CHAPTER 40
My Call to the Final Surrender
“Behold, be grateful, and forgive that which you
did not
understand or control. For life is divine, it is
perfect,
and it naturally manifests the will of its creator.”
Love Without End, Jesus Speaks…
—Glenda Green
My call to the
final surrender happened in the waiting room of the ICU unit of St.
Michael’s Hospital in Toronto this September where my Penny Lynn had just been
operated on for a brain aneurysm and was, in the words of one of her doctors,
“somewhere between here and there and very lucky to be here,” a miracle which I
attribute to St. Padre Pio; but this is a story in itself, which I hope to
write when I have more distance from this whole experience that brutally shifted
my world from comfortable order into terrifying chaos, and back again.
I’m the same person that I was before Penny’s brain
aneurysm and miraculous healing, but completely different; and it’s from this difference
that I’ve been called to bring closure to this story, because from my state of consciousness of the final surrender, the
world makes infinitely much more sense to me now in all of its chaos and
confusion; and when I listen to professor Peterson today, still out there crusading
to save the world with his talks on 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, I have to smile at his mission, because
from where I stand today I can see that the world does not to be saved, but understood.
“Each life has a natural built-in reason for being,” said Jesus in Glenda Green’s book The Keys of Jeshua. “Purpose is the creative spirit of life moving through you from the
inside out. It is the deep dimension in every soul, which carries with it a
profound sense of personal identity.” And life after life after life, we keep
coming back to learn this. This is what needs to be understood.
Ironically, this is the divine
imperative of Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message of the sacred individual self
that John Keats pointed to in a letter to his brother. In a moment of poetic genius, Keats caught a glimpse of the big picture;
but he never realized his “unapprehended inspiration” because he died too young
to fulfill his destined purpose to wholeness and completeness. But he did inform
us that this life is the medium by which soul acquires its own identity (just
as Jung and I realized that this life is the way), and that’s the genius of professor Peterson’s message—to
become whole and complete by taking moral responsibility for our life, which 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos helps
one do; 12 carefully wrought rules that offer a personal way to realize the
gifted poet’s “unapprehended inspiration”—
“I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—an yet I think I
perceive it. That you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most
homely form possible. I will call the
world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I
will call the human heart the
horn-book read in that school, and I will call the Child able to read the Soul
made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world
of pains and troubles is to school and Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place
where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is
the Heart a horn-book, but it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience,
it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As
various as the lives of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus God
makes individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the parts of his own
essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does
not offend our reason and humanity” (The
Vale of Soul Making, John Keats).
“There is nothing but the self and God,” Jesus confirmed to the gifted artist Glenda
Green while painting his portrait that she called “The Lamb and the Lion” when he
appeared to her for almost four months between November 1991 and March 1992, the
sacred mystery that professor Peterson caught a glimpse of with his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief which
he artfully rendered into his 12 Rules
for Life: An Antidote to Chaos that has taken the world by storm (global
sales have reached three million, and he’s lectured in 150 cities and not done
yet, and I understand that he’s working on his next twelve rules for life book
which will prompt another global book tour which may bring him and the world
closer to soul’s destined purpose of wholeness and completeness); but not until
one has been initiated into the sacred mystery of the self (the I Am consciousness of God) will one
understand his hierophantic message, which, by happy coincidence, Jesus revealed
in Chapter 2 of Glenda Green’s The Keys
of Jeshua, “RECOVERING THE
AUTHENTIC SELF”:
“Things were
not created from nothing. Everything was created from ‘Being.’ The ultimate
state of pure being is the totality of energy and potential, resting in
stillness and peace with itself. In such a state all ideas for creation are
formed, and these ideas are merely extensions of the self. Creation is the
consequence of I Am moving into
action, or life, through multiplying ITSELF.
There was no instrument of creation outside of Divine Being. I AM THAT I AM is God. So too with yourself. The truth of who
you are will not be found in actions or personal history, but in the simplicity
of who you are within the stillness and peace of your inner being…In the
beginning and forever ‘I Am is the way; I Am is the word.’” (The Keys of
Jeshua, by Glenda Green, p. 13).
This was my journey of self-discovery, and though I
had already passed through the eye of the needle and realized my true self,
little did I expect to be called again by the divine imperative of the way to fulfill a higher purpose, just as
Jordan Peterson was called to his higher purpose of delivering his hierophantic
message of self-reconciliation with his 12
Rules for Life and book tour talks, interviews, lectures, and podcasts; but
I was called to the final surrender
when my Penny Lynn suffered a brain aneurysm, and I had to let her go for her to come back to me.
