaven in Captain Stormfield's Visit to heaven. I imagine having a pig farm or helping out Noah with the animals or maybe gardening with Adam.  I don't imagine sexual parts in heaven or plumbing just orgasmic potential with all the Eve like women of my past, present and future. I expect there will be homosexuality in heaven too.  It just won't have that cheesy bar quality to it because there will be no drunkeness or drug addiction. There won't be theft or crime or murder and everyone will come together.  I imagine a whole lot of joy and agape and rest.  Floating sensations and beautiful vistas.  And learning.  I think the libraries of heaven will be unbelievable and wonderful games of flying tag and three dimensional chess.  I don't imagine getting bored or tired or having pain but laughing a whole lot.  I long to see my parents and talk about this time. Maybe it will be a bardot event and another cast will plan another lifetime play with last life loser being the winner.  I might be my father or sister or older brother.  Maybe i'll know my immortality this time round , discussing thought with Buddha and listening to Solomon tell me how best to think before I enter lethe.  Maybe they'll be dancing but with wings.  I imagine the smells will be like the tropical flowers of Saipan and Hawai. i'd like to be able to skip through time and visit the Restaurant at the End of the Universe from Adams, Hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy or go back and see Jesus and Peter walking on the sea of Gallilee.  There will be Chinese people, Indians, aboriginals, English, French, blacks, whites and people from Louisiana and even politicians, at least the ones who said their prayers, and Australians for sure.  There will be people from all over the world vaguely looking like they did before the died and went to heaven. Eventually everyone goes there.  Even those who go to hell don't go for 'eternity' just a long time and purgatory is a state of mind.  Everyone gets to heaven eventually.  It's a pilgrim's progress with a lot of detours and we can pray for others we know in the game of life below.  It's a distraction in heaven, checking out the earth scenario but mostly we're moving forward through time and space and dimension, growing with wonder and joy.  I imagine heaven a fine place in deed and the most direct way there being following the spiritual laws which are pretty much laid out by Jesus and others who say much the same as he did. It's love really.  Fear is backwards.