That was the miracle that I prayed for. Never in my
life would I have dreamt that I would be brought to my knees to pray like I did
in my Roman Catholic youth, but so terrified was I of losing my Penny Lynn that
I dropped to my knees and prayed for a miracle.
“Please Padre, bring her back home to me safe and whole,” was my constant plea to the healing saint who was the inspiration for
my novel Healing with Padre Pio, and
with Pastor Joel (the spiritual counsellor at St. Michael’s ICU ward, who was
there to comfort me in my desperate time of need), we prayed for Penny Lynn’s
recovery.
“She’s not out of the woods yet,” was the constant daily
refrain, and every few hours they took her out of sedation to ask her: 1. What’s
your name? 2. Where are you? 3. Can you move the fingers on your right hand? 4.
Now your left hand, and the same with her toes on her right foot and her left
foot, and each time the nurse asked, my heart jumped to my throat; and then Penny
contracted pneumonia and had to be put on a respirator, and the Pastor and I prayed
harder; and then, out of my deepest, deepest despair of losing her, I was
called to the final surrender:
Pastor Joel and I had just prayed for Penny’s recovery, me first in my desperation
praying to God that if she had to go I would understand but if was at all
possible for her to come back to me, to please let it be so, and Pastor
Joel praying to God in his own way for
Penny’s recovery, me on the left side of the bed holding Penny’s hand and he on
her right side holding her other hand, and we prayed heart and soul, and then we
went to the waiting room of the ICU ward and sat, but so emotionally wrought
was I when it suddenly dawned on me that I might lose my Penny Lynn that it all
came pouring out of me in a volley of unstoppable tears, and I cried like I never
cried before, and probably will ever cry again, and in stark awareness of
my desperate situation, I turned to Pastor Joel, who had his hand on my
shoulder to console me, and said, “I’ve just been called to the final surrender…”
I hope one day write the whole story of Penny
Lynn’s brain aneurysm and my call to the
final surrender, but for reasons which only my oracle knows, this was the experience
called for to bring closure to One Rule
to Live By: Be Good; and now that I’ve had time to ponder why, I know that I
was called to the final surrender to make
good my karmic obligation to Penny Lynn for breaking her heart the way I did in
our past life together in Genoa, Italy and to confirm God’s existence for this
story with her miraculous healing; because
after I surrendered my Penny Lynn to God, St. Padre Pio did bring her back home
to me safe and whole, and good professor Jordan Peterson and renowned
atheist Sam Harris, who have already discoursed on God and religion and
morality in Vancouver, Canada and again to a hungry audience of 8500 people in
Dublin, Ireland, and once more in London, England can argue until the cows come
home about God’s existence or non-existence, because the sacred mystery of God will
always come down to a question of self-initiation, and my call to the final surrender was the price that I had to pay for divine reconciliation…
A month after I brought Penny Lynn home from rehabilitation
at Bridgepoint Hospital in Toronto, safe and whole (still very weak, but with full presence of mind and all of her motor
skills), we got a call out of the blue from our friend in Orillia.
Penny was on the couch resting, and I was in the
sunroom reading when the phone rang. Penny answered, and to our surprise it was
our friend from Orillia whom we hadn’t seen in seven or eight years. She was
packing books into boxes for her move to a new apartment when she got an urge
to call us, and Penny told her about her brain aneurysm and miraculous recovery,
and after talking for a few more minutes Penny handed the phone to me and I shared
my call to the final surrender with
her;
but no sooner did I share the most sacred experience of my life when our
friend excitedly said, “That’s when her
healing started! You had to let her go for her to be healed! That was the
miracle!” And just then—as if to seal my
final surrender with Penny Lynn’s miraculous healing—a vision appeared to her of a beam of golden light streaming down into my
body from heaven!
Our friend is gifted. When I had to have triple bypass
surgery nine years ago, she called to tell me that her spiritual guide had told
her to tell me to get a quartz crystal and carry it on my person before my surgery,
which was cancelled twice for different reasons, which I now believe was to
prolong the healing benefits of the crystal because my heart was damaged from
two heart attacks and the surgeon was dubious about performing surgery; but
after the operation, the surgeon said to Penny, with a puzzled look on his
face, that he only had to do a double bypass and not a triple, because one of the
blocked arteries was almost normal, and a few years before this surprising
phone call, our friend had a vision of the novel I had just written on my past
lives and gave me the title that she saw on the cover, Cathedral of My Past Lives, and she also told me a few more things
about my life that only a gifted psychic could possibly know, so I had history
with her gift, and when she told me that Penny’s miraculous healing started
when I was called to the final surrender, I believed her. Penny was my whole
life, and letting go of her was the most difficult thing I ever had to do; but
it gives me comfort to know that Pastor Joel was there to witness it, or no one
would believe me. “I have to let her go,
Joel,” I said to him, convulsing with tears. “I’ve just been called to the final surrender...”
Why else would our gifted friend call out of
the blue? Why, if not to confirm the essential mystery of the way that Jesus symbolized with his
crucifixion and revealed to Carl Jung’s spiritual guide Philemon in the final
words of The Red Book when he said, “I bring you the beauty of suffering. That
is what is needed by whoever hosts the worm,” the sacred mystery of self-sacrifice
that proud little Friedrich Nietzsche so tragically misperceived and resisted
his whole miserable life, the mystery of letting go of our final attachment to our
existential self to realize the
purity of the immortal I Am consciousness
of our divine nature; but, in all honesty and with trembling humility, I did not
need this confirmation. My friend’s call was for my readers’ edification.
Again, I never cease to marvel at how the merciful law of divine synchronicity works
in my life when I’m writing a new book, nudging my friend from Orillia to call and
give me unexpected confirmation of my
final surrender and Penny’s miraculous healing for the closing chapter of
this incredible true story of only one rule to live by; and now I have to bring
my story home with one final spiritual musing that answers the question of why
we should be good and bring happy resolution to the divine imperative of professor
Jordan Peterson’s hierophantic message…
“Muse,” wrote the poet Jane
Hirshfield, “derives from the Latin mussare,
meaning first, ‘to carry in silence,’ then ‘to brood over in silence and
uncertainty,’ and then only finally ‘to murmur or mutter, to speak in an
undertone.’ Musing, it seems, is a thing that happens best in the circumstances
of quiet. Undogmatic and tactful before the object of attention, musing does
not impose but bears witness. It quietly considers, and then, when it finally
speaks, does so with the voice, respectful of other presences, that we use in a
library, church, or museum—the voice used, that is, when we feel we are
in the company of something more important than ourselves” (Ten
Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, by Jane Hirshfield, pp. 26-7,
bold italics mine).
I carry ideas for my spiritual musings in silence,
sometimes for weeks and months at a time—even
years, it seems! —before they are given expression, and always tactfully
and respectful of others; and now that I reflect upon how they are written,
also in a voice that makes me feel like I’m in the company of something more
important than myself, a voice that bears witness to the Logos, like my spiritual
musing “Why be Good?” that I was called to write Friday, April 17, 2015, three years before I was called to write One Rule to Live By: Be Good which
brings the imperative of professor Peterson’s hierophantic message in 12 Rules for Life to satisfactory resolution, I know
now why I was called to write my spiritual musing “Why be Good?” Because, in
its omniscience my oracle knew that this is what I was going to need to bring literary
closure to One Rule for Life: Be Good that
was not even conceived yet and would not be written until professor Peterson was
called by life three years later to answer the angry question of my poem,
What the Hell is Going on Out There?
Why be Good?
When
I read David Brooks’ column from the New
York Times (“Rather than building our careers, we should build inner
character”) in my Friday, April 17, 2015 Life section of the Toronto Star, I heard my call to write a
spiritual musing, why be good?
But for
one reason or another, I put it off; and then I picked up my Sunday, May 3, 2015 Star, which also features The
New York Times International Weekly and Book
Review inserts, and as the
playful spirit of synchronicity would have it, Brooks’ column in the New York Times was titled “Goodness and
Power,” and the Book Review insert
just “happened” to feature a review of David Brooks’ new book The Road to Character; and, just to play
with my mind a little more, after reading my papers yesterday afternoon the
playful spirit of synchronicity nudged me to listen to the CBC Tapestry podcast instead of Writer’s & Company as I had intended, and (oh happy coincidence!) Mary Hynes, the host of Tapestry, was interviewing David Brooks on his book The Road to Character; so here I am this
morning contritely complying with the divine imperative of the omniscient
guiding principle of my life to write the spiritual musing that I was called to
write several weeks ago, why be good?
In his
review of The Road to Character, Pico
Iyer writes: “Brooks begins with a sweeping overview of the non-intersecting
worlds of moral logic and economic logic, as he has it, dividing us into an
‘Adam 1,’ who seeks success in the world, and an ‘Adam 2,’ more deeply
committed to character and an inner life,” and he goes on, summarizing the
theme of Brooks’ book: “To nurture your Adam 1 career, it makes sense to
cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam 2 moral core, it is necessary to
confront your weaknesses.”
Brooks
felt impelled to write The Road to
Character, “to save my own soul,” he said to Mary Hynes; and it was obvious
from listening to him on Tapestry that
he had invested way too much energy in his Adam 1 and not nearly enough energy
in his Adam 2, and in his fifty-first year of his life he was making an honest
effort to cultivate a better relationship with his Adam 2—his better self, if
you will; and this brings me to the theme of today’s spiritual musing, why
be good?
This is a
big theme, and it would certainly seem presumptuous to offer an answer to a
question that has vexed some of the best minds in the world; but, in all
humility, I bring a lifetime of gnostic wisdom to the table, which gives me the
confidence to say that when all is said and done our essential purpose in life
is to simply be a good person.
This presupposes
a lifetime of questing for the meaning and purpose of life—a personal library
of thousands of books and years of commitment to various teachings; so, my
spiritual musings are nothing if not serious reflections upon the human predicament.
But to
answer the question why be good? I have to call upon my creative unconscious to
give me the proper image, because images are much more convincing than words
will ever be; and in my mind’s eye I see life as an elaborate maze, and man
scrambling from one lifetime to the next to find his way out. And the man that
I see in the maze today is New York Times
columnist/author David Brooks.
“There is a doctrine uttered in
secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison
and run away,” said
Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, which
speaks to the perplexing nature of the human condition (the maze of life); and
whether we are aware or not that we live more than one lifetime does not really
matter, because we will just keep coming back to live life over again until we
are ready to look for the key that opens the door to our prison.
And
herein lies the mystery that David Brooks yields to with his book The Road to Character, because Adam 1
brought him success in life but Adam 2 will open the door of his prison and set
him free from the maze of the human condition. “Many are called, but few are
chosen,” said Jesus; and David Brooks heard the call to save his soul
by working upon his character and moral center.
Everyone
will hear the call when life has made them ready, and David Brooks heard the
call when he began to notice the
distinction between Adam 1 and Adam 2 in some special people that he met
serendipitously in his daily travels through life, as he tells us in his New York Times column:
“About once
a month, I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be
in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you
feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as
they do so, their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude.
They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not
thinking about themselves at all.
“When I
meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder
thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success,
but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or
that depth of character.
“A few
years ago, I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I
realized that if I wanted to do that, I was going to have to work harder to
save my own soul. I was going to have the sort of moral adventure that produces
that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.”
I highlighted
the last paragraph, because when life calls the voice is different; it comes
from the depths of one’s own tired soul, and it speaks a truth that makes one
shiver. David Brooks shivered when he heard the call, and he wrote The Road to Character to find the way
out of his prison and bring balance to his Adam 1 and Adam 2, which speaks to
the Master Key of our prison door—the liberating power of goodness.
Socrates,
who believed the virtue of goodness to be the most noble virtue, said that the
unexamined life was not worth living; and although that may be a bit harsh
because every life serves its destined purpose to wholeness and completeness,
David Brooks examined his life and came to the realization that to have the generosity
of spirit and depth of character that he needed to save his soul, he had to
have “moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness,” and his moral
adventures lay in shifting his priorities from those that were self-serving
(Adam 1), to those that were more life-serving (Adam 2).
In short,
David Brooks had to be less selfish and more giving, because the dynamic of the
Master Key of Goodness declares that the
more you give of yourself, the more of yourself you will have to give;
and, conversely, the less you give of
yourself, the less of yourself you will have to give. That’s what Jesus
meant by his paradoxical saying: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and
he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” A
deep mystery that cannot be resolved without the Master Key.
Why be
good, then? Because there will come a time in one’s life, whether it be in this
lifetime or the next, when one will be called upon to open the door of their
prison; and, like David Brooks, one will come to see that the only way to open
their prison door is to simply be a good person.
And that’s why we should be good!
———
